| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850–1920. By Melanie Dawson. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. xii, 257 pp. $39.75, ISBN 0-8173-1449-0.)
Middle-class Victorians loved to play parlor games. In Laboring to Play, Melanie Dawson argues that these games offered more than a form of amusement for nineteenth-century middle-class men and women. According to Dawson, parlor games and home entertainment also helped the middle class construct and define itself. And as the middle class changed over the decades from 1850 to 1920, so did their games.	1
In the twenty years after 1850, parlor games toyed with the notion of gentility. As refinement and good manners were becoming indicators of middle-class status, the games that took place in middle-class parlors often demanded ungenteel sorts of behavior. Borrowing children's games, such as blind man's bluff, and importing them into the parlor allowed adults license to touch, bump, and grope each other. Despite an emerging and increasingly stringent middle-class code of sexual propriety, popular and frequently played games required female participants to forfeit kisses to the men. The "wiggling, gyrating, and undignified movements" of many games were, according to Dawson, a way for middle-class men and women to challenge gentility even as they acknowledged "a middling culture's investment in genteel decorum" (pp. 39, 40).	. . .

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