8 Feb
2023
8 Feb
'23
9:54 a.m.
Joe Harrington wrote:
When I started dancing in the late 1980s… Callers were
taking the revolutionary step of not calling "men" and "women" but
rather using "ladies" and "gents", to signal that switching roles was
ok, since nobody referred to themselves as a "lady" or a "gent" in
casual conversation.
Where was this, Joe? And are you talking about contra callers (rather than ECD)? I can
only speak about the NYC area in the 1960s and early ’70s, and New England starting in the
late ’60s and continuing to the present. In both regions, square/contra callers (contras
were a subcategory of square dance until around 1975) universally used “gents/ladies.” (I
believe ECD teachers have always used “men/women,” presumably emulating Playford and Cecil
Sharp.) AFAIK, northeastern callers pretty consistently used “gents/ladies” until some of
them started to move away from gender-related terms. Tolman and Page’s Country Dance Book
(1937) uses “gents/ladies,” as do most of the other standard American dance books from the
1900s to the 1950s (a few, aimed at schoolteachers, use “boys/girls”).
I know of no region where callers changed from “men/women” to “gents/ladies.” I know that
some callers, beginning I think in the ’80s, changed from “gents/ladies” to “men/women,”
feeling that “gentlemen” and “ladies” smacked of classism. (One female caller, in an essay
titled “I am not a lady,” requested that other callers not use her contra compositions if
they adhered to “gents/ladies.”) As an amateur (= lover) of dance history, I would like to
know about past changes of which I was unaware.
Tony Parkes
Billerica, Mass.
www.hands4.com<http://www.hands4.com/>
New book! Square Dance Calling: An Old Art for a New Century
(available now)