Around 6:15 p.m. on a Friday earlier this month, women of a certain age began to trickle into Fete Music Hall, a venue in Providence, R.I. On the speakers, Whitney Houston was goading them to “feel the heat with somebody.”

But night was refusing to fall, and with a shaft of relentlessly cheerful sunlight pouring through the open door, the mood was less throbbing dance party, more middle-school dance. Apprehensive attendees struggled to figure out what to do with their bodies.

Kate Campo, 45, a mother of two and sales rep for a pharmaceutical company, had arrived in athleisure clothes, ready to sweat the night away. But so far she was still clinging to the edge of the dance floor. “You don’t think the music will be all ’80s, will it?,” Ms. Campo asked, surveying the scene.

This was Providence’s inaugural installment of EarlyBirds Club, a roving dance party that takes place within the hours of 6 to 10 p.m. It was developed by two Gen Xers in Chicago who have been friends since their teens — Laura Baginski, a former magazine editor, and Susie Lee, a former makeup artist and skin care line founder — who came up with the concept in 2023 when they met for coffee after their 30th high school reunion.

They got to talking “quote-unquote million dollar ideas,” said Ms. Baginski, 49, who like many peers, was feeling stalled in her career. A music fanatic since childhood, she associated “most of the big milestones of my life” with music — and dancing, she added. Yet somehow she couldn’t get excited about dancing all night to EDM.

She told Ms. Lee, also 49, she’d always harbored a dream of hosting a dance party. It would be a safe, judgment-free zone geared toward women, trans and nonbinary people that would end before most clubs even open their doors, because — as the EarlyBirds website now puts it — grown women “have things to do the next morning.” (Except the site uses a cruder word than “things”).