HIUS 131 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Cross-Dressing, Premarital Sex, Peer Pressure
HIUS 131 – Textbook Notes – Cheap Amusements, Chapter 4: Dance Madness
• Dance halls were young women's favorite area of WC culture
• WC women dancing young in the street to the music of street performers
• Dancing more popular among young men than saloons/pool halls
• Girls didn't attend as much when they had a boyfriend, and stopped attending when they were
married
• Dance halls across ethnicities
• Dance halls shifted from being placed for family -> places for youth to meet opposite sex
The Social Organization of Working-Class Dance
• Dances held when dance halls were rented out for parties
o Dances a way to express ethnic traditions through native dances/dress
o Issuing invitations
o Hiring people to make sure proper conduct was being followed
o Young women attending parties with an escort
• 1890s 'racket' started to develop, dances hosted by social clubs
o Didn't limit who came in, or conduct
o Advertising all over the city and drawing hundreds of people
o Clubs using the profits to send members on vacations, etc.
The Commercialization of Dancing
• Expansion in the amount of public dance halls
o Doubled
o Saloons opening them behind/on top of them, even if denied a license
• Saloons partnering with halls and clubs to sell alcohol at dances
o Dancing periods shorter and shorter, with more periods for drinking
• Huge ballrooms being opened
• Hall owners creating clubs to sponsor dances so that they would seem more respectable
• 1900 halls having dancing classes during the day, and having dances at night not sponsored by
club, claiming they were public 'receptions' and charging admission
• Commercial dance became territory of WC youth
Dance Hall Culture
• Lowering cost/offering free admission for unaccompanied women in order to get them to come to
the halls, and to recognize lower economic position
• Dance halls becoming more and more appealing to the eye, with better lighting, music, decoration
• Weekdays dances ended 1/2am, weekends until the sun rose
• MC see dance halls as corrupt, worry about young women being coopted into white slavery
• WC women dressing like prostitutes
• Men and women mingling, talking to each other and being friends
• Parents bringing tweens
• Suggestive advertisements
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