Embodying Resistance: Gendering Public Space in Ragtime Social Dance

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Embodying Resistance: Gendering Public Space in Ragtime Social Dance

Holly Maples

New Theatre Quarterly / Volume 28 / Issue 03 / August 2012, pp 243 259DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X12000437, Published online: 31 August 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0266464X12000437

How to cite this article:Holly Maples (2012). Embodying Resistance: Gendering Public Space in Ragtime Social Dance. New Theatre Quarterly, 28, pp 243259 doi:10.1017/S0266464X12000437

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Holly Maples

Embodying Resistance: GenderingPublic Space in Ragtime Social DanceIn this article Holly Maples examines how the controversy surrounding the ragtime dancecraze in the United States allowed women to renegotiate acceptable gendered behaviourin the public sphere. In the early 1910s many members of the public performed acts ofresistance to convention by dancing in the workplace, on the street, and in public halls.Civic institutions and private organizations sought to censor and control both the publicspace of the dance hall and the bodies of its participants. The controlling of social dancewas an attempt to restrain what those opposed to the dances saw as unrestrained andindecent physical behaviour by the nation’s youth, primarily targeting ragtime dancing’s‘moral degradation’ of young women. It was not merely the public nature of the dancingthat was seen as dangerous to women, however, but the dances themselves, many ofwhich featured chaotic, off-centred choreography, with either highly sexualized behaviour,as seen in the tango and the apache dance, or clumsy, un-gendered movement, popularin the animal dances of the day. Through ragtime dancing, women performed acts of ruptureon their bodies and the urban cityscape, transforming social dancing into public statementsof gendered resistance. Holly Maples is a lecturer in Drama at the University of East Anglia.Both a theatre practitioner and a scholar, she trained as an actress at Central School ofSpeech and Drama in London and completed her PhD in Theatre Studies at Trinity CollegeDublin. Her book, Culture War: Conflict, Commemoration, and the Contemporary AbbeyTheatre, has recently been published in the ‘Reimagining Ireland’ series by Peter Lang.

Key terms: social dancing, ragtime dancing, embodiment, feminism, dance craze of 1913,American cultural history.

ntq 28:3 (august 2012) © cambridge university press doi:10.1017/S0266464X12000437 243

IN THE EARLY 1920s, Zelda and F. ScottFitzgerald delighted newspaper columnistsand the general public by diving into NewYork City’s Pulitzer fountain. This public act,along with others made by the celebratedcouple, became symbolic of the ‘Golden Age’;the performance of recklessness, drunkenexcess, and youth’s determination to defythe rules of their elders. The jazz age wasfilled with public performances by ‘BrightYoung Things’.1 Stories of rides on the topsof taxi cabs, dancing on tabletops, and action-packed scavenger hunts graced the gossipcolumns on a regular basis, illus trat ing therise of media attention on celebrity culture.

The socialites of the 1920s defied norm -ative behaviour in their rebellion againststate and city policies of appropriate publicdeportment. Often, the participants wouldactively pursue censorship or arrest in theirdesire to rupture societal norms. Throughpublic stunts of this kind, the celebrities and

flappers of the jazz age fused the perform -ance of self with the performance of space.Their theatre was the urban landscape itself.It was as if the cityscape provided the perfectbackdrop for their social drama. By know -ingly performing interventions upon urbanpublic space, the ‘Bright Young Things’embodied resistance to the perceived anony -mity of city life by using their bodies as wellas their personal possessions to transformthe modern city.

Public acts upon the city like the Fitz -geralds’ interaction with the fountain, or theBright Young Things’ transformation ofurban monuments through the placement ofpolice helmets upon them, and other suchpublicized antics convert public space intothe private realm, individualizing the anony -mous city through such acts of intervention.The jazz age interactions with the urbanlandscape amplify Michel de Certeau’s con -cept of walking the city. The individual act of

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walking, de Certeau argues, ‘is to the urbansystem what the speech act is to language. . . .It is a spatial acting-out of place’.2 For deCerteau, the walker brings the city into beingby appropriating and organizing the urbanlandscape through his or her route, ‘sincecross ing, drifting away, or improvisation ofwalking privilege, transform, or abandonspatial elements’.3 Indeed the public stuntsof the 1920s allowed individuals to interactwith the cityscape in a number of ways.Their activities mocked and commented uponthe city’s utility, rupturing civic grandeur,transforming and challeng ing the function ofstatues, fountains, and public squares. It isnot surprising that the majority of the publicantics of the jazz age took place in the urbanenvironment, since country or village lifeperhaps remained indi vidualized and lackedthe faceless audi ence of the city needed toperform such public acts of rupture.

Ragtime inthe Urban Landscape

Social interventions in the jazz age, how ever,began not with the pranks of the wealthy, norwith the inter-war period of the 1920s, but inthe ragtime era of the 1910s and among allclasses of society. As in the Fitz geralds’performative stunts on the streets of Parisand New York, the 1910s also witnessed out -breaks of dancing in public places notofficially sanctioned for dancing. Though theragtime dance craze occurred across Europeas well as in North America, in what followsI shall concentrate on the impact of the dancecraze on women in the United States.

As the craze hit the country, Americanwomen began dancing in dance halls, societyoccasions, charity balls, in hotels, tango teas,and in non-traditional locations such as onthe sidewalk, in the street, and during lunchbreaks in city offices, telephone exchangebuildings, and factories. Ragtime dancingwas, however, considered indecent by somemembers of the public: dances such as theturkey trot were banned from many publicand private dance halls, university studentswere expelled for being seen dancing the‘grizzly bear’, ‘apache’, and other con ten tiousdances of the time.

Sensational reports on the consequencesof ragtime dances were seen throughout1912 to 1914, and newspapers such as theNew York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and theWashington Post reported on the detrimentaleffect of dancing on the ‘wayward girl’, ofwomen being arrested for dancing down thestreet, and incidents of women dying on thedance floor.4 The uproar which surroundedthe dance craze illustrates social dancing’spotential for resistance to gendered norms,as the perpetrators of the controversy werepredominantly women. In 1912, at CurtisPublishing in Philadelphia, fifteen womenwere fired for dancing the ‘turkey trot’ intheir lunch hour.5 Newspaper reports on thisoccurrence, and others like it, indicate thatthese acts were not just spontaneous eventsbut deliberate performances by women toassert their place in the modern era. Spatialacts like these attempted to modernize notonly the women involved, but the city itself.They were performing modernity by placingit upon the landscape through their dances,catapulting their daily environment into theragtime era.

Between 1910 and 1914 a growing numberof working and society women acrossEurope and North America performed inter -ventions upon societal norms through theirdancing. In the United States, the fight forcontrol of the urban landscape by the civicbodies of the time, as well as the acts ofintervention and resistance carried out bymembers of the public, remained a focalpoint in public commentary and state-widecivic policy. The increasing migration fromrural to urban environments and the expand -ing industrial workplace in cities across thecountry raised concerns over the leisureactivities of women in cities such as Chicago,Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, and SanFrancisco. The following interro gates thebattle over public, civic, and embodied spacewhich surrounded the American ragtimedance craze. For some, ragtime social dancebecame symbolic of the departure from tradi-tional value systems and nineteenth-centurycodes of respectable social behaviour.

Rather than solely concentrate on the pub -lic spaces of the dance hall, the street, and the

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workplace, however, this study also exam inesthe dances themselves, what they representto us from a critical viewpoint in the twenty-first century, and also what they meant forthose performing them at the time. Alludingto Judith Butler’s notion of the performativeas an act of the production of and resistanceto the hegemonic power struc tures, ragtimesocial dances paradoxically resisted the stateand societal norms while, at the same time,reinforcing dominant Western hierarchies ofclass, race, and gender. For Butler,

Performativity describes this relation of beingimplicated in that which one opposes, this turningof power against itself to produce alternativemodalities of power, to establish a kind of politicalcontestation that is not a ‘pure’ opposition, a ‘trans -cendence’ of contemporary relation of power, buta difficult labour of forging a future from resourcesinevitably impure . . . for one is, as it were, inpower even as one opposed it, formed by it as onereworks it, and it is this simultaneity that is atonce the condition of our partiality, the measure ofour political unknowingness, and also the con -dition of action itself.6

Social dancing is the essence of perform -ativity; it encapsulates the physical space ofembodied behaviour, both gendered andcultural, as well as more figurative spacessuch as the terrain of modernity, nationalism,and collective identity for the performer.How ever, as Butler contends, the ragtimedances both resisted and asserted societalnorms, indicating the complex relationshipbetween popular culture’s role as both amani festation of social change and a reaffir m-ation of hegemonic power structures.

Memory, Identity, and the Dancing Body

Professional dancing offers a platform forindividual expression witnessed by an audi -ence for visual consumption, voyeur ism, andpleasure; popular social dancing, on theother hand, allows the public to performtheir own understandings of collective iden -tity and gender in the midst of mass societalchange. Dance scholar Jane Cowan arguesthat the ‘dance event’ is conceptualized as ‘a

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Dire warning in a cartoon from Puck by Gordon Ross, entitled ‘The Dance of Death’. The caption reads ‘Smallwonder there are protests against “The Grizzly Bear” and “The Turkey Trot”.’



“bounded sphere of interaction” in which . . .individuals publicly present themselves inand through their celebratory practices –eating, drinking, singing, and talking as wellas dancing – and are evaluated by others’.7

The performative notion of the medium isas true for social dancing as it is for exhibi -tion dance. The performance of self and com -munity are enacted on the dance floorthrough visible display of the dancing body,while, at the same time, these performancesare being witnessed and judged by others.As the partners whirl through the dance hall,their dances publicly perform multiple layersof meaning to their local and global publics.Public dance culture in the early twentiethcentury became caught within the battle -ground of misreadings prevalent in Americanculture of the time. The social dancing of the‘grizzly bear’, the ‘castle walk’, the ‘bunnyhug’, and the ‘turkey trot’ went beyond thesocial expression of ragtime culture to be -come distinctly gendered, focusing publicscrutiny around growing concern about ‘thetwentieth-century woman’.

To illustrate how social dance intervenesupon both interior and exterior space Iwould like to describe a popular dance of theday, the ‘black bottom’. Unlike the 1920sversion of the dance, the version popular inthe 1910s involved less upward, energeticmove ments and more of a focus on display -ing the woman’s body through slapping,dipping, and extending the female form.8 Ina film recording of this dance from 1919, thewoman stretches her arms from side to sideand dances with an inward-kneed box step,slapping her ‘bottom’ at each exchange,bend ing down to the ground, and spinningwith arms held high in the air.

Like the public performances made byrebellious women and men of the era in thefountains, on the streets, and in the work -place, women performed subtle interven -tions of their bodies upon the dance hall.Arms reach out in each direction, invadingthe physical space around them, while thedance’s movement draws attention to pre -viously ‘indecent’ areas of the female formfor both the participant and the viewer’spleasure.

Considered risqué in the teens, the blackbottom became more popular than theCharleston in the 1920s. It was popularizedin 1919 by the musician Perry Bradford, buthad been a solo challenge dance in Louisianaand other areas of the American South fromthe early 1900s, becoming a popular socialdance across the country around 1912.Though the name’s origin is unknown, thecomposition of the ‘Black Bottom Stomp’ in1924 linked the dance with the ‘BlackBottom’ area of Detroit known for its richAfrican American cultural life and associ -ated, along with New Orleans, with thebeginnings of the jazz age.9

The black bottom remains an excellentexample of how social dances are both indic -ative of contemporary society and culturalmemory. The dance offers a performativeghosting of the history of American cultureand with it, the appropriation and subjuga -tion of race in the social history of the UnitedStates. As Lisa Doolittle articulates the fusionof time in participatory dance,

If we grant that bodies make history, we can putpast and present bodies together to constructnarrative of meaning that allows for a continualexchange between past and present.10

Mae G. Henderson argues that dances suchas the black bottom, made popular byJosephine Baker, and the recent focus onbody parts such as ‘big butts’ in contem -porary hip hop culture, are performances ofembedded trauma and the appropriation ofcollective memory in the African Americanexperience.11 The movement parodies andfetishizes images of animal culture, as it wassupposed to originate from African Americanchildren imitating the movement of cowsstuck in the mud.

The black bottom remains double-edgedin the history of American social dance, itsname and movement that draws attention tothe hips and buttocks indic ating the sexual -ization of the African American body, whilethe integration of the dance into popularwhite American culture evokes its own his -tory of minstrelsy and be comes symbolic ofthe white body performing blackness inAmerican cultural history.

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The dance craze of the ragtime era re -mains an embedded space of thorny cul turalground occupied by gender, race, global iz -ation and the exotification of the other. Valu -able studies on the codification of genderroles in dance have been written by scholarsin recent years. Julie Taylor’s work on thetango sheds light on gender roles and alsoexamines the tango’s part in the perceptionand formation of collective national identityin Argentina.12 In his interrogation of theBrazilian samba, Richard G. Parker arguesthat this dance remains ‘within a fundam -entally male space’, reiterating hegemonicmale culture through its spatial terrain of thepopular male bars as well as its reification ofgender roles.13 However, Barbara Browningargues that though the samba is a ‘racialhistory lived in the modality of sexuality’, italso provides a space to give ‘underclasswomen – regardless of colour – the chance toexpress resistance to her situation’.14

Joseph Roach’s concept of surrogation inhis foundational work on Circum-Atlanticperformance in New Orleans, Cities of theDead, can aptly throw light upon the globaltransformation of dances such as the maxixe,the tango, the apache, and the Charleston.15

From the mimicry of early slave culture tothe cake walks of the late nineteenth century,the appropriation of African American andSouth American culture are acts of surroga -tion through the social dance’s imitation andfetishization of ‘othered’ embodied behavi -our. Dances such as the black bottom and thetango are physical occupations, self-‘other ing’individual personal space to enact fetish izedexotic experience for escapist pleasure.

The Social Sphere: Spaces of the Dance Hall

Social dance provides individuals a space forthe ‘inhabitment’ of performative behaviour.Through the ballroom dancing of the earlytwentieth century, American and Europeanwomen could liberate their bodies from the

‘Images of animal culture’. Top: cover for a musicalscore of the ‘Bunny Hug Rag’. Below: the ‘black bottom’mediatized in the 1920s, from the January 1927 issueof Photoplay. Ann Pennington teaches Felix the Cat toperform the dance.

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shackles of social and gendered convention.While Victorian dances reinforced genderstereotypes, performing idealized bodilydisplays of femininity and gender relations,the new dances of the 1910s challenged earlierdepictions of class and gender.

Though nineteenth-century dances suchas the waltz provided contact between part -ners, Lewis A. Erenberg suggests that ‘itspre-arranged sequences, the fixity of itsoverall patterns, and the courtly distancescircumscribed the amount of body move -ment and contact open to partners’.16 Inoppo sition to the constraint and formalityfound in these earlier dances, ragtime dancesallowed ‘hitherto forbidden body move -ments’ offering participants ‘a differentfemale identity – one which valued experim -entation with dances and fashions, and asingle standard of sexual conduct’.17 For thewomen of 1913, ragtime dancing allowed achance to escape not only from their dailyworking life, but also from the social con -straints of socially acceptable deportment bywomen of the early twentieth century.

The dance craze merged classes andcultures, allowing upper- and middle-classsociety to expand their social sphere. Nine -teenth-century social dance occurred in pri -vate and strictly chaperoned social events,allowing for very limited interaction bet -ween social classes.18 Lewis Erenberg des -cribes how interaction in the dance halls andother public venues aided in a mixing ofdifferent socio-economic groups:

The emer gence of public dancing indicated notonly changes in dancing; it also symbolizedbroader transformations in the culture as a whole.The best people were now breaking the formalVictorian boundaries that separated men fromwomen, blacks from whites, and upper- fromlower-class culture.19

Foreign and ‘Exotic’ Influences

Despite Erenberg’s democratic claims forsocial dancing of the time, not all members ofthe public appreciated the liberal social inter -action and, for those that did, much of thismixing of cultures took place solely on thedance floor.20

Like the music of the ragtime era, many ofthe dances had their origins in AfricanAmerican culture, while other dances camefrom South American and European lower-class origins. Garber describes this inclusionof international influences in dances such asthe maxixe as a symptom of a progres sivelyglobalized society:

At the intersection of these various traditions,people dancing and playing maxixe incorporated,through their bodily movements, a series ofencounters, especially Afro-diasporic encounters,in the Americas. Maxixe was not only a palimp -sest of earlier crossings but an arena of culturalmixture and an opportunity for ongoinginnovation.21

The global origins and mixed influencesbehind these dances allowed the public toperform roles outside perceived acceptablecodes of behaviour. Indeed, the increasingpopularity of dances such as the maxixe, thetango, and the apache, was in many waysbecause the exotic and foreign origins associ -ated with them allowed the participant a saferealm for role-playing, fetishization, and theexotification of self.

Control of social dance was attemptedthrough strict legislation on dance halls bylocal civic authorities, the banning of parti -cular dances in private clubs, hotels, andsocial organizations, nationwide lobbyinggroups paid for by citizen-led reform organ -iz ations, as well as an overabundance ofsocial critiques found in newspapers acrossthe country and in popular magazines suchas Harper’s Weekly and the Ladies’ HomeJournal.22 Public pressure on the dance crazeattempted to restrain what those opposedto the dances saw as chaotic and indecentphysical behaviour by the nation’s youth.

This attempt to control the uncontrollablewas focused on women in particular. Thedance craze epitomized what was seen as anexpansion of women’s role in society whichchallenged the strictures of commonly per -ceived ‘gendered’ behaviour. However, itwas the embodied performance of othernessthat attracted many of the women to theragtime dance forms, and was why thedances were so contentious. Through the

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vio lent apache dance, the buoyant turkey trot,and the clumsy grizzly bear, women (andtheir close encounters with male bodies)performed acts of rupture upon the urbancityscape transforming social dancing intopublic statements of gendered resistance.

Ragtime, Modernity, and Public Space

Transformations in social dance between1905 and 1915 mirrored larger changes insocial behaviour in the domestic and publicspheres. While changes to women’s role insociety are often perceived as a 1920s pheno -menon, the first two decades of the twentiethcentury actually witnessed faster and moreradical transformations for women in publiclife.23 Though originating in the nineteenthcentury, the numbers of women entering theworkforce grew exponentially in the UnitedStates between 1900 and 1910, while thetypes of jobs available changed significantlyduring the second decade of the twentiethcentury. From 1910 through the 1920s agrowing number of American women tran -sitioned into more varied positions in theworkplace throughout the country.24

The emphasis on public display and thepublic realm in regards to the Americanfemale was becoming increasingly a vehicleof praise and concern among the public andthe press. In a letter to the editor of Harper’sWeekly, one male writer argued that women’schanging condition was a trans formationfrom the private to the public sphere:

Undoubtedly the condition of women is changingall over the world, and changing, we believe, verymuch for the better. The change has its extrav ag -ances and disorderly incidents, but it is a changetoward a fuller and freer life and a more respectedand advantageous position. . . . [Women] areconstantly gaining in public influence, publicpower, opportunity, and usefulness.25

The transformation in women’s daily lifemade them more visible in the public sphere,and it was the very visibility – and possibleaccessibility – of women that led to concernamong reformers of the period.

Ragtime social dancing was radically morepublic than any nineteenth-century style. As

Julie Malnig suggests, ‘Women and menwere now participating in a culture that lic -ensed public commingling and sociality in away not seen in the previous century.’26 Inthe Victorian era, social dancing occurredprimarily in the private rather than publicsphere. Though both private and public ballsoccurred in the late nineteenth century, theso called ‘public’ dances were predomi n -antly subscription, charity, or organizationalballs with entry strictly by invitation only,which fostered an aura of exclusivity to suchevents.27 The exclusivity of the ballroom wascreated primarily for young women, offeringa protective environment that establishedritualized codes of behaviour, dress, andbodily movement to control the comming -ling of the sexes. Victorian balls observedstrict rules of etiquette for access to partners,dance choreography, and social interactionwhich allowed the public events to upholdstrictly chaperoned courtship rituals associ -ated with privately controlled environments.

Despite the many changes to society inlate nineteenth century America, women werepressured to remain engaged in restrictivecodes of behaviour by the ‘Cult of TrueWomanhood’. Popular culture emphasizedhow the public sphere could only damage awoman’s reputation, for women were con -sidered as ‘purely womanly’ through theirassociation with the home, and were onlyable to uplift and correct male behaviour byremaining removed from the public sphere.Lewis A. Erenberg asserts that,

In this atmosphere, it was impossible to introducerespectable women into public, commercial dancehalls associated with concert saloons dispensingliquor and prostitution. Dancing, when it occurred,went on in private.28

The dances of the early twentieth century, bycontrast, were gradually more popular indance halls, dancing academies, societyevents, tango teas, and in other areas of thepublic sphere. Indeed, it was the very publicnature of such events that made the criticsuneasy about the new dances which wereencouraging young women to interact withunknown members of the opposite sexoutside their known social sphere. Dance

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academies were the focus of much debate andcontroversy between 1910 and 1915, while,as noted, public commen taries recordeddramatic instances of the con se quences ofmodern dancing, with numer ous reports ofwomen becoming injured, losing their jobs,being arrested, and even losing their lives asa result of the new craze.29

Ruin for the ‘Wayward Girl’

Middle-class culture especially identified theurban poor as victims of this new pheno -menon, creating many charitable societiesthat focused on the evils of the dance hall intheir call for social reform. Belle Israels, adance reformer from the period, articulatedconcern for the new leisure activities ofworking women: ‘These people work to existso they must play if they are to live. And theymust play in the only way they know how toplay, and that is by means of the commer -cialized amusements that we offer them. Butwe must protect them at every point . . .[teaching] them what things are good andwhat things are bad.’30 The new choreog -raphy seen in social dances of the period wasassociated with fundamental changes toperceived notions of femininity, while, inmuch public commentary, women’s launchinto the public sphere was represented asfraught with dangers for the ‘unsuspecting’.In an article from the Ladies’ Home Journal ofMarch 1913, the dance hall was said to offeronly ruin for the ‘wayward girl’.

What problem have the women of this countrythat equals the problem of the wayward girl? Thegirl whose home life, if she has any, is sad anddisheartening, if not indeed vicious – the girlwhose parents are unequal to the responsibilityplaced upon them – the girl to whom the street,the moving picture show, and the dance hallbeckon with alluring hand?31

Often the cry for regulation of urban popularamusements centred on the ‘unprotectedyoung girl’ of the working class, who wasperceived as susceptible to temptation andtherefore an unsuspecting victim for malepredators in an expanding urban society.

While the threat to the working-class ‘girl’represented the evils of the modern city, that

middle- and upper-class women also parti -cipated in such events was seen as emblem -atic of contemporary American society’smoral decay. In a 1913 article in Harper’sWeekly, observing the customs at a fashion -able American summer resort, William Ingliswas dismayed at the behaviour he found onthe dance floor. The ballroom dancing per -formed by young society ladies and theirpartners was compared to ‘drunken sailorscavorting in various parts of the world’, and‘riotous dances [found] on the left bank ofthe Seine’.32 These dances reminded Inglis ofthose performed by pimps and their prosti -tutes in years past and, as such, solely appro -priate for the dregs of society.

The sensual and ‘bestial’ nature of themovements appeared intimate and disturb -ing to the author, who found the turkey trotand other popular dances designed to imi -tate animal mating rites. For Inglis, ‘Therewas a certain resemblance to the waddlingtrot of the red-wattled turkey-gobbler as hestruts among his hens in the spicy days ofspring.’33 Inglis’s article, entitled, ‘Is ModernDancing Indecent: a Calm and UnbiasedConsideration of a Remarkable Phase ofContemporary Life’, associated dancing withseduction, exhibitions of sexual misconduct,and moral decline in high society, concen -trating its argument around the Americanfemale, associating the young female danc -ing body with the ruin of American culture.

Youth culture resisted and denied thesecritiques of the modern dances of the period,and for many social dancing became sym -bolic of modernity and the rising youth cul -ture’s resistance to the social etiquette of theolder generation. F. Scott Fitzgerald eloqu -ently articulated the common percep tion ofthe generation gap in regards to social dancein his short story, ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’:

It is well known among ladies over thirty-five thatwhen the younger set dance in the summer-time itis with the very worst intentions in the world, andif they are not bombarded with stony eyes straycouples will dance weird barbaric interludes in thecorners, and the more popular, more dangerous.34

William Inglis, echoing the views of Fitz -gerald’s older generation of ladies, warns

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that the animalistic nature of the ‘modern’dances enhances the baser nature in youngwomen who should be striving for enlight en-ment and refinement.

In much American culture of the time,popular dances were associated with degen -eracy and barbarism. As with the rise ofprimitivism in artistic circles, such critiquescannot be separated from prejudices of raceand foreign influence found at this time ofmass social change, while the controversyover social dancing became as central tochanging roles of women as the suffragettemovement, and no less contentious. Inglisargued that by enacting these performancesof the bestial self, one was opening thefloodgates for the corruption of Americanwomanhood.35 His focus on the deportmentof the female body in the public sphereillustrates how the battle for dance reformprovided a platform for social critics to cont -rol and, perhaps, resist social change, whilethose participating in the dances could usetheir activity to defy the conservative socialreform movement prevalent in the country.

Gender, Space, and the ‘Indecent’ Body

The sexualized movement of dances, as wellas the indecent proximity between partners onthe dance floor, caused an uproar in pub liccommentary of the time over the indecencyof the movement for women in the dances’choreography.36 The tango was said to origi -nate in the brothels of Argentina, while theapache dance, pronounced apoché, was saidto be inspired in 1902 by a street fight bet -ween a prostitute and her pimp in Paris.

Indeed, the apache dance was originallyan exhibition dance performed by membersof the criminal gangs of Paris who found itprofitable to perform these dances for theFrench upper classes. The dance simulatesthrough movement a violent battle of willsbetween a man and a woman including achaotic ‘hesitation waltz’ choreography withan undercurrent of violence between thepart ners. The movement includes kickingand sometimes biting by both dancers, oftenculminating with the man violently carryinghis partner off the dance floor.

The popular sensation soon moved to amore participatory experience between highand low society after Parisian gang memberswere hired to dance the apache with thesociety ladies themselves. This became sucha popular phenomenon in Paris that manystreet gang members increasingly made aliving through being hired as dancing part -ners for society women in famous Parisiannightclubs.37 The transition of Parisian upper-class women from observers to participantsin this evocative, highly sexual, and oftenviolent dance emphasizes the use of socialdances from the period to release individualsfrom the trappings of class restrictions. Soonthe apache spread across Europe and intoAmerica where men and women alike couldenjoy violent role-playing on the dance floor.38

The apache offered fantasies of othernesswhere women found resistance to genderroles through the performance of extremestereotype; ironically many women of the erafound empowerment through portrayals ofthe female figure as sexual object and victim.

Susan A. Reed asserts that dance and the‘exoticization’ of the female form have beenintertwined throughout the social history ofwestern culture in exhibition dance. As sheargues,

Exoticization takes many forms, and the represen -tation of the exotic ‘Other’, especially women, hasbeen an important feature of both dance perform -ances and visual representations of dance since atleast the eighteenth century.39

However, rather than the role of voyeuroften performed by the public in regards toprofessional exhibition dancing, ballroomdanc ing allowed the public actively toembody the exotic ‘other’ on the dance floor.Exoticization also occurred through animal -istic movement popular in many contentiousdances such as the grizzly bear, the turkeytrot, and the bunny hug, among others. Byallowing women in particular to performthese fantasies of exotic culture and animal -istic behaviour, the dances provided a spacefor women either to exaggerate or defy con -struc tions of gender, class, and race. In thisway, the ‘othering’ was of the publicthemselves.

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Beyond the style of the dance, the use ofthe body in the choreography also defiedprevious codes of behaviour between gen -ders. Physical space between the dancers’bodies and the spatial occupation of thedance floor was less restrained in ragtimedances than in previously acceptable forms.For Parisian society ladies dancing withunder world gang members, the apacheoffered an experience of chaotic, off-centredbehaviour in the midst of their presumablyordered and controlled world. The simulatedviolent act often blurred fiction with reality,with the male partners throwing the womenby their hair, waist, and arms across thedance floor.

The lack of control in the move ment wasnot feigned, and in a New York Times articlefrom 1911, American dancing masters attend-ing an international dancing conferencefound themselves ‘horrified at the “Apache”or “Schiebe” dance, which is so prevalent inthe Prussian capital’. According to this article,the Berlin police were actively attempting tosuppress the dance after the death of onefemale who broke her back due to the ‘ener -getic efforts of her male partner’.40 A similararticle from the Chicago Tribune of 1912

reported the death of a woman in a Chicagodance hall after injuries sustained from theapache dance.41

Though essentializing traditional genderroles in a performative display of the battleof the sexes, what made dances such as thetango and the apache dance so popular wasprecisely the focus on fetishized role-playingand the performance of sexual domination.The apache dance in particular allowedwomen to dramatize a sexualized personathat was clearly defiant of good taste anddecent public behaviour.

Following upon Browning’s claim inregards to the samba, I argue that during thedance craze of the early 1900s the fetishiz -ation of the racial and exotic ‘other’ made thedances part of a ‘racial history’, while alsoreflecting the new global exchange of cul -tures in the internationalist pre-war period.The exchange of cultures and traditions gavewomen a chance to act outside norm ativebehaviour, releasing them from accept able

sexual conduct and the restrictive genderroles of the period.

The controversies over the bold ragtimedances and their public nature reflect thetransformations that occurred in all aspectsof women’s social, political, and workinglives. Women’s suffrage, wider career choices,higher education, and general emancipationwere at the forefront of public consciousness,emphasizing the shift in women’s positionfrom the private to the public sphere.

Social Control and the Women’s Movement

The changes to women’s role in societyaroused controversy which concentrated itsfocus on the image of the dancing female: afigure perceived as unrestrained and uncon -trol lable. Articles throughout magazines suchas the Ladies’ Home Journal and Harper’s Weeklyridiculing and defending the Suffragistmove ment shouldered those debating thedecency or degeneracy of modern dancing.

As the position of American womenmoved into the public sphere, so did theirvisible, physical presence in the publicdances of the time. Many of the sweepingchanges in social life widened the gap bet -ween the growing American youth cultureand the older gener ation. The dance crazeemphasized the friction bet ween what wasperceived as respect able behaviour in femaledeportment throughout the Victorian ageand the loosen ing of gendered behaviouralcodes in the progressive era, offering ampleopportunity for the emblem of the dancingfemale to be misread by a resistant public.

Women’s entrance into public life createda transformation in the construction of gen -der that was not without its difficulties. Manynewspaper reports and introductions in popu-lar magazines emphasized the country’sunease over the transformations not only ofwomen’s role in society but of society’sunderstanding of women themselves. LouiseConnolly articulated the feeling of disorien -tation among the American public in thisHarper’s Weekly article from June, 1913:

The trouble is that just as the introduction of theelevator has been so rapid that many people’s

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‘Dramatizing a sexualized persona’ in the apache dance. Above: in performance. Below: in a Paris restaurant.

253



stomachs are not yet adjusted to the motion, sothe changes in the social condition of women havebeen so sudden that many men’s prejudices havenot yet found their ‘sea legs’.42

Julie Malnig argues that the depictions ofwomen found in the popular media of theteens and 1920s reflected the general confu -sion over the changing roles of women insociety. Her article on the popularity ofAncient Greek imagery throughout the periodargues that often the ‘new woman’ wasdepicted as either a Venus or Athena figure.‘Ubiquitous in the teens’, Malnig contends,‘were Grecian images of models wearingGreek-inspired designs, or sketches ofcontem porary women in ancient settings,symbolic of one version of the “modern”woman as cultured, refined, genteel’ – a

modern day ‘Athena’. 43 Malnig goes on tonote that the contrasting image of woman asVenus represented the modern-day womanas one full of ‘playful sexuality’ with a‘healthy and buoyant physicality’.44 Theseconflicting depictions of femininity as vari -ously ‘graceful’ and ‘exuberant’ or ‘creaturesof Nature’ but at the same time, ‘urbanelysophisticated’, show the confusion in thepopular media over gender roles within anincreasingly urbanized culture.

Merging Male and Female Choreography

Malnig’s emphasis on popular images ofwomen throughout the period as eitherrefined or ‘natural’ figures, as seen in thepublic perception of Isadora Duncan, werecontradicted by the social dances of the day.Defying depictions of women as delicate andgraceful, dances such as the turkey trot andthe black bottom emphasized awkward move -ments with no distinctions between femaleand male choreography, while the tango,maxixe, and apache dances presented a daringform of sexuality at odds with Grecian imagesof a youthful, innocent, and playful Venus.

Dances of the period challenged genderedspace in a different way, resisting properspatial conduct through their movements.The male and female steps in the animaldances were indistinguishable and emphas -ized off-centred, chaotic moves with flappingarms, syncopated ‘walking’ feet, and claw-like hand gestures. The grizzly bear wascriticized as unseemly due to the awkwardsteps, with the male and female pushingtheir torsos against each other as they inter -link arms, display their claw-like hands, andmove around the space.

Unsightly to watch, they were extremelypopular to perform, thus moving the realmof dance from the spectator to the partici -pant. This focus on active engagement ratherthan passive voyeurism also subverted theconcept of women’s bodies as aestheticallypleasing for the (male) viewer. Through un -gainly, uncontrolled, and off-centre moves,women could release themselves, at least onthe dance floor, from their day-to-day socialrestrictions.

Rudolph Valentino dances a romantic tango in The FourHorsemen of the Apocalypse (1921).

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The uproar in public commentary of thetime over the indecency of choreographedmovement for women emboldened thecritics of social dance. Restrictions on dancehalls were advocated by many private andcivic organizations that worried about themixing of classes, cultures, and races on thedance floor. Civic leaders across the countrycreated rules to restrict public dance hallsand the dances themselves. In a widespreadcampaign, with reports daily in the localnewspapers, Mayor Gaynor of New Yorkdesired to ‘place all dance halls under citysupervision and licenses’. Gaynor attemptedto control ‘objectionable dances’ which heconsidered ‘against the morals of the com -munity’.45 In other American cities, dance-hall reformers took social organizations tocourt hoping to restrict the type of dancesavailable at public venues.

The turkey trot became central to debatesover controversial choreography, and therewas a growing movement to pressure dancehalls to ban the ‘trot’ and other of the moderndances considered ‘indecent’. Unable todefeat the popular dance craze, women’sorganizations worked to make respectablethe objectionable dances by modifying theirmovements and enforcing ‘proper etiquetteon the dance floor’, while popular dancers,such as Irene and Vernon Castle introducednew, more ‘decent’ dances, like the ‘one-step’

Above: the tango as seen by Punch in 1913. Below:Irene and Vernon Castle bring social respectabilityto the new dance.

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256

and the ‘castle walk’, to make dancingrespectable.

With the reformers losing the battle to stopragtime dancing, there was a growing move -ment throughout 1914 to make contro ver sialdances into leisure activities more palatablefor ‘respectable’ middle-class culture. Manyarticles in popu lar magazine’s such asHarper’s Weekly and the Ladies’ Home Journalgave advice on solu tions for taming both thepublic space of the dance hall and the physi -cal space between dancing bodies. A societymatron, Mrs Bullfinch, guided parents not tobe afraid of the modern dances, but to learnhow to transform them; in a Ladies’ HomeJournal article called ‘How I Changed MyDaughter’s Dances’, she offered three rulesfor young people to follow, aiming to changethe dances by altering the social conduct thatsurrounded public dances, modifying thedances themselves, and restricting the hourswhen dances were held.46

Many felt that these alterations to theformerly indecent dancing were successful,with media commentary indicating that thenewly ‘decent’ dances suppressed their racial,foreign, and working-class origins. In anarticle in the New York Times, the assimilationof the dances by middlebrow culture is clear:whereas previously the turkey trot had‘smacked strongly of the Dahomeny-Bowery-Barbary Coast form of revelry’, transform -ations to the dance had it ‘trimmed,expurgated, and spruced up until now it isquite a different thing’.47 The controversyover social dance and attempts at controlcon tinued into the 1920s, when debates overpublic dancing and their indication of trans -formations of class, gender, and raceremained central to the debate over widerconcerns of social change in the UnitedStates.

Epilogue: the Present Meets the Past

Attempts to control and limit social dancingremained central to what was considered‘decent’ behaviour in society, as well as anattempt by the state to stem the tide of socialchange which was perceived as degenerate.Early twentieth-century civic control over

social dancing, and the public’s resistance toit, continued to influence American societylong after the end of the jazz age. In 1998,seventy policemen raided a night club in theEast Village, New York – the crime beingdancing without a licence. In his new hard-line policy against urban crime, the NewYork Mayor of the 1990s, Rudy Giuliani, re -introduced many laws from the 1910s and ’20scurtailing social activities in public spaces.Giuliani’s resur rection of the anti-dancinglaws ghosted Mayor Gaynor’s attempts toenforce norm ative behaviour upon NewYorkers in the early twentieth century. Butwhereas in the early twentieth century theaim was to target dancing in response tochanges in society and the women’s move -ment, Guiliani’s crackdown used publicdancing to police other types of social beha -viour as part of his ‘quality of life campaign’.Giuliani’s anti-dancing policy appeared tomany as an attack on their civil liberties,changing New York from a place of individu -ality and expres sive creativity to one of‘bland ness’, as in the ‘Disney-fica tion ofTimes Square’. The dancing ban, which finedbars up to $2,000 for allowing customers todance by the juke box, became symbolic ofGiuliani’s control over the civic body of thecity, an enforced codification of urbanculture through its people’s physical selves.

Acting out their own spatial interventionupon the rules of the city, an arts activistgroup, the Dance Liberation Front, staged aseries of public rallies defying the crack -down in defence of ‘the people’s right toboogie’.48 Led by the comedians RobertPritchard and Jen Miller, known as DeputyDisco Fever and Osama bin Travolta, ‘thegroup hoped to spread awareness of thecabaret law and garner support for its eradic -ation’. The group and hundreds of fol lowersdanced through the streets through out 2001,spreading awareness while playing ‘Foot -loose’, performing a ‘twist-a-thon’ in TimesSquare, and public dancing in WashingtonSquare Park.

Rallying around this cause, public pres -sure against the Cabaret License Act encour -aged many bars and restaurants in New Yorkto defy the licensing law and allow their



patrons to dance. In the decade following theintroduction of the Act the rules continue tobe enforced and many establishments indefiance of the laws are subject to ‘publicraids, fines, padlocks, and shutdowns ifpatrons are caught dancing’, while membersof the public continue to use their dancing inunlicensed bars and on the streets to resistGiuliani and his successor’s unpopularattempts to change the social behaviour ofthe city’s populace.49

As dancing interventions continue into thepresent, it seems that dance in the urban land -scape by the public continues to defy civicpolicy and normative behaviour throughacts of the private body on the public realm.As Jen Miller articulates, ‘This is about morethan just dancing. . . . It’s a free speech issue.Once you attack dance, what’s next?’50

References

‘15 Girls Fired for Dancing the Trot’, New York Times, 29

May 1912.‘1919–1929, From the Blackbottom to the Lindy Hop.

Blackbottom: Let’s do [the] Blackbottom’ (ProducersLibrary Service, 1924), in American Dances! 1897–1948: a Collectors’ Edition of Social Dance in Film,(Kentfield, CA: Dancetime Publications, DVD, 2003).

‘Dangerous Dancing’, Chicago Tribune, 21 May 1912.‘Dies After Much Dancing: Miss Harris Just Remarked

“I Could Die Waltzing”’, New York Times, 27 Sept -ember 1910.

Harper’s Weekly, 10 May 1913.‘Man Dies from Banning the Bunny Hug’, San Francisco

Chronicle, 27 March 1913.‘Mayor Out to Stop “Tea and Tango” Now’, New York

Times, 5 April, 1913.‘New York Voices: License to Dance’, Channel Thirteen,

WNET NY Public Media <www.nyc.gov/html/dca/html/licenses/073.shtl> accessed: 11/21/2011.

‘Police Suppress New Dance: American DancingMasters Horrified by the “Schiebe” in Berlin’, NewYork Times, 15 October 1911.

‘The Wayward Girl’, Ladies’ Home Journal, March 1913.‘Would End School Dancing: Flushing Hopes Thus to

Prevent White and Negro Pupils Mingling’, New YorkTimes, 22 February 1911.

Browning, Barbara, Samba: Resistance in Motion,(Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995).

Bullfinch, Gertrude, ‘How I Changed My Daughter’sDances’, Ladies’ Home Journal, September 1914.

Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subver -sion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999).

Campbell, Barbara Kuhn, The ‘Liberated’ Woman of 1914:Prominent Women in the Progressive Era (Ann Arbor:UMI Research Park, 1979).

Connolly, Louise, ‘Correspondence: The New Woman’,Harper’s Weekly (1913).

Cowan, Jane K., Dance and the Body Politic in NorthernGreece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berke ley;Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).

Dorman, James H., ‘Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: the “Coon Song”Phenomenon of the Gilded Age’, American Quarterly,XL, No. 4 (1988), p. 450–71.

Erenberg, Lewis A., ‘Everybody’s Doin’ It: the Pre-World War I Dance Craze, the Castles, and theModern American Girl’, Feminist Studies, III, No. 1/2

(1975).

257

Street protest by the Dance Liberation Front against Rudy Giuliani’s attempt in the 1990s to restrict public dancing.



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Fabian, Johannes, Anthropology with Attitude: CriticalEssays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’, SaturdayEvening Post, 1 May 1920.

Frankel, Noralee, and Nancy S. Dye, ed., Gender, Class,Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era (Lexington:University of Kentucky Press, 1991).

Garber, ‘The Disappearing Dance: Maxixe’s ImperialErasure’, Black Music Research Journal, XVI (1992).

Gottschild, Brenda Dixon, The Black Dancing Body: aGeography from Coon to Cool (New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2003).

Henderson, Mae G., ‘About Face, or, What is This“Back” in B(l)ack Popular Culture?: From the Hot -ten tot Venus to Video Hottie’, in Cultural Migrationsand Gendered Subjects: Colonial and PostcolonialRepresentations of the Female Body, ed. Maria IsabelRomero Ruiz and Sylvia Castro Borrego (London:Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011).

Inglis, William, ‘Is Modern Dancing Indecent: a Calmand Unbiased Consideration of a Remarkable Phaseof Contemporary Life’, Harper’s Weekly, 17 May 1913,p. 11–12.

Katz, Lina, ‘The Lakeside Lounge Enforces the Ban onBoogie’, Village Voice, 23–29 August 2001.

Knowles, Mark, The Wicked Waltz and Other ScandalousDances: Outrage at Couple Dancing in the Nineteenthand Early Twentieth Centuries (North Carolina:McFarland, 2009).

Kortiz, Amy, Culture Makers: Urban Performance andLitera ture in the 1920s (Urbana; Chicago: Universityof Illinois Press, 2009).

Malnig, Julie, ‘Athena Meets Venus: Visions of Womenin Social Dance in the Teens and Early 1920s’, DanceResearch Journal, XXXI, No. 2 (1999), p. 34–62.

Malnig, Julie, ed., Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake:a Social and Popular Dance Reader (Urbana; Chicago:University of Illinois Press, 2009).

Malone, Jacqui, Steppin’ on the Blues: the Visible Rhythmsof African American Dance (Urbana; Chicago: Univer -sity of Illinois Press, 1996).

Manning, Susan, Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race inMotion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,2004).

Martin, Carol, Dance Marathons: Performing AmericanCulture of the 1920s and 1930s, in Sally Harrison-Pepper, ed., Performance Studies: Expressive Behaviorin Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,1994).

McGovern, James R., ‘The American Women’s Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals’, TheJournal of American History, LV, No. 2 (1968).

Neuberg, Eva, ‘No Dancing Allowed: Protesting theCity’s Cabaret Laws Outlawing Nightlife’, New YorkPress, 22-28 August, 2001.

Parker, Richard G., Bodies, Pleasures and Passions: SexualCulture in Contemporary Brazil (Boston: Beacon, 1991).

Perry, Elisabeth I., ‘“The General Motherhood of theCommonwealth”: Dance Hall Reform in the Progres -sive Era’, American Quarterly, XXXVII, No. 5 (1985).

Reed, Susan A., ‘The Politics and Poetics of Dance’,Annual Review of Anthropology, XXVII (1998).

Roach, Joseph, Cities of the Dead: Circum-AtlanticPerformance (New York: Columbia University Press,1996).

Schneider, Dorothy, and Carl J. Schneider, AmericanWomen in the Progessive Era, 1900–1920 (New York:Facts on File, 1993).

Shay, Anthony, Dancing across Borders: the AmericanFascination with Exotic Dance Forms (Jefferson, NorthCarolina: McFarland, 2008).

Taylor, D. J., Bright Young People: the Lost Generation ofLondon’s Jazz Age (London: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,2009).

Taylor, Julie, Paper Tangos (Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 1998).

Thomas, Helen, The Body, Dance. and Cultural Theory,(Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003).

Notes

1. The Bright Young Things (or Bright YoungPeople) were a group of London-based socialites in the1920s and 1930s who were the centre of British mediaattention for their wild parties, scavenger hunts, andother much publicized stunts on the streets of London.For more information see D. J. Taylor’s excellent BrightYoung People: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age(London: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009).

2. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life(Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press,1984), p. 97–8.

3. Ibid., p. 98.4. Violent crimes in dance halls and reports of death

on the dance floor from New York and other cities indic -ated the growing sensationalism found in public com -men tary of the time over the dance craze. See: ‘Dies AfterMuch Dancing: Miss Harris Just Remarked “I Could DieWaltzing”’, New York Times, 27 Sept ember 1910.

5. ‘15 Girls Fired for Dancing the Trot’, New YorkTimes, 29 May 1912.

6. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and theSubversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999).

7. Jane K. Cowan, Dance and the Body Politic in NorthernGreece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 4.

8. 1919–1929, From the Blackbottom to the Lindy Hop.Blackbottom: Let’s Do [the] Blackbottom (Producers LibraryService, 1924), in American Dances! 1897–1948: aCollectors’ Edition of Social Dance in Film (Kentfield, CA.:Dancetime Publications, DVD, 2003).

9. The ‘Black Bottom’ was an inner city area ofDetroit from 1900 to 1960, eventually destroyed to makeway for the freeway to wealthy suburbs in 1960.

10. Lisa Doolittle, ‘The Trianon and On: ReadingMass Social Dancing in the 1930s and 1940s in Alberta,Canada’, in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: a Socialand Popular Dance Reader, ed. Julie Malnig (Urbana;Chicago: University of Illinois 2009), p. 119–20.

11. Mae G. Henderson, ‘About Face, or, What is This“Back” in B(l)ack Popular Culture?: From the HottentotVenus to Video Hottie’, in Cultural Migrations andGendered Subjects: Colonial and Postcolonial Represen -tations of the Female Body, ed. Maria Isabel Romero Ruizand Sylvia Castro Borrego (London: CambridgeScholars Publishing, 2011).

12. Julie Taylor, Paper Tangos (Durham: Duke Univ -er sity Press, 1998).

13. Richard G. Parker, Bodies, Pleasures. and Passions:Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil (Boston: Beacon,1991), p. 154.

14. Barbara Browning, Samba: Resistance in Motion,(Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 34, 159.

15. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-AtlanticPerformance (New York: Columbia University Press,1996).



259

16. Lewis A. Erenberg, ‘Everybody’s Doin’ It: thePre-World War I Dance Craze, the Castles, and theModern American Girl’, Feminist Studies, III, No. 1/2

(1975), p. 156.17. Ibid, p. 155.18. Julie Malnig ‘Apaches, Tangos, and Other

Indecencies: Women, Dance, and New York Nightlife ofthe 1910s’, in Julie Malnig ed., Ballroom, Boogie, ShimmySham, Shake: a Social and Popular Dance Reader (Urbana;Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), p. 76. Seealso Elizabeth Aldrich, ‘The Civilizing of America’sBallrooms: the Revolutionary War to 1890’, in Malnig(2009), p. 41.

19. Erenberg, ‘Everybody’s Doin’ It: the Pre-WorldWar I Dance Craze, the Castles, and the ModernAmerican Girl’, p. 155.

20. As reported in an article in the New York Times, ina ballroom dance activity of a public school in Flushing,Queens, controversy developed after a female, whitestudent of ‘one of the wealthiest residents in LincolnPark, Flushing’ was ‘compelled’ to dance with a maleblack student, causing outrage amongst parents and theforced dismissal of the dancing teacher. The Boarddefended their decision as not being provoked byprejudice but the firm belief ‘that all dancing by boysand girls together should be abolished’. See: ‘Would EndSchool Dancing: Flushing Hopes Thus to Prevent Whiteand Negro Pupils Mingling’, New York Times, 22 Feb -ruary 1911.

21. Garber, ‘The Disappearing Dance: Maxixe’sImperial Erasure’, Black Music Research Journal, XVI, No.16 (1992).

22. Elizabeth I. Perry, ‘“The General Motherhood ofthe Commonwealth”: Dance Hall Reform in theProgresive Era’, American Quarterly, XXXVII, No. 5

(1985), p. 719–33.23. James R. McGovern, ‘The American Women’s

Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals’, TheJournal of American History. LV, No. 2 (1968).

24. For further information on the role of women inthe ‘progressive era’, see: Barbara Kuhn Campbell, The‘Liberated’ Woman of 1914: Prominent Women in theProgressive Era (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Park, 1979);Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye, ed., Gender, Class,Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era (Lexington: Univ -er sity of Kentucky Press, 1991); Dorothy Schneider andCarl J. Schneider, American Women in the Progessive Era,1900–1920 (New York: Facts on File, 1993); Elisabeth I.Perry, ‘“The General Motherhood of the Common -wealth”: Dance Hall Reform in the Progressive Era’,American Quarterly, XXXVII, No. 5 (1985).

25. Harper’s Weekly, 10 May 1913, p. 5.26. Julie Malnig ‘Apaches, Tangos, and Other In -

decen cies: Women, Dance, and New York Nightlife ofthe 1910s’, in Julie Malnig, ed., Ballroom, Boogie, ShimmySham, Shake: a Social and Popular Dance Reader (Urbana;Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), p. 76.

27. Elizabeth Aldrich, ‘The Civilizing of America’sBallrooms: the Revolutionary War to 1890’, in Malnig(2009), p. 41.

28. Lewis A. Erenberg, ‘Everybody’s Doin’ It: thePre-World War I Dance Craze, the Castles, and theModern American Girl’, Feminist Studies. III, No. 1/2

(1975).

29. In New Jersey a woman was given a 50-dayprison sentence for dancing the turkey trot, while in1913 ‘Mr Ed Spence of Grants Pass, Oregon, was knifed11 times while trying to enforce a rule at his club“Holland” that no animal dances allowed’. ‘Man Diesfrom Banning the Bunny Hug’, San Francisco Chronicle,27 March 1913.

30. Belle Israels, ‘The Dance Problem’, NationalConference of Charities and Corrections, 14 June 1914,Quoted in Elizabeth I. Perry, ‘“The General Motherhoodof the Commonwealth”: Dance Hall Reform in theProgressive Era’, American Quarterly, XXXVII, No. 5

(1985), p. 719–33.31. ‘The Wayward Girl’, Ladies’ Home Journal, March

1913.32. William Inglis, ‘Is Modern Dancing Indecent: a

Calm and Unbiased Consideration of a RemarkablePhase of Contemporary Life’, Harper’s Weekly, 17 May1913, p.12.

33. Ibid., p. 11.34. F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’,

Saturday Evening Post, 1 May 1920.35. William Inglis, ‘Is Modern Dancing Indecent: a

Calm and Unbiased Consideration of a RemarkablePhase of Contemporary Life’, Harper’s Weekly, 17 May1913, p. 11–12.

36. Julie Malnig ‘Apaches, Tangos, and OtherIndecencies: Women, Dance, and New York Nightlife ofthe 1910s’, in Julie Malnig, ed., Ballroom, Boogie, ShimmySham, Shake: a Social and Popular Dance Reader (Urbana;Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

37. Ibid.38. For further information see: Mark Knowles, The

Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances: Outrage atCouple Dancing in the Nineteenth and Early TwentiethCenturies (North Carolina: McFarland, 2009).

39. Susan A. Reed, ‘The Politics and Poetics ofDance’, Annual Review of Anthropology, XXVII (1998), p.509.

40. ‘Police Suppress New Dance: American DancingMasters Horrified by the “Schiebe” in Berlin’, New YorkTimes, 15 October 1911.

41. ‘Dangerous Dancing’, Chicago Tribune, 21 May1912.

42. Louise Connolly, ‘Correspondence: The NewWoman’, Harper’s Weekly (1913).

43. Malnig, p. 35.44. Ibid.45. ‘Mayor Out to Stop “Tea and Tango” Now’, New

York Times, 5 April 1913.46. Gertrude Bullfinch, ‘How I Changed My

Daughter’s Dances’, Ladies’ Home Journal, September1914, p. 6.

47. Quoted in Lewis Erenberg, ‘Everybody’s Doin’It: the Pre-World War I Dance Craze, the Castles, and theModern American Girl’, p. 160.

48. Lina Katz, ‘The Lakeside Lounge Enforces theBan on Boogie’, Village Voice, 23–29 August 2001.

49. ‘New York Voices: License to Dance’, ChannelThirteen, WNET NY Public Media <www.nyc.gov/html/dca/html/licenses/073.shtml>, accessed: 11/21/2011.

50. Eva Neuberg, ‘No Dancing Allowed: Protestingthe City’s Cabaret Laws Outlawing Nightlife’, New YorkPress, 22–28 August 2001.


Embodying Resistance: Gendering Public Space in Ragtime Social Dance

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