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12. “NO UNDUE FAMILIARITY” Gender, Vice, and the Campaign to Regulate Dance Halls, 1911–1921
- University of Nebraska Press
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289 12. “NO UNDUE FAMILIARITY” Gender, Vice, and the Campaign to Regulate Dance Halls, 1911–1921 mark hopkins As California clubwomen mobilized statewide to push the Red Light Abatement Act through the legislature, defend it in a statewide referendum, and close down the Barbary Coast brothels (chapter 10), some San Francisco women were joining with a wide variety of other groups in opposition to other Barbary Coast establishments: commercial dance halls. However , such businesses varied significantly in character, and the reformers concluded that the best solution was to close some but reshape others through regulation. Working with the Board of Police Commissioners, reformers succeeded in closing some halls and regulating the rest, and clubwomen themselves took on major responsibilities for supervising the surviving commercial dance halls. In a 1924 report, Maria Lambin, the chief supervisor of the Public Dance Hall Committee of the San Francisco Center, remarked, “San Francisco has long recognized that it had a dance hall problem.” She traced the origins of the perceived problem to the dance halls and saloons of the city’s Barbary Coast district, which, since its inception during the Gold Rush, had been a center for commercialized vice and crime.1 Its dance halls enjoyed a worldwide reputation for sensual dancing, prostitution, and liquor and were also known as haunts for outlaws. Herbert Asbury’s Barbary Coast (1933)—a popular history closely based on primary sources—recounts the evolution of the city’s commercial dance halls. Before 1906, says Asbury, virtually every resort that featured dancing or entertainment also employed prostitutes. Called “pretty waiter girls,” these women solicited liquor sales on commission, stripped, or otherwise plied their trade; dancing with customers was incidental. As the Barbary Coast rebuilt following the earthquake and fire of 1906, a nationwide dance craze produced a proliferation of commercial dance halls, and Barbary Coast dance hall owners began to cater more to dancers and tourists.2 By 1910 or so, San Francisco dance halls could be divided into two basic mark hopkins 290 types. Non-commercial dance halls were establishments where social, ethnic, fraternal, and occupational organizations hosted dances for their members, families, and friends. Typically, such dances were not for profit, though they may have raised funds for the sponsoring organization. San Francisco’s Recreation League, for example, sponsored nonprofit dances for the general public as a means of promoting a sense of community, and as a wholesome form of recreation.3 Commercial or public dance halls, on the other hand, aimed to earn a profit by charging an entrance fee; they catered to a broad, heterogeneous, and generally youthful clientele drawn from the public at large, and typically sold alcohol. A variation of the public hall was the “closed” hall (later known as “taxi-dance” halls), a business that was closed to women as patrons. Instead, proprietors employed young women “instructors” to dance with the male customers.4 Although these commercial halls varied in character, many San Franciscans associated all commercial establishments with viciousness and sought to abolish them entirely.5 The San Francisco Center was the most prominent of the women’s organizations that mobilized against the commercial dance halls. A chapter of the California Civic League (discussed in chapter 10), the Center was founded to push for woman suffrage. After 1911 the organization shifted its focus to education and reform, and supported many of the campaigns California women undertook in the 1913 legislative session. Local women attended the Center’s open forum, where they heard intellectuals and statesmen discuss the nation’s civic and social life. The group’s political work centered on social welfare work, especially services to women and children. Leaders worked to secure the appointment of women to key governmental positions at the state and local level, and lobbied the state legislature for various reforms, including sanitary milk laws, the Mother’s Pension Bill, and the Red Light Abatement Act.6 When clubwomen and clergymen set their sights on the Barbary Coast, the Center was quick to enter the fray. The campaign against the commercial dance halls coincided with efforts to close the brothels, and included many of the same groups and individuals. Clubwomen were often in the lead, but typically as part of a broad coalition of neighborhood improvement associations, men’s civic organizations, and religious groups. At times, women’s organizations [3.209.81.51] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:45 GMT) “no undue familiarity” 291 were recruited by other organizations; at other times, it was the women...