Cheap Amusements:Working Women & Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York by Kathy Peiss

Author:Kathy Peiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-07-30T16:23:00+00:00

Such customary practices as picking up a date and breaking dancers could be seen in the dancing pavilions of West Brighton. "Any well seeming youngster may invite any girl to dance" at Coney island, observed one journalist, "an arrangement long since sanctioned by that maelstrom of proletarian jollity, the 'social,' where tickets .. . connote partners and more partners, till everybody knows everybody else." Lillian Betts concurred, noting that at dancing pavilions "the buying of a drink gives the right of the floor to any man."41

West Brighton's Bowery, the dancing pavilions, and the boardwalk were social spaces women used for flirtations and adventure, but like their urban counterparts, they held sexual risks. The typical shopgirl at Coney, one journalist asserted, was "keen and knowing, ever on the defensive, she discourages such advances as perplex her. . . . Especially she distrusts cavaliers not of her own station." At other amusement parks, too, unescorted women could expect verbal harassment and advances. At Fort George, claimed Israels, "no girl or group of girls can walk along the street there or through the park without being repeatedly accosted by men."42 Young women sought Coney's diversions with a friend of the same sex, the protective arrangement that better allowed them to strike up innocuous acquaintances with young men.

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