Cheap Amusements

By Kathy Peiss

What did young, independent women do for fun and how did they pay their way into New York City's turn-of-the-century pleasure places? Cheap Amusements is a fascinating discussion of young working women whose meager wages often fell short of bare subsistence and rarely allowed for entertainment expenses.

Kathy Peiss follows working women into saloons, dance halls, Coney Island amusement parks, social clubs, and nickelodeons to explore the culture of these young women between 1880 and 1920 as expressed in leisure activities. By examining the rituals and styles they adopted and placing that culture in the larger context of urban working-class life, she offers us a complex picture of the dynamics shaping a working woman's experience and consciousness at the turn-of-the-century. Not only does her analysis lead us to new insights into working-class culture, changing social relations between single men and women, and urban courtship, but it also gives us a fuller understanding of the cultural transformations that gave rise to the commercialization of leisure.

The early twentieth century witnessed the emergence of "heterosocial companionship" as a dominant ideology of gender, affirming mixed-sex patterns of social interaction, in contrast to the nineteenth century's segregated spheres. Cheap Amusements argues that a crucial part of the "reorientation of American culture" originated from below, specifically in the subculture of working women to be found in urban dance halls and amusement resorts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Release date: Jan 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781439905531

Book preview

Reviews for Cheap Amusements

[christina.h · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was alright. On the one hand, 'Cheap Amusements' does a good job of explaining the roles and expectations of various women living in Industrial America--young, old, native, immigrant, and women of varying class.On the other hand, I find it bothersome that Peiss does not specify various terms before launching into the book. While it's no trouble for me to look up terms like 'vice investigator' or The Committee of Fourteen, Peiss makes no effort to explain who qualifies as a vice investigator, or what their specific purpose is. She mentions the Committee of Fourteen several times in the book, but does not explain the purpose of the committee's existence until more than half way through the book.Perhaps it's just my personal preference, but I feel like it's arrogant to assume one's reader to already know the particularities of a time or subject, and that if an author writes this sort of book with the intent to educate, then they should do it to the fullest extent. The alternative is that Peiss just forgot. In which case it's sloppy writing.Despite the aforementioned, I did come away with knowledge about the era and its treatment of immigrants and women, so for that I am grateful.