Joan Sawyer

Joan Sawyer, born Bessie Josephine Morrison on October 11, 1887, in El Paso, Texas, was an American dancer, composer, suffragist, and businesswoman. Before establishing herself in dance, she lived in Ohio as a young woman and trained as a stenographer. She took the surname Sawyer from a brief teenage marriage to Alvah Sawyer, retaining it as her professional name throughout her career.

Sawyer began her performing career on Broadway, appearing in two musicals between 1907 and 1908: The Vanderbilt Cup and Merry-Go-Round. She subsequently built a reputation as a professional social dancer, demonstrating current ballroom steps at private parties and nightclubs for other dancers to follow. She later performed on the vaudeville circuit in the 1910s and appeared in the silent film Love's Law in 1917.

Her dance partners included Rudolph Valentino, George Raft, Nigel Barrie, Wallace McCutcheon Jr., and Arthur Ashley. She performed with Valentino before President Woodrow Wilson. Sawyer was also among the dancers who claimed credit for inventing the foxtrot.

In 1914, Sawyer managed a New York City nightclub called the Persian Garden, which was notable at the time for operating under a female manager and featuring a Black Jamaican-born bandleader, Dan Kildare. She composed several pieces connected to her dance work, including a tango titled "The Persian Garden Tango" and a maxixe titled "The Joan Sawyer Maxixe." She also originated the "Aeroplane Waltz," lent her name to the "Joan Waltz," and published instructional materials for additional dance steps.

Sawyer connected her dancing career explicitly to the women's suffrage movement, viewing the spread of ballroom dance as beneficial to women's physical and mental development. In 1915, she drove an automobile decorated with suffrage banners across the United States, stopping to perform impromptu dance shows to raise funds for the cause.

Her personal life included three marriages. Following her early marriage to Alvah Sawyer, she wed businessman George A. Rentschler in 1922 and divorced him in 1936. She subsequently married and divorced writer Jed Kiley in 1944. In 1917, Sawyer was named as a co-respondent in the widely publicized divorce of heiress Blanca Errázuriz and businessman Jack de Saulles; later that same year, Errázuriz shot and killed de Saulles in a custody dispute. In 1929, an Ohio man filed suit against Sawyer, alleging she had persuaded his wife to divorce him. Sawyer died in Florida in November 1966 at the age of 79.