Dance Hall Days
 Randy D. McBee
 (Associate Writer & Reviewer - Dr. Alma Bond)
 2001 New York University Press
  ISBN: 0814756204

Intimacy and Leisure among Working-Class Immigrants in the United States. From 1880-1930 worker's lives were about romance, intense same-sex friendships, dance, loneliness, longing, & marriage just as surely as they were about jobs. Demonstrated is the critical role of class, along with generation, gender, & community, in shaping the particular ways in which Americans encountered mass culture.

Associate Reviewer Dr. Alma Bond writes:

Dance Hall Days is a simple, rather charming study of a bygone era. It is interesting largely because it takes readers into a relatively recent time & society with which most of us are unacquainted, except perhaps for the memories of our parents & grandparents.

Randy McBee examined the workers' relationships with their parents, living conditions, longings, numbingly boring jobs, intense friendships, romances & marriages, & carefully researched the importance of class, generation, gender, & community in the formation of American character.

The book explores the lives of immigrants who struggled to balance the drudgery of wage work with trying to live up to the expectations of their families & to establish their own styles of intimacy & leisure. It covers the era from the late 19th through the early 20th century, when immigration from southern & eastern Europe was at its peak & commercial leisure became popular.

We learn that Commercial Recreation was just coming into existence at the time, & it is fascinating to observe the differences between the heterosocial relationships of adolescents of the early twentieth century & those of today. The young people then experienced other ways of being together than youngsters alive now. They amused themselves not only in dance halls & amusement parks, but at picnics, religious festivals, & men's social clubs, a far cry from the ubiquitous discos & rock concerts of our day.

Because of their extreme poverty, women were forced to work outside of the home, which led as a by-product to greater independence from their parents. For the first time women had options other than marriage & school-teaching. Working brought them some money of their own, so they could afford to attend the Dance Halls. On the other hand, the loneliness of a new culture & the distance it put between them & their families made many young immigrants resort to marriage upon short acquaintance. Parents still pulled strings to try to get their children to marry spouses hand-picked for them, but rebelliousness & self selection of mates gradually became more common.

Dance halls largely attracted men & women in their teens & early twenties, who could try out new romances & experiment with relationships that strongly deviated from their parents' ideas of courtship & marriage. The dance hall society was a study of the clash of cultures, the struggle between generations, & the development of new identities & gender roles.

The dance halls allowed the youths to explore their sexuality, establish their autonomy away from their parents, develop personal & intimate relationships, & play with different cultural styles. Women could question the ideals of womanhood held by middle-class do-gooders, along with the “old country” values their immigrant parents were anxiously grasping. It was a time of growth, both for the country & the young people involved in the change.

An amusing typo appears in paragraph two of page 135. The author obviously meant to speak of certain dances to which the general public was admitted. In this book, however, we are informed that it was the “general pubic” who often attended the “real family parties.”

Dance Hall Days is not particularly well written, & there is a great deal of repetition. Nevertheless, unlike many works of its ilk, it is easy to read, & always interesting. In addition, it is a historical & social record which could be useful to students of American gender relations for many years to come.
(11/25/01)

Dr. Alma Bond
2001©Alma Bond
A RebeccasReads.Com Sr. Associate Reviewer

A RebeccasReads author featured in Authors & Books

Reviewer's Bio:
Dr. Alma Halbert Bond is the author of ten published books, including:
The Deadly Jigsaw Puzzle;
The Tree That Could Fly;
Tales Of Psychology (2004);
I Married Dr. Jekyll And Woke Up Mrs. Hyde (2000);
The Autobiography Of Maria Callas, A Novel (1998);
On Becoming A Grandparent: A Diary of Family Discovery (1994);
Who Killed Virginia Woolf? A Psychobiography (1998);
Profiles of Key West (1996).

She recently recorded her new manuscript, Old Age Is A Terminal Illness, as an audio book.

She is also the author of a just published children's picture book called The Tree That Could Fly.

Dr. Bond teaches Psychology & Writing online at WriterSchool.