Tomko blazes a new trail in dance scholarship by interconnecting U.S. History and dance studies.... the first to argue successfully that middle-class U.S. women promoted a new dance practice to manage industrial changes, crowded urban living, massive immigration, and interchange and repositioning among different classes." —Choice
From salons to dance halls to settlement houses, new dance practices at the turn of the century became a vehicle for expressing cultural issues and negotiating matters of gender. By examining master narratives of modern dance history, this provocative and insightful book demonstrates the cultural agency of Progressive-era dance practices.
Tomko blazes a new trail in dance scholarship by interconnecting U.S. History and dance studies.... the first to argue successfully that middle-class U.S. women promoted a new dance practice to manage industrial changes, crowded urban living, massive immigration, and interchange and repositioning among different classes." —Choice
From salons to dance halls to settlement houses, new dance practices at the turn of the century became a vehicle for expressing cultural issues and negotiating matters of gender. By examining master narratives of modern dance history, this provocative and insightful book demonstrates the cultural agency of Progressive-era dance practices.
Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890-1920
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Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890-1920
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Tomko blazes a new trail in dance scholarship by interconnecting U.S. History and dance studies.... the first to argue successfully that middle-class U.S. women promoted a new dance practice to manage industrial changes, crowded urban living, massive immigration, and interchange and repositioning among different classes." —Choice
From salons to dance halls to settlement houses, new dance practices at the turn of the century became a vehicle for expressing cultural issues and negotiating matters of gender. By examining master narratives of modern dance history, this provocative and insightful book demonstrates the cultural agency of Progressive-era dance practices.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253028174 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/22/2000 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Linda J. Tomko is Associate Professor of Dance at the University of California, Riverside. She is President of the Society of Dance History Scholars and Co-Director of the annual Stanford University Summer Workshop in Baroque Dance. In 1997 she won the Gertrude Lippincott Prize, awarded by SDHS, for her article "Fete Accompli," published in Corporealities.
Read an Excerpt
Dancing Class
Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890â"1920
By Linda J. Tomko
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1999 Linda J. TomkoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02817-4
CHAPTER 1
Bodies and Dances in Progressive-era America
If dance practices have seldom figured in historical studies of the Progressive era, turn-of-the-century America has itself eluded easy generalization or theoretical condensation. The period was one of unremitting change: few things seemed to be stable; many were in flux. At this conjuncture, human bodies offered potent sites for figuring identities and configuring social relations in the United States.
By the 1890s, accelerating changes in the organization of American economic life were altering the nature of work, the identity of workers, and the spheres in which producers and products circulated. Industrialization had proceeded unevenly, at different paces in different businesses and regions throughout the nineteenth century; now it also comprised the implementation of mass production technologies and the growth of large integrated corporations. Beer, beef, and steel were but three items manufactured by these new means. Their production processes were rationalized and broken into component parts, workers repetitively executed one or only a few parts of the fabrication cycle, and speed in execution of less skilled labor replaced previous emphases on special skills and trained workers. Manufacturing processes were carefully plotted by a new corps of managers, who sought through vertical integration to amass the resources needed for production at one end of the process, and to direct the marketing of the final product at the other. This managerial corps itself offered new job opportunities to middle-class workers in the paid labor force. It also spawned a rapidly growing clerical sector which proved to be a significant employer of female labor.
New technologies of production in turn created demands for labor that were met by wide-open immigration flows into the United States. Turn-of-the-century immigrants were different, however, from people who arrived on American shores earlier in the nineteenth century. Those people had hailed predominantly from western and northern Europe, including the Irish from the 1840s on, and the Germans at midcentury. The new immigrants traveling to East Coast ports of entry came from central and eastern Europe; Chinese and Japanese immigrants entered western ports with the advent of mineral strikes and railroad construction. The new immigrants, in short, looked visibly different from their predecessors. Their number and concentration in urban centers meant that, in 1900, immigrants or children of immigrants constituted two-thirds of the population in cities like Chicago and New York.
Demographics changed in another way as more and more Americans took up residence in expanding urban areas. By 1920, more than half of Americans would live in cities; the rural-to-urban transition was well underway in the Progressive era. At the same time, American farmers found themselves competing for the first time in an international agricultural market, as other countries bid to supply the demand for grains and beef that the United States had successfully targeted. Prices and production of farm crops fluctuated correspondingly and in relation to variables operating at a greater distance from the American scene.
In all, the pace of industrialization, immigration, urbanization, and the shifting contours of rural production meant that children born in 1890 would experience work and social realities indelibly different from those known to their parents. As social and economic pressures changed the pattern of everyday life, native-born and immigrant Americans alike faced the challenge of constituting their identities. Many traditional patterns had to be rethought or adjusted; new circumstances had to be comprehended as well. The values and hierarchies that had guided past activities no longer offered people sole, or infallible, frameworks for operating in the present.
How should these changing circumstances be met? Who could or would direct the responses to them? These questions demanded answers because contemporary political and electoral responses seemed to constitute part of the problem. Indeed, sentiment was strong in several quarters that, little more than a century after the republic's founding, governmental response to the popular will had become distorted. Through contributions to political campaigns, corporations and business interests wielded considerable influence on members of the Senate and the state legislatures which elected them. Cities teeming with newcomers positioned political "bosses" to mediate the needs of immigrants in exchange for their support of "machine" politics; meanwhile urban problems of sanitation, disease control, and food quality received inadequate attention. Thus Progressive-era politics were marked by vigorous and successful campaigns to inaugurate direct election of senators, and initiative, referendum, and recall mechanisms. City manager structures and municipal ownership of utilities were introduced in a number of areas as well, and communities increasingly had recourse to nonelective "commissions" of experts to address pressing public problems. Political corrections and adjustment through bureaucratic management techniques had limits, to be sure. In the South, for example, disfranchisement of black male voters proceeded apace in the aftermath of Reconstruction. Quotidian segregation and a surge of lynchings was consolidating the subordinate position of blacks in all their contacts with whites. And although women in some states enjoyed restricted rights to vote in school or municipal elections, suffrage was denied to women as a group until 1919.
Not just the government's responsiveness to citizens, but also the extent and character of its intervention in the economic realm were debated with new heat beginning in the 1890s. The Populist movement, for example, sought to involve the government more deeply in tempering unstable circumstances that beset farmers and agricultural production. Populists ran a third-party campaign in the 1892 national election and supported the Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Among its demands, the Populist movement urged government sponsorship of "free silver," an inflationary measure that favored debtor farmers. It also called for government ownership and operation of railroads (since access to and pricing of transportation critically affected movement of agricultural products to market), and formation of "subtreasuries," or means for storing grains and offsetting annual product price fluctuations. The Populists failed to achieve these and other demands, which constituted unprecedented bids for government involvement in the economy at a time of probusiness, hands-off Republican party domination of federal politics. Only with time would features of the Populist platform be incorporated by mainstream political parties. Government regulatory intervention did increase in other areas, however, such as certification of food quality (Pure Food and Drug Act) and conservation of public lands. By the end of the period, too, the nature of Americans' participation in the political process had changed. Party loyalties weakened, and voting began a long-term decline, even though women achieved the vote in 1919. And pressure groups assumed increasing importance as channels for affecting government policies.
For people living between 1890 and 1920, the period this study takes to be the Progressive era, the challenge was not simply to correct governmental abuses nor to reinvigorate old mechanisms. To deal with changed and changing circumstances of economic and social relations, people had to reassess the bounds and possibilities of those networks, and their own place within them. Where once local communities had afforded people necessary and adequate venues for their social, political, and work lives, shifts toward national and international organization in business and agriculture meant that older hierarchies of power and privilege did not obtain, previous frameworks of meaning did not suffice. People had to readjust their sense of self, community, and nation; they had to comprehend each other as parts of a changed whole. Indeed, historians have theorized the concepts of status anxiety and a search for order to explain the behavior of various groups of people in the Progressive era. The very terms in which these theories are framed confirm our awareness that identity formation was at stake in a fundamental way at the turn of the century.
Studies of "commodity capitalism" and a burgeoning Progressive-era "culture of consumption" confirm that the push and pull of identity formation operated in many registers. William Leach has argued, for example, that department stores promoted female shoppers' imaginative reconstitution of themselves. These emporia textured the shopping experience with sensuous new applications of light, color, and glass technologies. Introducing novel forms of service, stores endeavored to shape consumption as a comfortable and leisurely rather than a wearying activity. Staging brightly dressed show windows on the exterior, and festive atmospheres on the interior, department stores offered their predominantly female shoppers a potent sense of possibility. That is, department store contexts positioned women to imagine themselves in new ways, by virtue of their contact with arrays of goods not previously accessible or perhaps even envisioned. Driven by advertising, this culture of consumption countered older ways of being that operated in a noncredit world, ways that stressed frugality, scarcity, and the practical value of objects and purchases.
As with studies of consumption, scrutiny of women's organizational activities has demonstrated that gender constituted a primary field or locus for identity contest and formation in the Progressive era. A "separate spheres" ideology crested in the United States as the nineteenth century drew to a close. This ideology assigned men and women different gender identities on the basis of physiological differences between the sexes, allocating the private world of domesticity and piety to women, the public world of work and politics to men. To be sure, this ideology conflicted with the lived experiences of working class people, immigrants, and people of color. Within these groups, women and adolescents participated along with men in the paid labor force to help sustain family survival. At the same time, organized voluntary activity by middle- and upper-class women pressed at the limits of the gendered division of social space articulated by separate spheres norms. They justified their public sphere incursions with claims of protecting the home, of guarding vulnerable women, children, and families from behaviors and practices that threatened them. These women took collective action to urge moral reform, secure temperance, and provide charity to poor and unemployed people. They founded a number of settlement houses, and staffed others, to interact with new immigrants in their dense and congested neighborhoods and to lobby for municipal remediation of poor conditions.
Women also organized to secure suffrage. As historians have recently recognized, suffrage marches and outdoor meetings made explicit the link between the political and the expressive in the Progressive-era politics of gender. These strategies put women's gendered bodies on the line as they claimed the right to electoral participation. Closely related to this, women's labor uprisings also plied the body to demand changed conditions in industrial work. In 1909, for instance, female makers of ladies shirtwaists walked picket lines on New York's Lower East Side in a strike against garment factories for better wages, shorter hours, improved shop-floor conditions, and union representation. Women workers suffered verbal abuse by police and hired hecklers; they were arrested and jailed as well. Susan Glenn argues persuasively that these demonstrators claimed a dignity and identity as women workers that differed from conceptions their bosses entertained. What is equally salient is that women pressed these claims through bodily perseverance, during bitterly cold winter months, and marshaled physical resources to meet and march, to argue a distinctive identity.
Studies of gender have prepared us, I maintain, to now consider the importance of the body as a ground for the reworking(s) of identity that proved so central to the Progressive era. The gender roles constructed by separate spheres ideology were rooted in the physical differences between men's and women's bodies. In the New York City garment industry, allocation of job categories to men and women were frequently linked to physical attributes presumed unique to one gender, such as strength for men and dexterity for women. Support for women's protective labor legislation also drew on conceptions of women's special nature and physical needs. Louis Brandeis's brief for the 1908 Muller v. Oregon case justified "hours" legislation by arguing that long working hours posed potential harm to women's childbearing capabilities. In both these instances, the body or its biological determinants supplied a basis for conceiving workplace identities, that is, for formulating gendered constructions of labor and its limits in a rapidly industrializing society. Conversely, techniques of subdivided labor, deskilling, and, subsequently, promotion of "efficiency" inscribed workers' bodies, male and female, with shifting notions about class relations and the limits of worker agency and autonomy. Gender fused with race in still another body discipline, one imposed with fresh vigor in the early-twentieth-century South. There, Jim Crow politics wrote on black male bodies with the physical instrument of lynching. While disfranchisement secured voting as a white male domain, lynching gave palpable expression to modes of subordination, difference, and sexual stereotyping — race identity — that whites were constructing for black males.
The body was clearly linked to issues of gender and sexuality for Progressive-era people. Consideration of the body as a site for identity formation can help us see as connected such disparate factors and fields as labor protests and women's suffrage strategies, theatricalized consumer culture and innovative dance practices, evolution theory and a burgeoning physical culture movement. Further, focus on the body can help us situate the flourishing of dance interest and dance practices in the first decades of the century. At that time, people, and women in particular, forged ways of comprehending their changing experiences through a variety of danced embodiments.
Body Issues/Building Bodies
What were the bodies like that new movement practices put so thoroughly into motion? They were constructed in important ways through a discourse of nature, or evolutionary development, that achieved prominence at the end of the nineteenth century. When Darwinian theory reached the United States, it fell on ground that had been prepared by the earlier circulation of Herbert Spencer's writings. Darwin's work on evolution theorized the human body as a wholly natural entity, its development governed completely by biological processes. Supporters and opponents of evolution theory argued furiously, seeking to sustain or qualify this view and the implications for political and social policy that flowed from it. Arguments on all sides, however, had to deal in some way with an emphasis on the primacy of the natural world over the cultural or social. It was the materiality of human bodies that commanded increased scrutiny and recognition during the Progressive era.
LABORING BODIES
As contemporary commentators were quick to note, material bodies were imprinted by the sweated character of industrial labor and the cramped conditions of urban living. Industry, in its steady pursuit of rationalization, reshaped the physical circumstances of work to narrow and intensify the repertoire of body skills a laborer performed. Upton Sinclair's fictional The Jungle vividly renders the subdivision and speedup of labor that characterized mass production industries in 1905. Newly hired by a packing house, the immigrant Lithuanian Jurgis observes men at work in the killing beds:
The manner in which they did this was something to be seen and never forgotten. They worked with furious intensity, literally upon the run — at a pace with which there is nothing to be compared except a football game. It was all highly specialized labor, each man having his task to do; generally this would consist of only two or three specific cuts, and he would pass down the line of fifteen or twenty carcasses, making these cuts upon each.
After the carcasses bled, they moved down the line
and there came the "headsman," whose task was to sever the head, with two or three swift strokes. Then came the "floorsman," to make the first cut in the skin; and then another to finish ripping the skin down the center; and then half a dozen more in swift succession, to finish skinning.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dancing Class by Linda J. Tomko. Copyright © 1999 Linda J. Tomko. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, vii,Introduction, 9,
One Bodies and Dances in Progressive-era America, 1,
Two Constituting Culture, Authorizing Dance, 36,
Three The Settlement House and the Playhouse: Cultivating Dance on New York's Lower East Side, 79,
Four From Henry Street to Grand Street: Transfer and Transition to the Neighborhood Playhouse, 104,
Five Working Women's Dancing, and Dance as Women's Work: Hull-House, Chicago Commons, and Boston's South End House, 137,
Six Folk Dance, Park Fetes, and Period Political Values, 180,
Conclusion, 212,
NOTES, 221,
COLLECTIONS CONSULTED, 271,
INDEX, 273,