usherette

plural usherettes

1. datedA female usher.

   And then the usherette opened the doors of this dark palace and with a flashlight held behind her took him to his seat.

   1953, James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (Penguin Classics), London: Penguin Books, published 2001, →ISBN

   4 more examples

   It is such a tiny little place that at first I thought I had gone wrong, and was in an antechamber. Plain papered walls, ascetic chairs, a moldy piano, and a couple of usherettes seemed extremely bare.

   1905 September, Alan Dale, “Dramatic Flashes from London and Paris”, in Ainslee’s Magazine, volume 16, page 152

   He says, “Mike, let's do the town.” Can you refuse a guy who just gives you a thirty thousand dollar property? We do the town. We do the girl shows, and he yells at all the dames and tries to date the usherettes until we finally get pitched out. […]”

   1954 April, Louis Trimble, “Probability”, in If: Worlds of Science Fiction

   […] I won’t even see her again till next Saturday night on account of her doing week-nights as an usherette at the Regal […]

   1960, Muriel Spark, chapter 7, in The Ballad of Peckham Rye, London: Macmillan

   But please don’t call them usherettes. […] “Usherette makes us sound as if we’re miniature ushers or something. It’s an old term that we’re trying to get rid of.”

   1994 April 24, Glenn Collins, “Making it work. Sentinels of Broadway”, in The New York Times