ABSTRACT
The venue is packed. Loud, percussive music fills the room with powerful, unrelenting rhythms. Sweating, undulating bodies crowd the dance floor, colliding frequently as young people from varied social backgrounds come together in a dizzying melange of sound and motion. This was the scene in the United States roughly one hundred and forty years ago, and the dance at the center of this vital, matter-of-life-and-death controversy was the waltz, which captivated America's youth from the 1860s through the turn of the century. While the body at issue in the industrial workplace was predominantly male, industrialization also required women to assume new and demanding roles. In contrast to the pre-industrial homestead, where both men and women tended to both economic and domestic necessities, industrialization imposed a separation of labor along gender lines, a process chronicled by social historians and feminist theorists.
