Dance with Me in San Francisco

Dance cards, 1874-1877, courtesy of San Francisco History Center 

As I was looking forward to the upcoming talk by Joanna Gewertz Harris about her book, Beyond Isadora: Bay Area Dancing, the Early Years 1916-1965, I began digging around in the San Francisco History Center's Vertical Files again, this time under the subject heading Dance. What I found turned my historical attention from the 20th century back to the 19th, and from the performance dance scene to the social ballroom: a set of 24 dance cards from various dances held in San Francisco from 1872-1891.

A dance card is a classic example of ephemera: printed material produced for a one-time event or use that sometimes gets tossed out and sometimes (luckily for us) gets saved as memorabilia. It's a small, decorative, fold-out card or booklet in which a person (usually a woman) attending a social dance or ball pencils in her planned dance partners for the evening. As you can see from the pictures, dance cards are extremely varied and often whimsical; and in addition to dance partners, they show the date and place of the event, the order and types of dances on the evening's program, and club officers and/or planning committee members. Most have (or had) ribbons on the corner for attaching to the holder's wrist or clothing.
So, next Wednesday, after you've attended the Art, Music, & Recreation Center's program in the Koret Auditorium, stop by the San Francisco History Center and ask to look at the dance cards in the vertical files.