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You -- goddam -- whore!" shrieks Mrs. Higby, president of the "Mothers' League for Good Morals," alter Gloria Bailey, on the dance floor for more than a month, challenges her authority to dictate what constitutes proper behavior for poor women. Seven hundred sixty-three hours into the dance marathon that is the subject of Horace McCoy's chilling 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, the leaders of the Mothers' League arrive at the Santa Monica pier dancehall to condemn the "low and degrading" contest (126, 128). Announcing their intention to pressure the city to end the marathon unless the promoters disqualify a visibly pregnant woman and renege on an advertised promise to marry a couple on the dance floor, the women invoke "our duty to keep our city clean" (130). This image of the battle-ax -- derived from Carrie Nation's efforts to control male drinking through social housekeeping -- is a stock image of nineteenth-century domestic melodrama: it had become a staple of popular culture, including the generative movie scene of D. W. Griffith's classic Intolerance. In his two-reeler. The Mother and the Law a young woman dressed in rags defiantly resists the guardians of state morality trying to rescue her child from her poverty and abuse by taking it from its unfit mother.(1) By the late 1930s, popular culture was full of parodies of these types -- think of Claire Trevor (as the prostitute Dallas) and Thomas Mitchell (as drunkard Doc Boone) being hounded out of town by the wizened members of the Ladies' Law and Order League in John Ford's Stagecoach, among many examples.
"You ought to be in a reform school!" continues the frustrated Mrs. Higby after Gloria unleashes her anger: "Your Morals League and your goddam women's clubs filled with meddlesome old bitches who haven't had a lay in twenty years. Why don't you old dames go out and buy a lay once in a while? Gloria has seen her share of moral mothers: "While you two noble characters are here doing your duty by some people you don't know, your daughters are probably in some guy's apartment, their clothes off, getting drunk...You drive 'em away from home with your goddam lectures on purity and decency, and you're too busy meddling around...