Joe Harrington wrote: > When I started dancing in the late 1980s… Callers were taking the > revolutionary step of not calling "men" and "women" but rather using "ladies" > and "gents", to signal that switching roles was ok, since nobody referred to > themselves as a "lady" or a "gent" in casual conversation.
Where was this, Joe? And are you talking about contra callers (rather than ECD)? I can only speak about the NYC area in the 1960s and early ’70s, and New England starting in the late ’60s and continuing to the present. In both regions, square/contra callers (contras were a subcategory of square dance until around 1975) universally used “gents/ladies.” (I believe ECD teachers have always used “men/women,” presumably emulating Playford and Cecil Sharp.) AFAIK, northeastern callers pretty consistently used “gents/ladies” until some of them started to move away from gender-related terms. Tolman and Page’s Country Dance Book (1937) uses “gents/ladies,” as do most of the other standard American dance books from the 1900s to the 1950s (a few, aimed at schoolteachers, use “boys/girls”). I know of no region where callers changed from “men/women” to “gents/ladies.” I know that some callers, beginning I think in the ’80s, changed from “gents/ladies” to “men/women,” feeling that “gentlemen” and “ladies” smacked of classism. (One female caller, in an essay titled “I am not a lady,” requested that other callers not use her contra compositions if they adhered to “gents/ladies.”) As an amateur (= lover) of dance history, I would like to know about past changes of which I was unaware. Tony Parkes Billerica, Mass. www.hands4.com<http://www.hands4.com/> New book! Square Dance Calling: An Old Art for a New Century (available now)
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