Overview

Starting in the early 1830s, American girls and women began to hold Old English May Day festivals, complete with maypole dances, the crowning of a May Queen, and romantic plays and pageants. These festivals accelerated in popularity after 1900 at colleges and universities across the country, staying prominent during and even after the suffrage movement. Simultaneously, Progressive reformers and educators used folk dancing and the May Day festival as a means of providing both healthful recreation and Anglo-Protestant morality to immigrant girls living in urban tenements. An important part of the traditional college experience for many women, the celebrations played a surprisingly influential role in the Progressive reform movement.This thorough history examines the creation and development of the traditional American May Day festival, compares it to earlier English May Day celebrations and discusses such topics as the adoption of folk dance as a socially acceptable form of physical education for girls while collecting the reactions and reminiscences of some living May Queens. It also provides an overview of May Day celebrations at 80 specific college and universities, eight of which continue to celebrate the festival annually.

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Allison Thompson is a writer, dance historian, and folk dance leader and musician. She is proud to have been the student dance leader for the Elizabethan May Day festival held at Earlham College in 1977, where she taught the maypole dance and other folk dances to fellow participants.

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