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Six: Eastern Femininities for Modern Women, 1893–1930
- The University of North Carolina Press
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chapter 6 .................................................................................................................. Eastern Femininities for Modern Women, 1893–1930 I f there was one character that defined Eastern femininity in the United States after 1893, it was the persona of the Oriental dancer. She emerged to great notoriety at the Columbian Exposition and its spin-o√s in the form of actual women from North Africa and the Middle East who came to perform Eastern-style cabaret dancing as an entertaining ethnological show. As Americans took her, the Oriental dancer seemed to embody the carefree, consumerist nature of the ‘‘Golden Nineties.’’ One wag would remember of the era, ‘‘America, definitely out of the pioneer and Indian-fighting stage, relaxed. . . . Wine, women and song became national institutions, flourishing in public. New waltz steps, gayer clothes and freer spending were other manifestations of a turn from the original grave, unbending self-discipline of the Seventies and Eighties.’’∞ The Eastern dancer helped Americans push away contemplation of the decade’s strikes, economic depression, and war with her mischievous reputation, love of scandal, and apparent flattery of male interest in her body. She also emerged on the scene just as crusaders for public morality became notoriously prominent in the United States. A volatile combination of reformminded political activity and increasing consumer access to Eastern performers created a target for activists worried over the eager interest people had in Oriental dance shows, interest that seemed poised to embarrass the nation on a global level because it drove the shows’ male audience members to selfdestructive and raunchy behavior. These concerns were not just figments of prudish people’s imaginations. As it developed in the United States, Easternstyled dancing, also known as the danse du ventre or belly dance, was sexually suggestive because it asked new viewers to reimagine the proverbial Eastern ‘‘harem’’ not as a prison of helpless, exploited women but as the world turned upside down, a hedonistic space where male desire put women in control. Many American men were absorbed by the trope of the Eastern dancer and by 172 ...Eastern Femininities for Modern Women the many native-born and foreign-born women who performed in her guise throughout the country around the turn of the century. As show producers and performers played on the controversy over the propriety of Eastern dancers to market the danse du ventre and its domestic imitations, known as Midway dancing or the ‘‘hootchy-kootchy,’’ they transformed Eastern dance from racy novelty act to humorous cliché by which Americans could laugh at male desire and those who sought to contain that desire. This chapter examines the moral panics over male spectatorship in the 1890s but only as a preface to what was really the greatest e√ect of the Eastern dancers in America, their influence with women. Many women flocked to these shows, and a prominent minority were inspired enough to imitate and develop Eastern dances and costumes into homegrown, suggestive, and profitable ‘‘cootch’’ and strip tease acts. These women were consumers turned performers, who in turn made their way through the entertainment business to burlesque houses, traveling carnivals, and amusement parks. At the same time, thousands of other American women would adopt what they saw in those women’s and foreign women’s performances to articulate their own identities through consumption of products and practices styled ‘‘Oriental.’’ This consumers’ Eastern persona was steeped in a sense of the ancient past, like the Arabian Nights but profoundly modern in its novelty and endorsement of personal cultural liberty for middleclass and working-class Americans. A whole generation of native-born and foreign-born women consumers played Eastern in ways that were highly contentious because they made Americans think about the movement of sexually aware and powerful, self-directed femininity into public. The a√luent Anglo-American women who had played Oriental by making a cozy corner in the parlor in the 1880s saw their daughters and the daughters of recent immigrants embrace feminine products and practices branded Eastern because they put women at the center of attention as creative people. Generations of women born just during or after the moral panics of the 1890s, for whom there had never been an America without Oriental dancers, were far more willing to play Eastern than their mothers had been. These American women would take from men the ultranatural East for themselves, manifested in the form of a sexually powerful woman, and combine it with ultra-artificial elements that celebrated the consumer’s Oriental tale of choice and...