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.
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.
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.