Dancing Girls, Fighting Men, and Sexual Anxiety in Jazz-Age San Francisco

On Thanksgiving morning, 1920, a group of San Francisco prizefighters picked up two “dance hall girls”—young women paid to dance with men in commercial dance halls—drove them to a nearby shack, drugged, beat, and raped them. If the nature of the crimes committed against the dance hall girls was not heinous enough, public outrage exploded when two San Francisco police detectives were killed in a shootout as they attempted to interrogate members of what the press called, the “Prizefight Gangsters.” Four days later, a posse of masked citizens stormed the jail and seized the accused, ran them to a nearby cemetery, and hung them from a massive oak tree. The gang rapes and lynchings exposed raw anxieties in San Francisco and provided a pulpit from which citizens could harangue whatever ill they considered their city's most menacing social evil. Taking the brunt of the blame were dancing and prizefighting, two physical activities described as like sources of moral decay. In this paper I consider the ways the dancing female body became a site of moral, generational, and class conflict in 1920s San Francisco. I begin by exploring the rhetoric of moral reformers who linked the female dancer with the specter of the brutish prizefighter as a way to delegitimize—even criminalize—the dancing female body. Next, I explore the nascent class-consciousness that arose between dancers and boxers and illuminate how these young men and women defended fight clubs and dance halls as important working-class spaces where they might use their bodies for pleasure, autonomy, and economic viability. Ultimately, I frame the debates over dancing girls and fighting men as anxieties over class, gender, and modernity in Jazz Age San Francisco.