Coney Island and American Society
"The trouble with this present age [is] too much work and too little play” -Fred Thompson (Register 15)
New Men and Women
The
developments in consumer culture and movements towards an urban
industrial society fundamentally challenged the constructions of family
in America. Whereas before, a strict familial hengemony was enforced
through the willing assent of cultural institutions, new conceptions of
amusement and desire were now urging Americans to think of themselves
primarily as individual consumers (Leach 37).
In any case, men were no longer able to exercise unquestioned authority
as sole wage-earners and women no longer strove exclusively for the
ideal of republican motherhood. New social realities were allowing both
sexes to explore norm-defying gender identities that opened a new
world of opportunity and pleasure.
Victorian values held that boys would never be men
until they proved their manhood, defined in this social context as the moral
quality of accepting patriarchal authority and learning to act with
self-restraint (Register 34). In late 19th century America, this striving for a
serious and productive male identity was almost universally accepted as a sign
of maturity. On the other hand, playfulness, the absence of manly restraint and
hegemonic morality, was associated with savages, immigrants, Indians, and
working-class men, "whose mischief [was] attacked in Sabbatarian and
temperance campaigns" (Register 35).
By the 1890s, however, drastic
socioeconomic changes posed a challenge to the ideal of the autonomous, rugged
individualist male patriarchy. The decline of agricultural self-employment, rise
of "new women" workers and consumers, and threatening reality of
unprecedented immigration combined with the rise of an industrial and
bureaucratic labor force to pose the a number of questions. "Where would a
sense of maleness come from for the worker who sat at a desk all day? How would
one be manly without independence? Where was virility to be found in
increasingly faceless bureaucracies?" (Gorn 192)
Historian Woody Register argues
that many people responded to this crisis of identity by embracing the vision
of a boyish, pleasure-seeking masculinity. The popularity of boxing and football,
the creation of the Boy Scouts, the ubiquitous images of Theodore Roosevelt's
Rough Riders and Owen Wister's The Virginian, Peter Pan, and
above all, Coney Island, were expressions of
the new masculinity in its many forms of cultural relevance. Manly virility was "an absolutely indispensible remedy for the artificiality and effeteness of late nineteenth-century life" (Higham 29).
Coney
Island, in contrast to more sedate amusements, offered a direct appeal
to this new sort of man. For all the talk of moral uplift, City
Beautiful advocates had "made little provision for the desire of
working-class males to have 'manly and blood-tingling recreations" (Kasson 13). Coney
embraced the role of catering to a boyish, pleasure-seeking male
audience. "We are not dealing with New Yorkers as they are in New York,
but with big children who have come to fairyland and want the fairies
to make them laugh and show them stange things," Fred Thompson
explained (Register 104).
Thompson and
others imagined an ideal consumer of Coney's amusements to be a boy-man
"uninhibited by barriers and scruples, subject only to his privately
intense satisfactions and whims," who could easily be enticed to
splurge on the fun to be had on their parks. In a perfect world, they
imagined, a boy could have any toy he wanted, even those the size of
the roller coasters and games of Coney, albeit for the duration of a
ride. To the middle-class urban man with money in his pocket and
seeking escape from the quotodian, the entertainments offered motion,
excitement, and a chance to mingle with the other sex free from social
supervision (Register 104-112). The island's entrepreneurs did not restrict their gendered accomodation to men, however.
The
19th century interpretation of women's participation in leisure held
that this activity took place within the traditional spheres of
feminine life. "The leisure of the lady and the lackey differs
from the leisure of the gentleman in his own right in that it is an
occupation of an ostensibly laborious kind" (Veblen 36). The
duties of the household, Veblen would claim, are not productive labor,
and thus fall under the definition of leisure. The "woman's sphere" of
the late 19th century was the home, where females were expected to
maintain domestic and moral harmony while her husband entered the
larger world of commerce to provide for the family. Leisure and social
activity, consisted of neighborly visits, solitary reading, and
entertaining the family; most women, even young ones, only actively
socialized with fellow women (Peiss 7).
Scholar
Kathy Peiss documents the way that the dominant homosocial, acquiescent
construct of American woman's culture faced changes in society around
the turn of the century. Increasingly, women were entering employment
and higher education, championing political causes, and claiming
greater rights to accompany this more active participation. The typical
wage-earning woman of 1900 was young and single, and "nearly 60 percent
of all women in New York aged sixteen to twenty worked in the early
1900's" (Peiss 34). Popular culture
portrayed these "new women" as unwilling to accept the traditional
bounds placed on leisure and socialization. Now that they too were
facing the pressures of urban and laboring modernity, "many working
women carved out of daily life a sphere of pleasure that belied the
harsh realities of the shop floor and tenement" (Peiss 4-6).
Increasingly, leisure was defined as a separate sphere of "independence, youthful pleasure, and mixed-sex fun, in opposition to
the world of obligation and toil" (Peiss 35). Boldened
by their growing economic, cultural, and political power, embodied by
Department Stores, women's literature, and the winning of suffrage in
1918, American women sought to redefine their role in society. The New Woman's "salient traits were boldness and radiant vigor" (Higham 31).
In contrast to the gentility and tightly precribed
separation that defined Victorian gender interaction, cultural
institutions responded to the new roles of the man-boy and New Woman by
asserting an interactive heterosexuality. "Urban nightclubs and
amusement parks legitimated interaction between the sexes in such
practices as dating and close dancing, while films in the teens and
twenties offered visual models of heterosexual modernity" (Peiss 7).
New women and men were actively encouraged to fill
these roles at Coney Island to the extent that these cultural types
became associated with the amusement parks by 1911. It was here that
the independent and assertive modern men and women could most fully
embrace their pursuit of pleasure and romance, freed from the
restrictions of tradition and formality by Coney's claim to be a
playground without rules.
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