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Allison Lowe
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The saloon girls were considered by reputable ladies to slack off, and most of these women were never caught dead associated with a real prostitute. To saloon owners, the majority of saloon girls were profitable commodities, and gentlemen were dissuaded from paying too much attention to any single girl, since saloon owners lost more women through marriage than through any other means. One reason was to help keep a dancehall girls safety, but another was the fact saloon owners did not want to lose them in possible marriage. The dance hall girls life was, for the most part, very respected in Saloon circles, as owners demanded customers to respect them.
Dancehall girls made enough money that it was extremely uncommon for them to dual-dip into prostitutes, and indeed, many ex-soil Doves found they were better off being a dance hall girl. Successful dancers who were cab drivers generally had several customers that came to the dance hall just to dance with them, and they did so over a period of time. Taxi dancers were known as cab dancers, as their payment was proportional to the time spent dancing with customers, much like the cabdriver with a passenger.
The taxi-dancers dance hall, a recreational place where men could rent women to dance with them for a fee, first appeared in San Francisco a little more than a century ago. Patrons at the taxi-dance hall would usually buy tickets for dancing at ten cents a pop, giving birth to the phrase Dime-a-Dance Girl. Taxi-dances drew an eclectic group of recreational dancers who had not previously had the opportunity or opportunity to dance with women at ballrooms.
Ballroom dancing had previously been a pastime reserved for elites, but with this new dance hall style, working-class men began twirling in the rooms, too. Periodically, there was even some sexually explicitclosed-door dancing in some shady parlors . In some, charity girls engaged in sex work were also commonplace, acting as dancers.
Some agencies tended to attract the coarser, lower-class customerele, and also drew the ire of reformers, and the image of the cab dancing profession suffered in general. The pastime of taxi dancing was not without its drawbacks; aside from its obvious parallels to prostitution, it was sometimes racist, with many dance halls turning away black patrons. These clashes of values between the taxi-dance youths and their parents often led to young women living what was called a double life, in which they denied working in the taxi-dance hall.
In their descriptions of the attitudes of young women working at dance halls, they noted, with perhaps greater integrity than they intended, that dance, music, and homosexuality, as well as the unguarded freedom from being controlled by bosses, was the preferred form of work. The women who were upstanding considered women employed by these saloon keepers to be defiant women, and called them painted ladies, dishonorable, ladies-of-the-night, etc. What men found was cities with no women, except a few ladies hired to entertain men in the dance halls and saloons.
The job of the saloon girl or dancehall maid was to light up the nights of many of the lonesome men in the Western towns. Starved of female companionship, saloon girls sang for men, danced with them, talked with them--encouraging them to stay at the bar, buy drinks, and patronize games. The men could purchase tickets to dance with one of the girls and buy a drink from her, but they were limited to the amount of time they had.
Saloon girls at nicer establishments in larger cities would dress up in halter tops that were either open-shouldered and either sleeveless or with shorter, puffed sleeves. Girls who were beautiful, able to dance well and were good at maintaining a conversation made ideal saloon girls. Victorian saloon girls, or dancing girls, might be dressed just as finely as Victorian upper-class ladies, but they were more likely to wear colourful, tightly fitted, shorter-hemmed evening dresses.
Many dance hall girls were strict line dancers, while others danced also with working cowboys, who came for the fun. There were all kinds of men, different than I would meet had I stayed at home with my folks at Rogers Park... Once the girls started out in the Dance Hall and made good, it was easy to go through months of never really getting out of the Dance Halls influence. A hot girl would make on average 50 dancing per night, sometimes making more per night than a working guy might in a month.
It is not difficult to see why those two horrors were so determined to keep their jobs, because dancing-hall girls collect plenty of booty from swaying on the floor with beardy, sweaty, foul-mouthed men. The second kind of bad girls were saloon girls and dance-hall women, who, contrary to what was widely believed, were generally not sex workers--this was usually the case only with the most run-down class of saloons. The typology included the so-called saloon girls, who were taken to mean any women who mixed, danced, or sold affections to men, according to Delancy Place.