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Athena Meets Venus: Visions of Women in Social Dance in the Teens and Early 1920s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Julie Malnig
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In a 1915 editorial of The Ladies Home Journal, social commentator Dorothy Mills pondered the issue of the “woman question,” and in a few vivid sentences summed up much of the public's reaction to women's readjusted place in society during the Progressive era. What was one to make of the fact that women were declaring the right to vote, divorcing their husbands at a greater pace than ever and demanding fulfilling work outside of marriage? Said Mills:

The “New Girl” that some of us proclaim, and many of us don't believe in at all and more of us dread, is not a fantastic creature, a third sex, a superwoman. She is the eternal woman, with her love for man and child her eternal necessity, plus perhaps only one thing: a certain awkward realization of herself as more of a personality, a unit. Do you see how that can be the starting point of an infinite variety of developments, of activities, of theories? (Mills 1915, 3)

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , Fall 1999 , pp. 34 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1999

References

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