What eight million women want

by Rheta Childe Dorr

One day the lodger asked Annie if she did not want to go to a dance. Annie did want to, but she knew very well that her mother would not allow her to go. Once a year the entire family, including the baby, attended the annual ball of the Coachman's Union, but that was another thing. Annie was too young for dances her mother declared.

The Donnellys paid for and occupied three rooms, but they really lived in one room, the others being too filled with beds to be habitable except at night. The kitchen, the one living-room, was uncomfortably crowded at meal times. At no time was there any privacy. It was impossible for Annie to receive her girl friends in her home. Every bit of her social life had to be lived out of the house.

When the weather was warm she often stayed in the street, walking about with the other girls or sitting on a friend's doorstep, until ten or even eleven o'clock at night. Every one does the same in a crowded city neighborhood. There comes a time in a girl's life when this sort of thing becomes monotonous. The time came when Annie found sitting on the doorstep and talking about nothing in particular entirely unbearable. So one balmy, inviting spring night she slipped away and went with the lodger to a dance.

The dance hall occupied a big, low-ceiled basement room in a building which was a combination of saloon and tenement house. In one of the front windows of the basement room was hung a gaudy placard: "The Johnny Sullivan Social Club."

The lodger paid no admission, but he deposited ten cents for a hat check, after which they went in. About thirty couples were swinging in a waltz, their forms indistinctly seen through the clouds of dust which followed them in broken swirls through air so thick that the electric lights were dimmed. Somewhere in the obscurity a piano did its noisiest best with a popular waltz tune.

In a few minutes Annie forgot her timidity, forgot the dust and the heat and the odor of stale beer, and was conscious only that the music was piercing, sweet, and that she was swinging in blissful time to it. When the waltz tune came to an end at last the dancers stopped, gasping with the heat, and swaying with the giddiness of the dance.

"Come along," said the lodger, "and have a beer." When Annie shook her head he exclaimed: "Aw, yuh have to. The Sullivans gets the room rent free, but the fellers upstairs has bar privileges, and yuh have to buy a beer off of 'em oncet in a while. They've gotta get something out of it."

I do not know whether Annie yielded then or later. But ultimately she learned to drink beer for the benefit of philanthropists who furnish dance halls rent free, and also to quench a thirst rendered unbearable by heat and dust. They seldom open the windows in these places. Sometimes they even nail the windows down. A well-ventilated room means poor business at the bar.

Annie Donnelly became a dance-hall habitué. Not because she was viciously inclined; not because she was abnormal; but because she was decidedly normal in all her instincts and desires.

Besides, it is easy to get the dance-hall habit. At almost every dance invitations to other dances are distributed with a lavish hand. These invitations, on cheap printed cards, are scattered broadcast over chairs and benches, on the floors, and even on the bar itself. They are locally known as "throw-aways." Here are a few specimens, from which you may form an idea of the quality of dance halls, and the kind of people—almost the only kind of people—who offer pleasure to the starved hearts of girls like Annie Donnelly. These are actual invitations picked up in an East Side dance hall by the head worker of the New York College Settlement: