What's Wrong with Our Girls?

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1923 edition. Excerpt: ...writes of the same experience in Vermont, and though I have not enquired, I do not doubt that she writes from actual observation. In the City, Country dances would probably not be practicable. Space is too limited, and City life is too tiring for any but the very young to find strength for a jig. But there is both room and energy enough for the art of formal dancing. Would it be fantastic to suggest the re-introduction of the square dance? Would it be too far fetched to prophesy that in ten years' time we shall be dancing the Minuet? Stranger revolutions, and less desirable ones, have occurred. The more languorous our dancing becomes, the further will the social pendulum swing toward vigor or toward grace. Probably quite a light touch would suffice to give direction to the swing. Let us imagine that a dancing master, attached to a first-class school in, say, Chicago, insists upon teaching the sixteenth century dances of ceremony, using, for example, the music of Edward German. Or let us imagine a splendid revival there of Romeo and Juliet, with a Pavanne danced in the ball scene. What a revelation of graceful movement! What intoxication of lovely melody! Girls see now possibilities of charm. Boys, awkward and dissenting at first, follow where the girls lead. The middle west catches fire. It proclaims the renaissance of the dance. It lifts a proud head crowned with the diadem of Taste, and scornfully regards the effete east. The east turns in its sleep, sneers, cavils, and imitates. It invents a more beautiful Pavanne, and triumphs over the middle west. The far west responds with a Gavotte of still greater loveliness. Paris dives into her libraries, and unearths the forgotten Minuets of her own unexampled eighteenth century. The Art of...