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More information becomes available in the 19th century, although we still know very little. We believe that children were mostly taught to dance at home by mothers. This would have been mostly social dances. We have no information on ethnic dances like Irish step dancing. And as far as we know, children were not taught formal disciplines like balet dancing. We do not even know if there were balet schools in America. We believe that this was a European phenomenon. Here many churches would haved objedcted. There may have been balet performances by the late-19th century, but they would have been foreign touring troops. We suspect that here were dance lessons for children at least by the late-19th children, although we do not yet have information. And they would have been lessons in social dancing. The industrialization of the United States created great wealth and created a much more affluent middle- and working-class. This meant that more families could afford niceities like instrumental music and dance lessons. But dance classes were especially important and became also a requirement for the the well-to-do. One social historian writes, "In the late 19th century, so many of the Gilded Age robber baron types were looking for a sense of sophistication to place themselves in a kind of aristocracy. This is the kind of thing they did, or had their children do.� [Paley] A complicating factor here is that some religious groups objected to dance, but this was primarily with non-elite churches.
Palry, Valerie. Paley is a historian at the New-York Historical Society who studies social elites and whose own children attended one of the city's remaining dancing schools with upper-crust throwbacks, the Knickerbocker Cotillion. Quoted in Nirnov, Sarah Maslin. "Dancing school gives children a taste of the elite," The New York Times (November 4, 2010).
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