In 1909, for example, the Women’s City Club, under Belle’s direction, began an investigation of the city’s so-called “dancing academies.” The “academies” were the only easily accessible places of weekday recreation for the poor girls of the Lower East Side who worked in garment-center sweatshops. These girls, many of them in their early teens, were unsophisticated. But the academies served liquor at tables on the dance floor, had rooms ready for hasty rental down adjacent corridors and seemed expressly designed for what reformers euphemistically referred to as “the downfall of young women.”
