Resisting Reform
Now that it's over, I have so many thoughts about what just happened and what's next. For me, writing is all about momentum. Although, that's probably true about anything I do; and that's probably true for lots of people. If I say I am going to try and keep the writing momentum going, will that make it more likely or just make me a serial liar? In any event, my dissertation is done. For starters, here's how my introduction begins:
"Resisting Reform: San Francisco Vice in the Progressive Era"
In late September 1913, a “dance hall girl” wrote an angry letter to the clubwomen of San Francisco denouncing their attempts to “help” her. After the city’s police commissioners passed an ordinance prohibiting women from serving alcohol in dance halls in a small section of town, the San Francisco Center of the California Civic League attempted to find the women new jobs. However, the “work suggested by the majority of the clubwomen,” this anonymous author complained, was not any better than that offered a recent immigrant, “one who is of nondescript education and experience.” “Possibly you have failed to realize,” she continued in a chastising tone, “the majority of these girls are young, fair looking, well educated, well-groomed and have been in the habit of making more money than the average business man’s income.” Of the hundreds of women affected by the dance hall ordinance, few accepted the help offered to become billing clerks, domestic workers, or “kitchen mechanics.” One of the clubwomen lamented that their effort may turn out to be little more than “pearls cast before swine.” And, indeed, “no amount of persuasion, or even argument” could induce most of the women to so easily give up their lucrative employment. They vowed to continue their former line of work “as long as the dance halls on the Coast kept open” and indeed, they eventually became part of an entirely new form of commercial leisure, the “taxi-dance hall,” specifically invented to skirt the police order.[1]
Histories of the Progressive Era typically emphasize the reforming class and the tremendous change they instituted at all levels of society. Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Roosevelt, settlement homes, pure food and milk, the referendum and recall, are just a few of the people and policies that define this generation. Yet there was a darker side just below the surface of progressive reforms that demonstrated “strong antidemocratic tendencies” and prioritized the needs of a reforming, bureaucratic class over those they supposedly tried to help.[2] The objects of reform efforts–the “undeserving poor,” women, immigrants, non-whites–tended to be vulnerable, both politically and economically. Yet many of them not only endured, but actively rejected the era’s zeitgeist. “Resisting Reform” uncovers some of the women and men and moments that provides a broader understanding on the Progressive Era.
[1]Unidentified author to San Francisco Center, September 24, 1913, League of Women Voters Records, 1911-1979, Public Dance Halls, California Historical Society, North Baker Research Library [hereafter cited as LWV and CHS, respectively]. During the time of my visits, archivists at the California Historical Society were in the middle of reorganizing and reclassifying the records of the League of Women Voters. Some of the folder titles or reference numbers they used were not finalized. I have provided as much citation information as possible that may include outdated manuscript reference numbers or folder names that have since been changed.
[2]William Issel, “Class and Ethnic Conflict in San Francisco Political History: The Reform Charter of 1898,” Labor History18, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 341.