Children and Sweet Stuffs

1901

It is necessary to make some kind of stand against the physical demoralization of the rising generation by the inordinate consumption of cheap confectionery.

Mrs. Creighton, the wife of the late bishop of London, has urged again and again the necessity for checking the wholesale consumption of sweet stuff by the children of the poorer classes, and it is admitted by the doctors in poor neighborhoods that it is to the continual eating of lollipops that the wretched digestions, frequent gastric troubles and enfeebled stamina of those who are to form the future backbone of the nation are due.

What the public house is to the father, the sweet stuff shop has become to the child.


Dancing as Exercise

Dancing has lost some of its vogue, but physicians have come to its rescue and are proscribing it as a useful exercise. It is said that dyspeptic and anemic patients, both men and women, have been advised to waltz at a moderate tempo at least 30 minutes a day.

"Scissors" Dance Is Latest

1920

New Spanish Creation Proves Popular in Paris

PARIS, France, Jan. 1. — Independent popularity has followed the introduction from Madrid of the very latest dance creation, "The Scissors."

The dance is known in Spain as "Juanita" and is performed to the tune of that name. Its importer, a famous professional dancer, who is proprietor of one of Paris' largest dance halls, says, however, that it can be danced to any tango tune or slow waltz.

When the Waltz Was New

1916

I have a letter in my possession written by a friend to my great-grandmother in the year 1817, at Christmas time, in which the lady expresses her grave disapproval of the "modern" tendency toward rapid dancing. The paragraph runs as follows:

"I was yester evening at your Cousin Betty's, where I was much struck with the new fashioned dances, which seemed, to me at any rate, to be out of keeping with the propriety and modesty which we look for in young ladies of our class. I can only regret the disappearance of those 'mazurkas' and 'gavottes' as well as the 'minuets' and hope that these new dances or 'valses,' as I think they are named, will quickly disappear from respectable society." —Letter in London Telegraph

—Stevens Point Daily Journal, Stevens Point, Wisconsin, July 29, 1916, page 3.