A Respectable Woman: The Public Roles of African American Women in 19th-Century New York

4 “Idle Pleasures andFrivolous Amusements”

“Idle Pleasures and Frivolous Amusements” African American Women and Leisure Time As black women flooded into the wage-earning sector in New York City, they sought ways to enjoy their few free hours. Economic and cultural changes opened the door to new activities for them after emancipation. Throughout the nineteenth century, black women carved out their own leisure activities and spaces within the city despite the challenges of poor wages, long working hours, racial discrimination and segregation, and efforts on the part of black male leaders to limit the activities of black women to “respectable” ones. Since women constituted a majority of the city’s black population and most black women earned wages, their choices regarding leisure had a strong economic and cultural impact. Leisure activities gave them an opportunity to claim their independence and create their own cultural forms. Many leisure activities became available to working-class New Yorkers during the nineteenth century. As immigrants and migrants flooded into the city searching for work, the population of working-class neighborhoods exploded. At the same time, an entire leisure industry began to emerge. Taverns sprang up to provide alcohol for those with the money to spend on it. In working-class neighborhoods like Five Points, men gathered to place bets on rat fights or cockfighting events.1 Other 4 93 forms of commercialized entertainment became available as well. In 1841, P. T. Barnum took over the nonoperational Scudder’s Museum on Broadway and turned it into the American Museum. The museum provided a variety of entertainments including a pageant of “living curiosities ” and scale models of cities from around the world.2 Theaters that put on shows ranging from Shakespeare to melodramas also became particularly popular among workers. And in the 1820s, minstrel shows in which white performers donned blackface emerged as a popular form of theater entertainment for whites in New York City.3 Black New Yorkers were excluded from participating in many new forms of leisure. In the 1830s, they were barred from attending the New York Zoological Institute unless they were servants “in attendance upon children and families.” Black New Yorkers were also unwelcome in the popular P. T. Barnum’s American Museum. Vauxhall Gardens banned blacks from entering, and the Park Theater sat them in a special blacksonly section of the theater.4 Even churches practiced discrimination: the Christian Convention of Ministers that met in New York City in 1868 refused to admit black ministers.5 Blacks were also banned from many restaurants. Reverend William Butler of the Zion Church and his wife were barred from entering an ice cream parlor in 1869; the owner stated that he did not serve blacks. Butler was also turned away from a restaurant located on Sixth Avenue and informed that he could only dine there when no white patrons were present.6 Although black New Yorkers were excluded from many of the pastimes that New York City had to offer, they found ways to entertain themselves by creating their own leisure activities and establishments. In addition to dancing, drinking, and gambling, black New Yorkers enjoyed attending plays and eating in restaurants. The black middle class—a tiny minority of men and women—denounced many of these activities for endangering people’s health, corrupting their morals, or wasting time and money. Some of the criticism drew on a religious discourse of caring for the soul more than for the transient pleasures of this world. One commentator, speaking of people tempted by “costly apparel, costly equipage, and indulgence in expensive entertainment,” stated, “The desire of such is not so much to hoard up money, as to glitter with tinsel show, and mingle in the frivolous and 94 | “Idle Pleasures and Frivolous Amusements” corrupting amusements of fashionable life.—They forgot [sic] Him who has said, ‘Let not your adorning be with gold, or pearls, or costly array .’”7 Another urged blacks to dispense “with those idle pleasures and frivolous amusements which benefit neither mind nor body, but tend to enervate and destroy both,” and instead to “turn our attention to the cultivation of that part of our being which shall survive unhurt.”8 The Reverend Samuel Cornish urged blacks who had their Sundays free to keep the Sabbath, treating the day “as a day of rest from all the ordinary employments of the week, and from all kinds of recreation, or amusements; such as visiting from house to...