dusty canoe sits atop a display case in the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation in Waltham, Massachusetts. The few visitors to this esoteric museum may wonder how a quaint canoe, a redolent of pastoral idylls, relates to industry and innovation. For the mill workers and factory hands of Waltham at the turn of the twentieth century, meeting friends at the canoe clubs and paddling about on the river were enjoyable respites from the rigidly controlled time schedule of factory life and the crowded, supervised spaces of boarding houses. By purchasing time that was completely under their control, workers were able to express and experience their newfound freedom in ways that contested conservative Victorian proscriptions on female sexuality.

Selling time in a canoe was one of several services on the river that encouraged the working class to revel in their hard-fought free time through consumption. A video of Norembega Park filmed in the 1950s gives an idea of the types of activities available to working class residents in the Waltham area(Figure 2). Riverside amusement parks and dance halls were other places where the working class could purchase and experience control over their leisure time. The canoe companies were integrated into a riverside business community that sponsored entertaining events along the river to encourage patronage. Local businessmen started the Charles River Amusement Associations that scheduled weekly band concerts in the riverside parks, canoe races among the canoe clubs, elaborate parades on the water and holiday celebrations.[1]

In the years immediately preceding and just after the turn of the twentieth century, the working- and lower-middle classes of Waltham were enjoying themselves: they had the money to purchase control over their time; and a host of producers were willing to sell them their entertaining services. Canoeing, dancing, watching movies, strolling through picnic grounds, or riding the rides at the amusement park was a liberating experience.

Celebrating their independence from supervision and emboldened by the power of collective action to reduce the length of the workday, working-class women took control of their search for the company of a young man. These women moved the courting ritual into the public sphere, using the services provided by commercial leisure. Kathy Peiss argues that leisure businesses intentionally marketed public forms over household forms of commercialized leisure to overcome “ideological and material barriers to women’s social activity.” As they left the factories and boardinghouse and walked down to the river the women “passed into a special realm of exciting possibilities.”[2] In the mixed-sex environments of public entertainments, such as those at Waltham, familiarity and intermingling with strangers was normal public behavior that encouraged women to try out new roles.[3] Going out for their fun “temporarily freed” working class women “from their normative demands.”[4] A young woman could purchase unmonitored time and then spend it as she pleased.[5]

Freed from the time constraints of work and the oversight of intrusive boarding house matrons, some women chose to participate in commercial leisure to contest older middle-class values.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century socializing gradually moved from the home to public spaces.[6] Young Americans in rural environments could share time with the opposite sex but they were usually within oversight of adult and community supervision – picnics, sleigh rides dances. Young people living on their own in the city, however, had greater opportunity for privacy and mobility than those in rural areas, but freedom literally had a price.

One of the places young women were able to find some privacy to get to know a young man was in a canoe on the river. Although the Arnold Canoe was designed to be a club canoe, the cushions and backrest that were included indicate that the canoe at the Charles River Museum was likely used for courting. Like the touring canoes designed to be stable while hauling camping gear, the club canoe has a flat bottom designed to be stable when inhabited by people. The backrests and pillow are sized to wedge between the ribs of the bottom of the canoe and rest at an angle against the thwart. Typically, the woman would sit on a cushion on the floor of the canoe and recline against the pillowed backrest.

Leisure entrepreneurs outfitted "courting canoes" with Victrola music players, battery operated lights, flags, and parasols for a few hours on the river (Figure 3). On the surface Arnold was selling the experience of being in the canoe on the water, but fundamentally what he was selling was freedom and private time to the working-class residents of boarding houses in the neighborhood.

Often a canoe ride was a more intimate experience than a man and woman simply getting to know one another. For some women, private time was used to experiment with sexuality and fulfill a desire for intimacy.[7] John Kasson, a historian of technology and culture, has written that in this period “amusement parks and the emergent mass culture offered an opportunity (for lower-middle and working class visitors) to participate in American life on a new basis, outside traditional forms and proscriptions.”[8] Men also participated in these risqué activities, but interludes were under the control of the woman. In her book on courtship in America historian Ellen K Rothman explains that “While the years from 1870 to 1920 saw a liberalization of the middle-class code of sexual conduct, it remained the woman’s role to post the “do’s” and “don’ts”[9]

The wide bottom and the lack of a center brace in the Arnold canoe made it quite comfortable for two people to climb in the middle for a more physical experience. Amorous activity in a canoe was a popular past time on the river and became known as canoedling (Figure 4). Working class women who exchanged a caress, a kiss or more with men in exchange for a dinner, drinks or theater tickets became known as charity girls. According to historian Kathy Peiss, for these working women, “sexuality became a central dimension of their emergent culture.”[10] These women engaged in non-normative behavior to distance themselves from their immigrant and family traditions. “Women who experimented with new forms of sexuality and new types of relationships with men contest our stereotypes of Victorian sexuality. Charity girls were at odds with middle-class notions of respectability.”[11]

The adventurous sexual experimentation of these women did not go uncontested.[12] In 1903 the Metropolitan Park Police in Middlesex County passed an ordinance requiring all boat passengers to remain upright in their canoes. The police assigned 25 plain clothes policemen to paddle among the crowd of canoes and arrest anyone who violated the rules. At night they shined flashlights into canoes and repeatedly ordered occupants to “Come, sit up there with your lady friend.”[13] At least one couple was arrested. The riverside police boathouse went so far as to install a telescope to spy on boaters.[14] Some blamed riverside business owners for attracting the troublemakers and “rowdies”, but most of the complaints were from conservative members of the middle class who were unhappy that the working class women were able to control their leisure time and sexuality and express themselves in an unsanctioned manner.[15]

Waltham was not the only Boston-area city where young women were taking control over their sexuality. Worcester had to pass regulations regarding similar behavior among the working class in public parks. In Revere Beach the park police had to enforce a rule about bathers lying in the sand. Like the canoe regulation, after an initial outcry, an agreement was reached allowing people to lie in the sand if they did not “make themselves objectionable.”[16]

Figure 5. Canoeing on the Charles River, Boston. Thomas A. Edison, Inc., 1904. Library of Congress.

Canoeing on the Charles River was popular at the turn of the century(Figure 5). In response to the police actions, the canoe company operators and the Charles River Amusement Association organized themselves in protest. Canoedling was a big enough part of canoe culture that they were able to convince the police that enforcing the rule on lying down in canoes would kill the riverside businesses. Women aligned their personal interests with powerful business interests in Waltham and several months later, at the start of the 1904 boating season, the police had agreed to stop enforcing the rule.[17] Attempts by reformers to control working women’s leisure through regulation and through organizations like the YWCA and working-girls clubs failed in the first decades of the twentieth century failed, and eventually most had to give in to the demands of working-class women and accommodate heterosocial leisure expressed through commercial culture.[18]

Working class women gained power by participating in commercialized leisure time that contributed financially to the local businesses. Peiss summarizes the role leisure businesses played in the changing culture at the turn of the twentieth century:

Leisure institutions played an intricate game of mediation in which the lines between cultural oppositions – female and male, domestic, and public, respectability and disrepute, sexual purity and sensual playfulness – were shifting and indeed blurred.[19]

In moving their romantic endeavors into the public sphere working class women led the charge for all women to take control of their sexuality. These young women were literally “going out” with their men, a practice that became known as “dating” and replaced in-house, supervised “calling,” as the locus for a young man and young women to get to know one another.[20] By the 1920s the first wave of feminism had crested. The era of the flapper arrived. Women were in control of their time and more in control of their sexuality. Dating shifted from more open public venues like canoes and dance halls to the semi-private space of cars.

Kasson writes that at the turn of the twentieth century “the nation was beginning a pivotal transition from an economy organized around production to one organized around consumption and leisure as well.”[21] Hard work, punctuality, and self-control were the values of the earlier production-based society. In return for embracing these values workers were promised upward mobility, security, and respectability. Those values “grew less compelling as new agencies emerged that offered far more immediate gratification” through consumption.[22]

After decades of long days and low pay, having leisure time and a little extra income was a new experience for factory workers who longed for control over their leisure time. Working class customers in the years 1890 to 1920 consumed commercialized leisure in ways that expressed changes in working class values and a loosening of social mores in the culture.[23] The dance halls, amusement parks and canoe company entrepreneurs quickly filled a niche by offering time based entertainments that provided the working class an experience of control, and even a means of contesting social norms. Working-class single women commoditized leisure time through the services of H. B. Arnold and other businesses to take control over their sexuality and circumvented attempts to enforce a conservative morality.