I hope I’m allowed to post this here, but as a pole dancer myself and not a real historian (armchair only) I have a little info on it.
Burlesque and striptease were common elements of circus culture, with men being able to pay a few cents to see a “peep show”. This was essentially the same in function as a modern strip club, although the men were usually looking through a screen or a hole in the wall instead of being right up by the stage (hence “peep” show).
As for the poles - women who were performing dances would use the poles of the circus tent for support and to increase the number of dance moves. Some would climb up, spin around on them, flip upside down, etc. By the 1950s, this style of dancing was being featured in mainstream music videos (such as Elvis’ Jailhouse Rock), and in the 1960s, we have the first known instance of a strip club in Montreal using poles and pole dancing as their main draw, with all the dancers using the poles in their routines. This was wildly popular, and began to spread across North America and Europe.
By the 2000s, the practice had gone more mainstream and was attracting “normal” folks, mostly women and those in the LGBT community. Pole studios pop up, home poles become affordable (I have one myself!), and the stigma of it “just being for strippers” began to fall away. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a stripper IMO, but there are a number of pole dances that incorporate more from ballet than striptease. It’s become an incredibly versatile art.
It’s important to note as well, the other cultural influences, namely those from China and the Middle East/India. In China, using poles as a form of acrobatic art was practiced by men in competition and was meant to show off extreme athletic skill that involved both strength and beauty. People will jump between two or more poles, performing a number of acrobatic tricks. When you see classes labelled “pole dancing for kids”, Chinese Pole is almost always what they are doing, as the focus is on athleticism and has a basis in gymnastics, and really isn’t sexual at all. This sport was originally practiced in India and was called “Mallakhamb”.
Hopefully this is a proper answer!
this link isn’t technically a scholarly source, but it does provide some more historical context.. This link is interesting because it proposes several historical influences which are interesting to consider but don’t necessarily have an unbroken connection to modern poledance (i.e Maypole dances & Indigenous African dances). It gets into the influences of Chinese pole/Mallakhamb a bit more as well.
PART I
Among other reasons, blame bored soldiers.
A couple of bits of disclaimer: my familiarity with the history of entertainment is mostly focused on that of American politics as a form of it, so others may provide different context and better detail than I can. Also, while there appears to be an international aspect to it, that's not something I'm familiar enough with to answer confidently.
So let's go back to the Early Republic. Entertainment, particularly in cities, often tended towards elitist and highbrow; as a political party name, "Democrat" actually derives from the Francophile "Democratic/Republican" debating clubs somewhat modeled after the original Jacobin ones pre-Terror. (This devolved into some nasty partisan warfare between Federalists and the sponsors and members of those clubs, including one Thomas Jefferson, once the Terror went into full swing.)
Once slightly less educated settlers began streaming west, rural entertainment (and for that matter elections, which served as part patronage fight, part drinking festival, and part party) required a slightly less high barrier of entry to enjoy. Isenberg talks a bit about the cultural shift of those years in White Trash, but the most relevant development was the creation of menagerie shows, acrobatics, traveling wax museums, and such - a tad bit different than debating whether or not people without property should have the vote! A different opportunity arose after the Panic of 1837 when most of those went bust and the modern circus was born. There were a couple offshoots of this. The campaign of 1840 was one, where William Henry Harrison ran against Martin Van Buren without all that much of a platform save that the latter had led the country into financial ruin while spending hard earned tax payer money redecorating the White House, but did have the most spectacular campaign of the first 50 years of the United States that drew tens of thousands to see the scale log cabins and giant roller balls hauled through the dirt streets of western towns - along with plenty of free hard cider and tables groaning with food to encourage getting out the vote.
Relevant to this question, though, was the other offshoot: the development of sideshows starting in 1848. These were, quite simply, designed to increase gate for circus owners by requiring a supplemental charge (usually around another 50%) to see the parts of the show that weren't animals, and initially were human oddities. PT Barnum was probably the first to prove to be a master of this starting in 1851 with his Traveling Asiatic Caravan Museum, and the sideshow was here to stay.
But let's first sidetrack into precisely why sideshows had the market opportunity to become somewhat less...wholesome. (Incidentally, even with his various financial disasters Barnum was large enough so that he could offer himself as an alternative to this trend; as early as the 1850s he had named his new stage a "Lecture Room" to better provide to the "hundreds of persons who are prevented visiting theaters, on account of the vulgarisms and immorality which are sometimes permitted therein, may visit (his) establishment without fear of offence", which had very little to do with morality and everything to do with the size of the middle class audience he sought to attract.)
If you look at the history of obscene material in the United States, it first came to light legally in 1842 with a customs law that banned imports of it - but importantly, not domestic production. The runaway bestseller Madame Bovary in 1856 produced more pearl clutching and a strengthening of the import law, and there are even links between abolitionism and obscene material that I won't get into here - but it was still largely legal to produce and sell domestic pornographic materials.
Then came the Civil War, when large groups of young, single men had plentiful time on their hands when they weren't killing their fellow young, single men, and a railroad system primed and ready to provide easy and cheap transport of something to provide a bit of a distraction. From Giesberg:
"Focused on providing materials through the mail, New York's erotica dealers made use of the opportunities provided by the war. The porn business benefited from technological innovations such as the carte de visite - photographs affixed to card stock that measured around 2x4", were intended for exchanging and that were easily stored in a pocket...improvements to mail delivery offered entrepreneurs the national audience they most wanted. Congress maintained low postal rates for mail sent to the U.S. Army...and by 1862 mail was sorted and moved on specially designed railroad cars."
While various efforts were made to clean things up (and provide alternative reading material, like a portable loan library created by the U.S. Christian Commission), enforcement efforts varied dramatically by command, and thanks to the Civil War and the advent of photography, pornography had gone viral.
It got so bad that in February 1865, shortly after the dramatic passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, Senator Jacob Collamer of Vermont decided something needed to be done to liberate the minds of the boys at the front from such filth, since the US Postal Service had become "the vehicle for the conveyance of great numbers and quantities of obscene books and pictures, which are sent to the Army, and sent here and there and everywhere, and that it is getting to be a great evil" and using his position as chair of the relevant committee proposed an amendment to a pending bill on postal laws - originally intended to codify some of the restrictions on seditious material during the war - to include a prohibition on obscene material too, with fines up to $500 for those who did so. Concern even arose for the poor postmasters newly empowered to seize such morally decrepit material, although Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland got to the true point about what would happen to it given they were political appointees of the most base character, "After the postmaster takes the material out, what is he to do with it? May he circulate it as he thinks proper?" (And yes, the answer was that he probably did for a tidy profit.)
This first obscenity law on the federal level was a shape of things to come; the Civil War was over, but tastes had changed and with the advent of Anthony Comstock vigorously using the Civil War law on postal material to prosecute as a special agent for the Post Office in New York starting in 1872, pornography and abortion and a few other things were driven underground. Comstock's work (and that of the YMCA and the whole revivalist movement and such) are well beyond the scope of this answer, but the important part to remember is that this was on the federal level. States and localities had the right to regulate in person obscenity on their own, and this provided a market opportunity for the most of the sideshow business to expand to, well, other forms of entertainment - and it did.
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ETA: If you are going to be the nth person to make a joke about wooden poles and splinters, be aware we will temp ban you for it. It isn't original. You aren't thee 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person to make it.