The Taxi Dancers — The Young and Beautiful Women That Got Paid to Dance With Men
The 1920s and 1930s offered a unique opportunity for the ostracized minorities to feel accepted on a dance floor
A taxi dancer is a dancer who gets paid to dance with a dance partner. The taxi dancer gets paid proportionally to the time she dances with her male partner, a concept similar to a cab driver driving a passenger.
The taxi dancers appeared for the first time in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States of America.
Young women, aged between fifteen and twenty-eight years old, danced with men who bought dance tickets.
By 1931, in New York alone operated one hundred taxi-dance halls that could accommodate 50,000 male visitors a week.
The scandalous taxi dancing
The always entrepreneurial Americans build special dance halls which employed female dancers. Only men could enter these dance halls. They would pay ten cents per dance ticket. A man would give a ticket to a taxi dancer and she would dance with him for one song.