What inspires young girls and young women, what motivates them to make the choices they do (always considering the options available to them during the years when they must make certain decisions)? This concern will be a recurring theme in stories published at this site.
     Beatrice Hillhouse was born in 1909. Her parents were both wroking journalists in Cincinnati, her father being a drama critic, her mother, while she started writing for the society section, became a music critic, quite an accomplishment when you remember how few women obtained college degrees and successfully held down a “man’s job” before women had even won the right to vote.
     The primary focus in the education of the Hillhouse daughters was on culture. Her parents belonged to the McDowell Society, and Beatrice told me that two or three times a year the members would meet after the symphony at her home, everyone would be nicely dressed, lovely food was served. The guest of honor was usually the soloist who had performed earlier that evening, and he or she would perform again, and the musical evening. “They would go on until two or three in the morning,” Beatrice recalled. “And I can remember coming down that long flight of stairs in our house, down from the second floor, in my nightgown, and sit on the steps listening to the music until somebody would say, “What are you doing down here! You should have been in bed a long time ago. Go back to bed.”
     Because the suffragette’s were very active during the years of her girlhood, the so-called “women’s question” had to have been very much in the air, especially among the educated and professional classes. I asked Beatrice if her mother was a suffragette, and she said, “She belonged to no group and she never protested, but she was an ardent feminist in that she broke away from her own family traditions. She got a liberal education when very few women did that, and she was ambitious for herself and for her children.”
     Her parents clearly prepared the soil, and in the memoir that follows, Beatrice recalls the moment when a seed took root.

BEATRICE HILLHOUSE
Pavlova Dancing

I was six years old when a dearly beloved aunt took me to see Pavlova, the great Russian dancer. I remember being stood on the bed in my room and dressed to go to the performance. After basic panties and top, a flannel petticoat was added and stuffed into voluminous dark blue, baggy, woolen pants. Over all that came a dark blue dress with a middy collar, and, just before going out of doors, a hood, coat and boots were added. How anybody could sit through a performance in all those clothes (minus hood, coat and boots) is a mystery that still perplexes me, but I did.
     During the winter season in Cincinnati, the city where I grew up, ballet performances were given in the same auditorium as symphony concerts. Full ballets were not performed at this time. In fact, dancing was denigrated except for “ballroom dancing,” ethnic dancing, square dancing, hoofing, and other popular styles. Although eventually, and grudgingly, ballet came to be called ART, in my youth serious dancing was considered something of an eccentricity.
     That memorable evening began with an overture by full orchestra. The program consisted of single numbers danced by the company and soloists. Pavlova, the star of the company, danced twice, once before the intermission and once after. She danced the gavotte to “The Glow Worm,” music by Paul Linke, and she performed in heeled slippers rather than on pointe to demonstrate her versatility. That night she also performed her famous dance of the Swan.
     There was something indefinable about Pavlova’s dancing. It was magnetic, enthralling, entrancing. The choreography was not so very complicated or difficult. Her technique was more than adequate, though not nearly as gymnastic as some choreography later became. As she glided across the stage, Pavlova held her audience rapt with her evocation of the smooth movement of a swan gliding across still water. The audience watched in silence, moved to raptures. This strange capacity that Pavlova possessed, her power to immediately seize and hold the attention of her audience, was remarked upon by many people. In all my own years of theater going, I have only experienced this effect three times. Whatever this power is or was, it was in evidence the two occasions I saw Pavlova dance.
     When she had finished her performance, applause came slowly and tentatively. It was not the spectacular technique that gave Pavlova such magnetism, but the artistry, the dedication, the complete yielding to her art, to the dynamic of its demands. She was the inspiration for many, many dancers who came after her, including myself.
     In the years that followed, serious dancing swept the United States like a storm. Once enthusiasm was stimulated, dance schools and companies emerged almost spontaneously. As a child and as a young woman, I was caught up in this phenomenon. I began taking dancing lessons at the age of six or seven, and I fought hard to have a career as a dancer. And I can date the moment when I experienced something of a calling to this vocation, to be a dancer, to dance, as the evening when I first saw and felt the rapture of Pavlova dancing.

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