No dance for the single men

We were up in Valencia a little while ago. One of the places we went was a museum called L'Etno. I'd heard on the radio that it had won the 2023 European Museum of the Year Award so, while we were in town, it made sense to go and have a nosey. My 'two and two' skills being what they are, I'd failed to realise that it was an ethnology museum. Ethnology isn't a word I use every day but, in essence, it's a museum about society and its artefacts; old cars, 8 tracks, telephone boxes, rolling pins and fridges. Like everyone else, as we gawped at the exhibits, we reminisced. "We had one of those in our kitchen" or "My mum used to swear by Oxydol."

One of the many things that drew my attention was a photo with the title "El baile de los solteros." The museum people had interpreted that caption into English as "No dance for the single men."

It's a black and white photo. The background music is a chotis, a Madrileño folk dance. In the photo, a few men wearing caps and dark, slightly old-fashioned suits lounge against the wall, looking on, as couples dance in what looks like a typical Saturday night village hall do. With a bit of imagination you can see them moving forward from time to time into the space reserved for the dancing couples before they retreat, abashed, to the wall. All of the unmarried thirty-something men of the village are there. Not one of them is missing. Other men of their age, who are already married, have stopped going to the dance. These unmarried men, these perpetual bachelors, never dance and the day of the photo is no exception. At dances like this these men have nothing to do. The dances are for younger people, for the unmarried. The village dance was the socially acceptable place for the two sexes to mingle without too many restrictions. But our bachelors have already passed their sell-by date, they have missed their chance, they are the male equivalent of old maids. Men and women go to dances to dance but these men will never dance. They will stay until about midnight amidst the noise and the lights of the dance. All night long they will gaze at the inaccessible girls before sloping off home.

The photo is illuminated in such a way that, behind it, from time to time we can see some everyday articles related to this dance without dancing. The cut-throat razor to make sure the men look their best, the essential caps; fashionable headgear, and a cigarette case, to chain smoke the evening away, watching other people dance.

Until 1914, in rural Spain, marriage functioned as an economic transaction, as an operation between two families, not two individuals. The firstborn male would inherit the property and the negotiation was basically about the property, about the redistribution and consolidation of the wealth that the land represented for the two families. The other sons and daughters were left much more to their own devices. They might marry for love, to cover the shame of an unintended pregnancy or any of those other well-established reasons why people choose to get married. The First World War caused a boom in the Spanish economy which started the transfer of wealth from the countryside to the towns and cities. That change continued all through the 20th Century. People left the countryside in droves and the old patterns of marriage began to crumble. The second, third, and fourth-born sons suddenly had the opportunity to make something of themselves in the towns and cities rather than being the labourers on their eldest brother's farm. Minimal as they may seem to us the opportunities of domestic service and factory work also gave opportunities for women to "better" themselves. The firstborn son was no longer the catch he had been for decades and centuries. A woman could do better for herself with a second-born who made good in the city, and a second-born son in the city had better possibilities to choose a wife for pure fancy from a far larger pool of women and for selfishly personal reasons. The firstborn remained tied to the land, in a reversal of fortunes they were now the ones with limited room for manoeuvre, and it was this group that became the sad coterie of permanent bachelors in the photo doomed to celibacy or paid for sex.