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Confusion of taxi dancer with taxi driver

posted 15 years ago by jeffyoung1
2 replies | jump to latest

Sofia (Natasha Belinskya) works as a taxi dancer at an upscale dance hall in 1936 Shanghai in order to support her beloved daughter and her overbearing, smug, but lazy in-laws. These in-laws, all impoverished Russian aristocrats, talk trash all the time like, "God is watching her and God will punish her (for being a taxi dancer)". The best was one of the old bitties telling Sofia's young daughter not to go downstairs and play with those Jew children. Well, at least this movie is historically accurate.

When "The White Countess" came out in 2005, the term, "taxi dancer" was already so antiquated that it was practically forgotten except by people who study history. I remember confused critics and newspaper reviewers describing Sofia's job as a, 'taxi driver'. It was a funny inside joke to me because I happened to know what a taxi dancer was.

I had read an article about taxi dancers in a very, very old magazine many, many years ago. Taxi dancing halls were all the rage in the largest American cities back in the 1930s. Typically a dance with a taxi dancer cost 10 cents. Taxi dancers were not typically young women of ill-repute, although they could be. For the most part, in the height of the Great Depression, most of them were ordinary young American women between 18 and 30 something trying to earn some cash in a scarce job market, pretty much like it is today in 2009, the Great Recession.
There was an amusing black and white photo in the old magazine, which was discussing the old taxi dancer craze, long since passed by the time of that magazine. In the photo, which took place in a Chicago taxi dance hall, the City of Chicago had dispatched female inspectors to all the taxi dance halls. The female inspectors required the taxi dancers, one by one, to lift up their long skirts to prove that they were wearing panties. The photo actually showed one young taxi dancer woman holding up her skirt and showing the backside of her panty to a stern-looking female inspector. LOL.

[–] Bunnymonsterz 14 years ago

Hey thanks for the post. That's very interesting. I too was a bit confused by the term when I heard it in this movie. I knew it had something to do with dancing, but I wasn't sure how far the women were expected to go with these men, and if that was an official part of the job description. Thanks for clearing that up. And the part about the inspectors checking for panties.... wow. haha.

...rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell...

[–] jeffyoung1 14 years ago

I don't know very much about the history of the 'taxi dancer'. It's best to ask someone who is in their 70s today. Even then, most of these senior citizens would have been too old to have patronized a taxi dance hall in the 1930s. I don't know when the taxi dance halls closed down. My guess is sometime in the 40s, after World War II. You don't hear about taxi dancer halls in the 50s and later.

The old taxi dancer halls were staffed typically with young women, presumably the minimum age of 18 and into their twenties. But I don't know if older women served as taxi dancers. Maybe someone who knows more might come on this post and inform us. I'm certain that if a woman was very pretty in her early thirties then she could still work at a taxi dance hall business.

City authorities must have become concerned because of the opportunities for indecent public behavior all the way to possibilities for opportunistic prostitution. But I don't have the information. It's probably because of reports of lewd and indecent behavior that some cities may have dispatched female inspectors to ensure the female taxi dancers were appropriatedly attired underneath their dresses. Unlike today where the short skirt is common and can easily expose a ladies' undies or lack thereof, the below-the-knee-to-the-middle calf skirts of the 1930s offered the easy temptation to go sans panties, or, 'going commando', in today's slang.