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.
New book! Square Dance Calling: An Old Art for a New Century
(available now)