Saturday evening, from eight until eleven, young men and women come in
and dance to excellent music, under the instruction, if they need it,
of a skilled dancing-master. A small fee is charged, partly to defray
expenses, and partly to attract a class of people who disdain
philanthropy and settlements. The experiment is new, but it is
undoubtedly successful. As many as two hundred couples have been
admitted in an evening. In half a dozen cities women's clubs and women's
committees are at work on this matter of establishing amusement and
recreation centers for young people. In New York a Committee on
Amusement and Vacation Resources of Working Girls has for its president
a social worker of many years, Mrs. Charles M. Israels. Associated with
the committee are many other well-known social economists,--women of
wealth and influence who have given years to the service of working
girls. The committee began its work by a scientific investigation into
the dance halls of New York, the summer parks and picnic grounds in the
outlying districts, and of the summer excursion boats which ply up and
down the Hudson River and Long Island Sound. The revelations made by
this investigation, carried on under the supervision of Miss Julia
Schoenfeld, were terrible enough. They were made to appear still more
terrible when it was known that men of the highest social and commercial
standing were profiting hugely from the most vicious forms of
amusement. A state senator is one of the largest stockholders in Coney
Island resorts of bad character. An ex-governor of the State controls a
popular excursion boat, on which staterooms are rented by the hour, for
immoral purposes no one can possibly doubt. The women of the committee
submitted the findings of their investigators to the managers of these
amusement places and to the directors of the steamboat lines, and in
many instances reforms have been promised. The point is that a committee
of women had to finance an investigation to show these business men the
conditions which were adding to their wealth, and into which they had