ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN 177

ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN Moralists charged that at the Oxford Music Hall ‘the promenades and drinking bars thereof are permitted to be used largely and habitually as a resort of common prostitutes for purposes of solicitation and immoral bargaining and that excessive drinking indecent conversation and disorderly conduct take place therein’.25 Prostitutes’ objective in the promenades was obvious: many of them sat all night at tables by the bar where they could not even see the show.26 Most moral reformers believed that the danger of the promenades lay in the ready supply of women and strong liquors together in the same place Thus, James Greenwood writes in 1869: It is at the refreshment-bars of these palatial shams and impostures, as midnight and closing time approaches, that profligacy may be seen reigning rampant Generally at one end of the hall is a long strip of metal counter, behind which superbly-attired barmaids vend strong liquors…the unblushing immodesty of the place concentrates at this long bar Any night may here be found dozens of prostitutes enticing simpletons to drink…her main undisguised object being to induce him to prolong the companionship after the glaring gaslight of the liquor-bar is lowered.27 Soliciting zones within music halls varied from one to another At Collins’ on Islington Green, an inspector found the gallery free of prostitutes, though the stalls level was less praiseworthy: This part is besieged by a goodly number of unfortunates of the better-class sort The bar, which is at the back, is supplied with side lounges and these are the hunting grounds of these women I observed no importuning but it is not required with such conveniences A tipsy young man will invariably drop down beside one of these females The skirt dance of Alice Leamar, in which ‘the high pitching of the legs and the continual twirling, with the hands, of the muslin petticoats’ was judged ‘very suggestive’ so as to give the audience ‘unbounded satisfaction’ is mentioned in the same report, as if to verify that the patrons of the stalls had some stimulus to be patrons of another kind.28 148