The “B” Girl. A Saying You Won’t Hear Today
I had vaguely heard the term B-girl mentioned in the past. Whether it was from some early film noir cinema or pulp fiction I cannot recall. The 1940 Pulitzer Prize winning William Saroyan play The Time of Your Life was made into a film in 1948 and was recently shown on Turner Classic Movies and I watched it for the odd turn of tough guy Jimmy Cagney playing a philosophical bar patron. It is an uneven movie, but what was interesting was Jeanne Cagney’s (yes – Jimmy’s sister) portrayal of Kitty Duval and the referral of her character as possibly being a B-girl.
So what exactly is a B-Girl?
First thought – Hays code vernacular for a bar prostitute.
Looking the term up in Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary it is slang for a ‘bar girl’ – a woman who entertains bar patrons and encourages them to spend freely. Online other meanings emerged – it could also mean a prostitute that hangs around in bars. Either way it was not a compliment.
I always felt a b girl was the same grade as a b movie… low grade, trashy, not too well received in sophisticated circles. Naughty girls, rough edges types…Faye Emerson, Mary Beth Hughes, Janis Paige, etc. Yet these , and others, despite their notoriety , turned out likeable just the same.
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My mother finally gave it up and told my daughter that she was a B-girl in the late 40’s. I knew she had worked in a bar for a while after she took a Greyhound from a small town in Indiana to Los Angeles (with dreams of being a “Star”). She also told me that she met my dad when she was a waitress in a cafe in the hotel where he lived as he attended USC. Now I wonder about that. Either way, I’m sure she was good at what she did and was not a prostitute, though she may have been a bit promiscuous. She had a wonderful sense of humor and rarely said a cross word. She would have been 100 years old this year and was the most loving mother anyone could have asked for.
What great memories of your mom. Regardless of how she met your dad, she gave her family a wonderful life
I’m with Spyder. I only know of B-Girls as breakdancers.
There is another use for the term B-Girl, which means a Female Street Dancer or Breaker that is Female.