“The Devil’s Dance Dens” of the Crescent City: Female Lives and Labor in the Taxi Dancing Halls of 1920s New Orleans.

In 1924, the taxi-dancing women of the Danceland dance hall in New Orleans, appeared at City Hall to protest its recent closure, to fight for their jobs and the lucrative wages that came with them. In the eyes of moral reformers, civic elites, and the press, the women who danced there and the work they did, were "immoral and nuisance." This thesis demonstrates how these working women belied the stereotypes of helpless victim, wayward woman and gold-digging vamp so common in popular culture. Instead, they earned above average wages for working-class women, supported parents and children, and built a network of solidarity that gave them a collective voice when their livelihoods were under threat. Using newspapers, census data, maps, and the records of reformers and scholars of the time, the thesis introduces the under-explored area of research of dancing women’s labor and lifestyle, into the narrative of New Orleans’ "jazz" age.