The Silk Stocking Strutters

Peggy Landry, an avowed Mardi Gras enthusiast, had watched marching clubs like The Lyons Club parade during Carnival for years and always thought it would be fun to join in. In 1975, on a dare from a friend, she and her two teenage daughters decided to start their own group, and New Orleans got its very first exclusively female marching club. 

The Silk Stocking Strutters was an Uptown club, named for the “silk stocking ward” (aka the 14th Ward, which includes the areas near Audubon Park), were organized for the purpose of “encouraging, promoting, and advancing the spirit of Mardi Gras.” Peggy, an employee at DH Holmes, and her daughters Susan and Shelly, were written into the charter as the club’s leaders.  

Their first year marching was heralded by a proclamation from the City Council on February 26, 1976. It began with “Whereas the gaiety of the forthcoming Mardi Gras is to be enhanced by the emergence of a new club,” acknowledged their status as the first ladies marching club, and ends by extending “its felicitations to Peggy Landry’s Silk Stocking Strutters, Inc.”

The theme for the first year was the Ziegfeld Follies, and the Silk Stocking Strutters’ bright pink doubloons featured a chorus girl in the spotlights on one side, and a gartered leg on the other. Doubloon provided courtesy of Charles V Booth Collection, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans

The Strutters debuted on March 2, 1976, marching ahead of the Jefferson City Buzzards, along the same Audubon Park to Canal St. route. Their costumes were styled like chorus girls from the 1920s, and instead of trading kisses for flowers like the mens’ groups, a kiss from a lucky lad along the parade route earned him a garter. The club was greeted with enthusiastic shouts of “It’s a ladies group!” as they paraded down the Avenue.

Another custom traditional to men’s marching clubs was also adopted by the Strutters: bar hopping along the route. However, Grand Damme Peggy Landry wrote into the club rules that marching ladies were prohibited from getting drunk during their march. So, the Silk Stocking Strutters visited fewer bars than the men; they stopped at only 25 bars before and during their route. 

The Strutters only marched for three years, with only about 20 members, but they laid the groundwork for women’s Mardi Gras marching clubs and dance troupes to come.