ON A WINTER's NIGHT in 1875, in Glasgow's insalubrious Saltmarket district in the city's East End, two separate female acts began a two-week run at the Whitebait music hall. First to perform was the Francis Parisian Ballet Troupe, a four-girl dance act performing their can-can for the first time in Scotland. Next were the Sisters Ridgway, a pair of female dancers and duettists making their debut appearance of the season. These two ‘turns’ were to precipitate a media furore that filled the columns of Scotland's newspapers for a month and prompted a number of the city's influential male citizens to launch a vigorous campaign against the immorality of music hall. Indeed, according to one outraged observer, ‘A dance of Satyrs and Bacchantes’, with words and actions arranged by the notorious female Restoration playwright Aphra Behn, would probably have caused less offence.

Like all scandals, it provides an exceptionally useful starting point for historical investigation. Prompted by the transgression of a perceived borderline of acceptable social behaviour, it produced a proliferation of evidence detailing the multifaceted views of nineteenth-century Glasgow's ‘fractured, heterogeneous public sphere’. Yet an analysis of the articles and letters from the variously appalled, defensive and bemused inhabitants of the city, suggests more than just another middleclass attempt at the embourgeoisement of a working-class leisure form, an increasingly common occurrence from the 1870s and already noted and debated in the historiography. Instead, the scandal caused by the acts at the Whitebait indicates the existence in Victorian Glasgow of an intra-gender competition, in which three conceptualisations of masculinity vied for cultural dominance, each asserting the right to define the meaning, and therefore ultimately the management, of the city's music halls.