By midnight, the restaurants of Paris were beginning to empty, but for many young women, the night was only getting started.
According to a 1929 newspaper report, growing numbers of fashionable French women were leaving the city’s cafés and restaurants for casino tables, racetracks, and unlicensed gambling rooms.
They played late into the night, wagered heavily, and developed a reputation for taking greater risks than many male gamblers.
The craze alarmed French social workers.
Craze for Gambling Among French Girls Worries Officials
PARIS. — France has started to take cognizance of the fact that the women of the republic, more especially of Paris, have gone in very heavily for gambling.
Mademoiselle always seeking something new in the way of sensations, has taken a great fancy to the green-covered tables of the casinos, occasioning great worry to the social workers of France who see in the latest fad a great menace to the future of the country.
New Casinos Opened
To cope with the new clientele which has sprung up — the young girls of Paris — many new licensed establishments have been established, besides the innumerable unlicensed resorts which exist.
The fashion now is to go to the gambling house after an hour or two in the gay restaurants. Play at the principal casinos begins in real earnest about midnight and continues until the small hours of the morning, when the autos, crammed with tired-faced girls, start rushing from the gaming houses homeward.
More Reckless Than Men
Experts state that women are far more reckless in the gambling operations than men. From time to time they succeed in pulling off sensational coups. A number of young Frenchwomen who formed a gambling syndicate and attacked several large banks in succession won $100,000 in a short time.
The women do not confine their gambling activities to the gambling houses. At the race tracks they are as numerous as the men. Once the mademoiselles went to the races only to show off their fineries. Nowadays they add to the excitement by betting on the races — heavily — and wagering even among themselves.
Source: The Washington Daily News. Washington, D.C. June 21, 1929.
