Dancing Class

Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890-1920

Linda J. Tomko

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780253028174
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

This look at Progressive-era women and innovative cultural practices "blazes a new trail in dance scholarship" ( Choice, Outstanding Academic Book of the Year). From salons to dance halls to settlement houses, new dance practices at the turn of the twentieth century became a vehicle for expressing cultural issues and negotiating matters of gender. By examining master narratives of modern dance history, this provocative and insightful book demonstrates the cultural agency of Progressive-era dance practices. "Tomko blazes a new trail in dance scholarship by interconnecting U.S. History and dance studies... the first to argue successfully that middle-class U.S. women promoted a new dance practice to manage industrial changes, crowded urban living, massive immigration, and interchange and repositioning among different classes." — Choice

NOTES

Full citations are given for first references in each chapter, and shortened citations thereafter.

Introduction

1. Robert Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 159–62.

2. See, for example, the collection of articles, edited by Lynn Garafola, devoted to “dancing on the left” in Studies in Dance History 5, no. 1 (Spring 1994); Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); Stacey Prickett, “From Workers’ Dance to New Dance” and “Dance and the Workers’ Struggle,” in Dance Research 7, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 47–64, and 8, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 47–61, respectively.

3. See Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), especially 1–17. Also Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981); Hal Foster, preface to Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), ix–xiv; Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 57–82; Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984/92).

4. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 78–87. Histories of black peoples and cultures have been prominent among studies of the U.S. that have given weight to dance. See Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Sterling Stuckey, Going through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History and Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory & the Foundations of Black America (both New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 and 1987, respectively); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness; Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). Proceeding from a dance perspective, Lynne Fauley Emery’s Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970 remains the most comprehensive account to date (New York: Dance Horizons, 1980; 2d rev. ed. Princeton Books, 1988), updating later-twentieth-century developments with a chapter by Brenda Dixon Stowell. See also Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance; Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996); John Perpener, “The Seminal Years of Black Concert Dance” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1992).

1. Bodies and Dances in Progressive-era America

1. Important studies of the Progressive era which make clear the period’s wrenching dislocations and pattern shifts include Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books, 1955); Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism; A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: The Free Press, 1968); Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” in The Promise of American History; Progress and Prospects, ed. Stanley I. Kutler and Stanley N. Katz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).

2. For studies of economic and industrial change in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America see Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture & Society in Industrializing America (New York: Vintage Books, 1977); Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work; A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic; New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs; Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Glenn Porter, The Rise of Big Business, 1860–1910 (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1973); Melvin Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the IWW (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Melvyn Dubofsky, Industrialism and the American Worker, 1865–1920, 2d ed. (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1985); David Brody, Steelworkers in America, the Non-Union Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).

3. On immigration flows and immigrants’ reception in postbellum and early-twentieth-century America see John Higham, Send These to Me; Immigrants in America, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Higham, Strangers in the Land; Patterns of Nativism 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1985). See Twelfth Census of the United States taken in the Year 1900. Census Reports. Volume One: Population, Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: United States Census Office, 1901), table 24, pp. 651, 668–69.

4. For changing farm conditions see Hofstadter, The Age of Reform; Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment; A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Wiebe, The Search for Order, makes clear changing conceptions of community and loss of clear senses of order and ordination.

5. See Goodwyn, The Populist Moment; Hofstadter, The Age of Reform; Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” 116.

6. Periodization is a necessarily arbitrary practice. Nonetheless, the Progressive era should not be thought limited to those years in which the Progressive Party actively participated in American electoral politics. I take a broad view of the Progressive era as limned by its aggressive reformist drives and its shattering demographic changes. I purposefully date the Progressive era back to 1890 in order to foreground women’s leadership in reform initiatives such as the settlement house movement (Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull-House in 1889, Lillian Wald the Nurses Settlement in 1893) and the temperance movement (as in the broadly based, grassroots organization, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union). I date the end of the era, a difficult decision in any case, to 1920, not because women’s suffrage was then achieved but because postwar rethinking of social relations, including gender roles, combined with economic instability, mounting immigration restriction efforts, and shifting patterns of political participation to substantively change people’s conceptions of the state, their ability to affect it through activism, and hence their own social roles.

7. Hofstadter applied the term “status anxiety” in The Age of Reform; Wiebe coined the second term with The Search for Order.

8. William R. Leach, “Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890–1925,” Journal of American History 71 (September 1984): 319–42. See also Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, The Culture of Consumption; Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983).

9. Chapter 2 treats separate spheres ideology in detail.

10. Chapters 3 and 5 address the settlement house movement.

11. Michael McGerr, “Political Style and Women’s Power, 1830–1930,” Journal of American History 77 (December 1990): 864–85; Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women; imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–14 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987); Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Ellen Carol Dubois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Classic studies of woman suffrage are Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement 1890–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965); Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle; The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959).

Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl; Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 173–76, 207–16, 222–27, 237–42. Useful studies of women’s labor activism in New York include Ann Schofield, “The Uprising of the 20,000: The Making of a Labor Legend,” in A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike; Women Needleworkers in America, ed. Joan M. Jensen and Sue Davidson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 167–82; Nancy Schrom Dye, As Equals and as Sisters: Feminism, the Labor Movement, and the Women’s Trade Union League of New York (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980); Dye, “Creating A Feminist Alliance: Sisterhood and Class Conflict in the New York Women’s Trade Union League, 1903–1914,” Feminist Studies 2 (1975): 24–38; Alice Kessler-Harris, “Where are the Organized Women Workers?” Feminist Studies 3 (1975): 92–110; Kessler-Harris, Outto Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 142–79. See also Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917; reprint, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960); Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905; reprint, New York: Penguin American Library, 1985).

12. William H. Chafe, The American Woman; Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 80, 128–29; Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America; A Documentary History Edited by Gerda Lerner (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 193–215; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry; Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).

13. See, for example, Cynthia Russett, Darwin in America; The Intellectual Response 1865–1912 (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976); Russet, Sexual Science; The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Martha Verbrugge, Abie-Bodied Womanhood; Personal Health and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Boston (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Edward Clarke, Sex in Education (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1887).

14. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1905; reprint, New York: New American Library, 1980), 43–44.

15. On garment industry work conditions see Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 98–106, 136, 138–39.

16. Davis, Spearheads for Reform, 60–83; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Macmillan, 1890); Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 54–60; Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (1925; reprint, New York: Persea Books, 1975); Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910; reprint, New York: New American Library, 1981), 200–10; Lillian Wald, The House on Henry Street (New York: Henry Holt, 1915).

17. Luther H. Gulick, director of physical training for turn-of-the-century New York City schools, wrote eloquently about school conditions in Gotham—see chapter 5. Municipal conditions are evoked in Physical Training; A Full Report of the Papers and Discussions of the Conference Held in Boston in November, 1889, reported and edited by Isabel C. Barrows (Boston: Press of George H. Ellis, 1890).

18. Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform; the Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement 1890–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 63–70; Dominic Cavallo, Muscles and Morals; Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880–1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvani...