Clean Up The Dance Halls Analysis

In the article “Clean Up the Dance Halls” Elisabeth Perry examines the age of the Progressive Era and the efforts by the reformers to get rid of unregulated dance halls. Perry adds how dance halls that provided “stylish drinks” and guaranteed popularity influenced many innocent girls to leave their households to embrace a life of alcohol, unmoral dancing, and eventually sexually relations with strangers. Perry also adds how the girls could not resist a man's love despite it meaning that they would loose their “girlhood.” One of the prominent reformers during this time was Belle Israels who sought to protect girls from being “played with” and sought to put an end to dance halls. As a result, the Progressive Era stirred together different social issues which usually led to controversy and tension as seen in the dance hall reform. Elisabeth Perry placed her thesis statement in her introduction and in her conclusion. She explained how dance halls have destroyed the traditional family and how the Progressive Era led to the first efforts to “understand, theorize, and control adolescence.” Perry strategically strengthened her thesis by telling the audience of a real life story of an innocent immigrant girl named Frieda who fell victim to dance halls and had to face the consequences.
Perry included how men used these girls to meet their sexual desires and treated this whole situation as if it were a sport. She then described how reformers such as Belle Israels criticized dance halls and did everything in her power to clean these dance halls so that girls won't be viewed as prey. Israels herself established commercial dance halls that controlled dancing and kept a watchful eye for those committing suspicious behavior. Perry also wanted to control the types of dances that occurred in dance halls. She called for dances such as “barn dancing”and German dancing in an effort to allow people to have a good time in a respectful manner. This reveals that Israels wanted to change the way society viewed and treated women and
Zaghmouri 2 yearned for women to be respected rather than seen as a source of sexual pleasure. The battle between reformers and dance hall lasted for several years and concluded without any clear winner. However, many Americans used substitution as a technique to avoid dance halls. We see this when Perry states,"They therefore pressed communities to adopt substitution programs, and to provide young women, especially, with a wider range of recreational choices than they had before." This contributes to Perry's thesis statement because it shows the gradual revolution of reform movements during the Progressive Era and society's method for coping with its disparities. The article “Clean Up the Dance Halls” Elisabeth Perry helps my understanding of the historical period because it shows that during this time, America was going through an age of reform and tension.
However, I now understand that it was this period that helped shape our modern world. This also reveals that back then, society was more engaged in their communities and wanted everything to be their way where as present times, society is more loose and care free. This article was unique because not only did it give me a clearer understanding of that time period, but others as well. It shows that it is in human nature to have disparities and that it has been occurring since the beginning of
time. This article, unlike most, was special because of its ability to allow its readers to see this topic from a much broader scope. Perry allowed he audience to relate this article to our modern day struggles. She made the connection between the similarities of human troubles from a hundred years ago to our modern day society. Both the introduction and the her conclusion allows readers to realize that some of the difficulties of the dance hall reforms are still with us today. Another strength of this article was that Perry embedded real world situations (such as the case of Frieda and Joseph Guyon) to help further convey her argument. However, one glaring weakness of this article is that the author is potentially bias. Elisabeth Perry is clearly against dance halls and basically just stated all the negatives about the topic without giving the other groups viewpoint. I highly recommend this article because it betters your knowledge of American history during the Progressive Era and effectively makes connections between history and our modern day society that I have never made before.