I was watching an “etiquette” short film from 1949 about teenagers attending their prom and the proper etiquette for it, and they showed the couples filling out their dance cards, and making sure that one girl didn’t dominate one boy’s card, and vice versa. I remember seeing old movies from the Civil War/Victorian era when there were dance cards, but I didn’t realize that persisted into the 40s. When did dance cards stop being proper etiquette?
We certainly didn’t have them for our proms (I graduated from HS in 1967). However, I took group dancing lessons in Jr High (so around 1963) and we did have them for the prom-like thing for the final class. A major difference of course was we didn’t invite a specific girl to the dance class “prom”.
The boys did this by swapping dances with other boys to reassign our nominal-date. I’m pretty sure the nominal date was a random assignment.
In any case someone was still thinking about them in the 1960s.
I saw these in the late 1960’s and early '70’s at private dances but, oddly, never at weddings where there was dancing. There’s probably some arcane rule that Judith Martin could explain. The cards seemed to disappear circa 1975. I still have few dance cards from memorable evenings tucked away in a drawer.
We had them at our high school dances in the mid to late sixties, but the girls just danced with their dates, so we didn’t use them the way they were meant to be used.
Amusing Meet Me in St Louis dance card scene:
By the 50s, they were pretty much passe. When I went to high school dances in the 60s, no one used them.
They were for formal dances (not weddings) and formal dances started dying out with Rock and Roll.
Yes, by the sixties they were long gone. At my high school, you either went to the regular dances with a date, or went stag and asked the unattached girls to dance (provided you had the nerve).
Because my mother was a teacher at my school and also a dance chaperone, I never had the luxury of “hanging back.” She would direct me to girls who weren’t being asked to dance by the other boys and so I always danced every song and more often than not it was with one of the “wallflower” girls.
Of course a few years later, many of those wallflowers blossomed into beautiful young women and they remembered and I got dates with girls that were frankly out of my league because my mother “forced” me to have some courage and not care about who saw me dancing with who.
There was no such thing at my prom in '63, nor at my Junior High prom in '60.
Just wanted to say that I was born in '65 and there was a post here a few years back in which I learned, to my astonishment, that the phrase, “My dance card is full…” used to be meant literally rather than figuratively…
My mother-in-law had a small collection of dance pencils. They were fancy and petite pencils attached to a lapel pin or a chain/fob. I had NO IDEA what they were until I googled the brand names.
They were quite interesting, but not having a real need, so we sold them on eBay.
We certainly didn’t use them in my HS in the early 50s. However, it was an all-boys school so there were never any unattached women and a date was de rigeur. I would have imagined them as Victorian, but maybe I was wrong.
Good Lord, I’d have guessed they went out with WW1.
What was on a dance card? Was it prearranged, meaning it listed song titles with a space for a dance partner? or was it just a list of numbers and everyone was required to keep track? or was it something different entirely?
This.
Here’s an example from 1881.
Google “dance card” and look at the images for the wide variety of forms.
I suspect based on the dates we’re seeing in this thread, that once girls started going out on dates without a chaperone, the dance card started disappearing and died 10 years later. Why didn’t they die out in the 40s? Girls were not chaperoned then. I suspect it was so that all the rare men at a dance during the war could get a chance to dance with someone.
And there was a class side to this. No one in my family ever used a dance card.
I think perhaps they died out when the style of dancing changed to free-form, so the idea of “a dance” disappeared. And the class thing.
No such thing 1980 in my school. Andmy school was a 400 student school.
The dances were listed numerically by type of dance, but no specific song was cited. Next to the listing was a blank line where a name would be written. Like this:
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Opening Cotillion _______________________________
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Foxtrot _______________________________________
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Varsovienne ___________________________________
and so forth.
Usually, the bandleader would advise the hostess of the recommended sequence of dances so that she could get the dance cards printed. The actual songs to be played would be determined by the hostess in consultation with the band leader but the song titles were not listed on the card. If it was a New Year’s Eve dance, “Auld Lang Syne” would be listed, but that’s not a dance.
At particularly old-fashioned dances (you never, ever said “ball”) there would be a Master of Ceremonies who would announce before each song started, “Ladies and gentlemen, kindly take your partner for the foxtrot.” At most dances, however, the bandleader announced this.
Each single man and each single woman had a dance card. The women’s cards had a small pencil, but the men’s cards usually didn’t. Provided they had already been introduced, the gentleman would approach the lady and ask her if she had any space on her dance card. The lady would look at her card, see that she had dance #8, a tango, free and she would offer that to the gentleman. She would then write his name in her card, and he would write hers on his.
The rule was that a lady could not turn down a gentlemen who asked for a dance providing they had been introduced. If she turned down one, she was duty-bound to refuse all other partners on the grounds that she wasn’t dancing that evening. Sometimes the choice for a girl was to either dance one dance with someone she disliked or be a wallflower all evening.
It would be permitted, however, for the young lady to say, “Do you know, George, the only spot I’ve got open is the Lindy and I’m afraid I’m not very good at it. I’d be happy to sit that one out with you.” Then George’s name would still go on her card, and her name on his, and they’d sit out on little gold chairs watching others do the Lindy.
There was a rule that a lady mustn’t dance more than two dances with the same man, but that was pretty well ignored.
Dance cards were for unmarried guests. A married lady didn’t use them; her invitations to dance were usually more spontaneous, with a man to whom she had been introduced walking up and asking for the next dance just as the music began. If the woman was sitting with her husband, it was usual for the man who wanted to dance to say something like, “Robert, do you mind if I borrow your lovely wife for a dance?” Though a woman’s brother or uncle wouldn’t seek the husband’s approval.
I have a few cards from the late '60’s to circa 1978, the year I married. If I can figure out a way to blur out the names on them, I’ll post them.
Given your username, I imagine those were extremely memorable…
