Cheap Amusements: Working Woman and Leisure in Turn-Of-The-Century New York

Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Woman and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century

New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. Pp 188

Cheap Amusements: Working Woman and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century

New York, written by Kathy Peiss, studies the lifestyles of working class women in the early 1900's. The book focuses mainly on the area of New York City. Because there were so many immigrants coming to America at that time, Peiss primarily focused on only the middle income immigrant women and their families. Throughout the book, Peiss shows us that commercialization led to a shift in not only the traditional roles of gender, but it also changed the way entire cultures treated their women.

This book was quite clearly divided into three parts. The first part gave a background as to the different leisure activities of men, women and their families at that time. Clearly men enjoyed more freedom to pursue various forms of entertainment. The women's forms of entertainment however, were more limited. Peiss states that, "given the task-oriented nature of their work, married women's leisure was intermittent, snatched between household chores." (23) She goes on to say, "the grinding rhythms of household labor and limited access to financial resources closely circumscribed many women's social participation." (24) The author uses these first three chapters to clearly explain how things used to be in order to set the stage for how things changed.

The second part of the book can be sectioned off to include the next three chapters. Each chapter covers a different form of entertainment that became popular with middle class women. With commercialization, women began to gain more independence and have more say in the leisure activities they wanted to partake in. The three areas covered by Peiss were dance halls, Coney Island and the theatre. Dancing was by far the most popular and scandalous pastime of young, unmarried, working women. Huge dance halls sprang up all over New York to fulfill the people's desire to have a place to let loose. The dance halls also brought in a new era of sensuality and expressiveness that had previously been frowned upon. Peiss says, "In the commercial dance halls, single working class women found a social space that reinforced their emergent cultural style and offered an opportunity to experiment with unconventional sexual and social roles. In a few hours of dancing and camaraderie, they could seemingly escape the social relationships and expectations tying them to their household responsibilities, jobs, and ethnic communities." (114) Another popular entertainment venue became Coney Island. Peiss states, "At Coney Island, the commercialization of leisure entailed a complex cultural process. Steeplechase,