Josephine Baker in the 1920s
The dancer and civil rights activist Josephine Baker found fame in Paris in the 1920s. Her most iconic routine was the danse sauvage, in which she wore a skirt made out of artificial bananas and twerked before twerking was even a term. Audiences didn't know what to do with their feelings of attraction, fascination, and disgust. Baker's contemporary, the anthropologist Essie Robeson, called it "this ridiculously vulgar...wiggling." Ernest Hemingway remembered her as being "the most sensational woman anybody ever saw. Or ever will."