Hull-House settlement workers saw the value of "recreative pleasure" for young people doing the monotonous work of modern industry. In 1890, Ellen Gates Starr noted, "The worst thing about these crowded districts is the fact of there being no private places for dancing. Young people will dance. These people cannot do it in private houses--hence public halls. Why not a place where the amusement could be indulged in innocently and without danger?" Hull-House offered dance classes in the evenings to accommodate workers who came for both the healthful and social benefits.

Teacher Mary Wood Hinman began folk dancing classes as a way to hold the interest of immigrants and introduce their children to the rhythms and music of their parent's homelands. Rose Marie Gyles incorporated dance into the women's gymnastic program at the settlement as an acceptable outlet for women's physical energies. Settlement workers taught social dancing classes and sponsored numerous dance parties as an alternative to the public dance halls. They worried that young people, in search of entertainment, would fall prey to the commercial vices of the city--the saloons, gambling houses, and dance halls.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, new techniques and methods of dance vied for acceptance. Hull-House's dance instructors experimented with new dance forms as they taught, researched, choreographed, and performed. More importantly, these creative women taught the joy and pleasure of movement to several generations of young people.

In 1905, Hull-House staged The Trolls' Holiday. Jane Addams wrote: "'Troll's Holiday' was written by one resident, set to music by another, sung by the Music School, and [staged by] the dramatic committee; and the little brown trolls could never have tumbled about so gracefully in their gleaming caves unless they had been taught in the gymnasium." Photograph, University of Illinois Chicago, The University Library, Jane Addams Memorial Collection, JAMC Neg. 955

Rose Marie Gyles (1868-1949)
From 1893 to 1904 Rose Marie Gyles was the director of the Hull-House public gymnasium, one of the first of its kind in Chicago and the U.S. Gyles taught women's and girls' gymnastics and supervised the Hull-House playground. Under her direction, dance was incorporated into the physical education program.

Rose Marie Gyles Photo
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

These young women are participating in a dance and rhythm class at Bowen Country Club, Hull-House's summer camp in Waukegan, Illinois. Rhythmic dance generally consisted of group exercises carried out to music; it combined dance with athletics.

Photograph, University of Illinois at Chicago, The University Library, Jane Addams Memorial Collection, JAMC Neg. 602