Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

Dance Halls

Since the love of dancing persists without abatement through the centuries, dancing must be accepted as a human need. Dancing should not, however, cause the ruin of young men and women. That would seem to be a trite remark but it has apparently taken infinite pains in investigatory and publicity work to persuade the public or any considerable portion of it that unregulated modern dance halls do injure their patrons and that they must be reformed.

The trail out from the home, when followed by women in urban centers, has led them in almost every case to the dance hall. Health workers, W. C. T. U. women, welfare workers, social workers, educators, propagandists of all kinds have found in the public dance hall their Waterloo. The number of policewomen in the cities now assigned to these places to safeguard young girls is a direct response to the demands made by women that such municipal provision be made for their care.

Both men and women have been needed in the investigation of dance halls and both have responded to the need, comparing notes and conferring on the general situation. The men can better gain the confidence of the male patrons, follow them to their resorts and learn whether the dance hall is allied with vicious interests. On the other hand, the women can better gain the confidence of their own sex and find out what motives actuate girl patrons in frequenting such places, in drinking the liquor that is almost invariably to be found at dance halls, and in succumbing to the temptations that are offered at the close of the dance. Among the skillful and ingenious women investigators of dance halls, Julia Schoenfeld, now field secretary of the National Playgrounds Association, perhaps takes first rank. Her study of conditions in New York City, which she made under the most difficult requirements, paved the way for the municipalization or municipal control of the dance halls which has become an accomplished fact, if on a small scale at present.

Mrs. Charles Israels of New York and the members of the Women’s Municipal League, with the facts obtained by Miss Schoenfeld, were able to start a substantial movement toward the extension of municipal functions in New York to cover the recreation of dancing, not entirely, of course, but to the extent of providing greater facilities for this recreation under careful supervision and with drinking entirely eliminated. One hears women in New York state as their hope that before long their city will boast a municipal dancing master who will preserve for the foreign colonies, that exist in such, abundance, their old-country folk dancing, who will have facilities for providing inspiring music and halls where the young may dance with safety and freedom. In spite of good beginnings in this direction, however, New York has been slow to follow the excellent example set by Chicago with its system of field houses for dancing in the public parks.

The evil resulting from the commercialization of the dance hall can be destroyed only by eliminating the element of profit-making. Municipalization is the remedy. Well-informed women are now arguing this. Mrs. Louise de Koven Bowen, head of the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, is one of the women who are educating the public to a realization of the fact that profit-making from dancing must be abolished. In a little pamphlet entitled “Our Most Popular Recreation Controlled by the Liquor Interests,” she presents a study of the public dance halls of Chicago which is most convincing in its plea for a department of recreation in Chicago.

In York, Pennsylvania, the Woman’s Club, in coöperation with the Associated Charities and Mr. Francis H. McLean, compiled an ordinance now in effect, putting dance halls under city control. Other clubs and organizations of women have done the same and scarcely a convention of women anywhere at any time fails to go on record as in favor of similar measures of control.

In many places, the women are not waiting on the tardy action of city councils, but are instituting safeguarded dancing places of their own. “Sunday dances for young people is an innovation by the Women’s Outdoor Club of San Francisco. Club women will supervise the affair. The reply to criticism about encouraging Sunday dancing is that young people will dance anyway on their only free day, and it is better to provide them with proper surroundings than leave them to the temptations of the average dance hall.”[^[22]] It is significant that the Department of Education of the Civic Club of Allegheny County was the one to institute dances on Sunday evenings for young people over sixteen years of age. Bringing the question of amusement home to Bridgeport, Connecticut, Mrs. Upham, industrial secretary of the Y. W. C. A., said that a petition circulated in the city had brought in 600 signatures of working girls demanding dance halls where no liquor should be sold and where they might enjoy themselves in safety.

Simultaneously with the movement for the regulation of the public dance halls is the movement to establish girls’ dance clubs, non-sectarian and open to girls in employment, largely in order to wean them away from the public dance hall. Mrs. Charles Oppenheim of New York is a promoter of this movement, which she hopes to make one of national proportions. It is in a way the direct antithesis of the movement toward municipalization of recreation, and grows out of the success that private individuals and organizations have met with in making girls so interested in their own clubs that they prefer them to the public dance. The two movements are not necessarily antagonistic, however, as they allow a freedom of choice and insure wider provision for the needs of the young.