The third generation of women to be college educated considered themselves to be "new women" — responsive to the progressive causes of social reform but also flouting conventional mores, a foreshadowing of the 1920s flapper. As late as 1907, when men were allowed at women's campus dances, the couples, with dancing forbidden, had to walk to the music. Some of these new women, scoffing at convention, defiantly performed the "forbidden waltz" at Smith College, and by 1913 college men and women everywhere danced together regularly. Campus authorities then had to judge which dance steps should be permitted. The turkey trot was banned at Barnard College in 1915 and the tango was forbidden at Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa. At the University of Chicago, where the tango was allowed in 1912, a graduate student was horrified. "This wriggling," he predicted, "will soon lead to a nervous...