Because so little has been written on women's theatre history, all kinds of misconceptions continue to flourish [...] part of the problem derives from the emphasis of so much theatre scholarship on text based theatre. This is to some extent understandable since theatre is ephemeral and the written playscript is all that materially remains after the performance has ended. But to focus on the written text creates an imbalance. [1]
The first post-1968 publications documenting the placement of women in theatre were largely written by feminist theatre historians who in the main were writing about feminist theatre. They were limited to the documentation and analysis of certain periods in history; the Edwardian and the so-called 'rebirth of the women's theatre', which itself came out of the rebirth of the women's movement in the late 1960s with, until recently, only a limited regard toward the women playwrights of the Restoration period. This imbalance is being rectified by more recent research into the history of female performers, directors, managers and administrators. However, in terms of textual analysis, just as prioritising text over performance produces imbalance, so too does the study of only certain kinds of texts which fit into pre-defined analytical frameworks.
This analytical framework has included analysis of theatre produced by women, whether textual or not, but one of the key qualifications for inclusion was evidence of a deliberate connection between aesthetics and femi nism. Many have neglected to acknowledge the multitude of work produced by women who did not fit into the frame, namely those who were involved in the production and creation of theatre between 1918 and the late 1960s.
During the 1920s and 1930s organised political feminism was far less visible; struggles to im prove the position of women within society continued, but less publicly. Organisations contin ued to argue and work around specific issues, such as contraception and child-care, and within working-class organisations feminism still found a presence. But theatre work controlled by women, linking feminism and aesthetics, ceased to command its own space. There were a number of women who were very active within the Unity Theatre movement [...] and there was the occasional play about the 'women question' equal rights for women, equal educational opportunities, abortion. But it was only well after the Second World War that feminism and theatre came together; this time in a greatly changed social and political situation in which radical post-war changes to the family had produced intense and contradictory pressures on women.[2]
There has been a general failure to recognise a notion of 'feminisms'; a multitude of political and ideological positions concerned with the social, economic and historic placement of women. A statement that women lived under contradictory pressure only after the Second World War fails to acknowledge the 'real' social and economic position of women during the years which spanned the end of the First World War and the mid 1960s. The validation of a Marxist materialist feminism over bourgeois feminism, or vice versa, can lead to the misrepresentation of contexts for women's struggle for equal status.
Writers such as Dale Spender, Joanna Alberti, Shari Benstock and Virginia Smyers have documented some of the less visible work carried out by 'feminist' women during the middle period of the twentieth century. Certainly, the struggle for women's equality did not have the same momentum, form or focus as it had once had during the era of the Suffragette. Yet the struggle continued over disparate but connected issues, many of which failed to attract the same public attention as had the fight to establish votes for women. This is not to prioritise the private over the public, but rather to point to its possible equivalent significance.
The Actresses Franchise League (the A.F.L.) is seen as an example of a feminist theatre valid in its equivalent ideology and practice to that of the feminist theatre of the late 1960s, but rarely are any crossover points with the theatre which followed the brief history of the Actresses Franchise League acknowledged. Auriol Lee, for example, acted for Edith Craig's Pioneer Players whose work was connected to the A.F.L., and went on to become one of the most prolific commercial directors of the 1930s, directing most of Van Druten's London productions up until her early death in 1942.
Some feminist historians have perhaps unintentionally misrepresented particular periods of history in order to stress the importance of what is being examined in their own particular highlighted period of interest. Consequently, we find statements like the following;
During the period from 1660 to 1720, over sixty plays by women were produced on the London stage - more than from 1920-1980.[3]
This information is misleading and incorrect. It signifies a particular period of history as being an exception in terms of women's creativity and theatre. To some extent, the statement validates cultural assumptions about the invisibility of women in theatre history. One group of writers are foregrounded at the cost of another, so women remain on the margins and their creative presence is the exception rather than the rule.
False categorising (which) ranges from the mythologising assumptions that prevent clear seeing [...] to biased misjudgment, to plain lying; at its worst its the deliberate renaming of phenomena so as to change their significance. [4]
Helen Keyssar reveals the inherent contradictions in a closed model for analysis when she writes:
Between 1919 and 1960, the most persistent gesture towards feminism in drama was a focus on female characters and the particular obstacles these characters encountered because they were women.[5]
In terms of bringing woman's experience as written by woman into the public arena of theatre, the persistent gesture of these female playwrights should not be so easily dismissed. Readings of the plays reveal unquestionable connections between their work as artists and their socio-economic position as women. Keyssar differentiates between post-suffrage playwrights and those of the period after the late 1960s:
As the contemporary playwright Honor Moore has remarked, 'whether or not they identify themselves as feminists, there are now playwrights whose art is related to their condition as women.' The plays created in the context of that recognition do not just mirror social change but assert a new aesthetic based on the transformation rather than the recognition of persons. [6]
What is being identified as a persistent gesture for one generation becomes aligned with a semi-radical position for another. Not all contemporary women playwrights are concerned with new aesthetics or transformation as opposed to recognition of persons. In a 'theatre society' where there exists little public recognition of female person as written by woman, the making public of recognition is integral to any future process of transformation.
Between 1914 and 1968, the context for British theatre and society was influenced by two World Wars, The General Strike, fluctuations in economic stability, changes in the proportional ownership of theatres, changes in taste, and the introduction of state funding for theatre amongst other things. Women were moved en masse from the home to the public workforce during the First World War, back into the home, back into the public workforce, then back to home and duty once more. The period also hosts developments in a virtual solidifying of definitions of socially acceptable and biologically imperative 'female' and 'feminine' behaviour.
During the 1920s, 1930s and, to an extent, the 1940s, the British stage was made up of commercial theatres, repertory theatres, small club theatres such as The Everyman, The Gate, The Embassy and subscription club theatre groups which hired or ran venues such as The Savoy and The Kingsway. Although there were exceptions, such as Clemence Dane's A Bill of Divorcement [7] and Dodie Smith's Autumn Crocus, [8] many of the dramatic successes on the West End stage started life in these 'other theatres' which by today's standards were run by professionals but, more often than not, on an unpaid basis. Similarly, plays are not likely to be taken into a commercial theatre today unless the management can be persuaded that there will be a financial gain. New writers reached a larger audience via the then equivalent of our 'fringe theatres'. Writers like Susan Glaspell, Paul Claudel, actors such as Sybil Thorndike, Gielgud and Gwen Ffrancon-John achieved their first British 'successes' through this fringe system.
A number of women playwrights wrote mainly one-act plays, which fitted perfectly into a one-night programme of three 'one-acters' by new writers, or were used as 'curtain-raisers', performed immediately before a main production. Many of them also concentrated on plays written for children which again have been historically devalued. Neither of the latter two have any real economic value for theatre producers in a commercially oriented theatre. It is also important to note that there were often many more actresses looking for employment than actors. Press-cuttings and comments made by women working during this period do show that gender prejudice still existed and some women directors, such as Edith Craig, felt that a lack of available work was due almost entirely to the division of employment opportunities being based on gender bias.
There were in fact considerably more than sixty plays by women produced on the London stage between 1918 and 1968 alone, the majority of which were concerned in some way with inequality between the sexes, the inherent contradictions in the social and moral expectations of women, and representations of women in history.
Playwrights such as Gertrude Jennings, Gwen John, Clemence Dane, Gordon Daviot, Margaret Kennedy, Aimée Stuart, Dodie Smith, Esther McCracken, Joan Temple, Enid Bagnold and Bridget Boland, to name a few, were 'jobbing' playwrights. Many of them were also journalists and later wrote film scripts: they earned significantly more acclaim and money from their theatre writing than their future counterparts .
A significant number of these plays either had all women casts, or made women central to the action and narrative as protagonist or antagonist. These playwrights came up against the same constraints and bias as women during the late 1960s, a few even gave themselves androgynous names like C.L. Anthony (Dodie Smith) and Gordon Daviot (Josephine Tey). One of the most interesting socio-political facts about the early playwrights of the period is that a large proportion began their careers as actresses and (it is argued), by finding it hard to get good parts, ended up writing them themselves.
It is, however, impossible to categorise the work of the women playwrights of the period in terms of a notion of shared 'sisterhood'; although where they are mentioned in historical writings by critics they are marginalised into chapters such as 'Our Women Dramatists' [9] and likened to the 'feline tortoise-shell cat' [10]. Many of their plays are as 'well-made', and possibly bourgeois, as any of those written by their male counterparts. Equally, some of them, such as Susan Glaspell, Brigitte Boland and Anne Jellicoe, experimented with form and style of writing, although experimentation with form was rare until the 1950s, and most of the playwrights use the well-made play, the style of twentieth-century melodrama, and often the 'drawing room' setting. Thus their work cannot truly be seen as homogeneous. However, there are certain clearly identifiable traits of common interest and thematic focus.
The majority of the plays are set in traditionally 'female' spaces; inside the home, in all-female working environments, and so on. Many have either all-female casts, or female characters are in the majority, and the plots are often centred around women's lives and experiences. So during a period when we are led to believe by some theatre historians that there was no 'significant work' being done by women in theatre, there is a visible wealth of playwrighting which not only brings discourse centred on the private lives and experiences of women onto the public stage, but also creates new employment possibilities for actresses and, strangely (if we are to believe the somewhat neurotic bleatings of a few of the contemporary male drama critics), also brings a new female audience into the theatres. Many of the women dramatists wrote self-consciously about the nature and conditions of women's lives, their place in the economic order and their difficulty, not so much in finding a voice but in finding an acceptable and workable identity.
One prevailing feature of the plays written by women of this period is a desire to explore and indicate the existence of a cultural state of confusion of identity, a mismatching of social and moral expectations and the lived experience of women. Many represent an attempt at analysing the position of women in a social and economic, and therefore power-based, relationship to both men and society.
G.B.Stern's The Man Who Pays The Piper [11] was first performed in London at the St Martin's Theatre in 1931 with a cast that included Diana Wynyard and the young Jessica Tandy. It is a serious attempt to analyse the relationship between gender and socio-economic power. The play only had a short run in the West End, and was criticised by some for being too intellectual and undramatic, yet by others it was acclaimed as her best piece of drama. It is a three-act, 'well-made' play centred around seventeen years in the history of the middle-class Fairley family. The play begins in 1913, and opens with an argument between the key character Daryll and her father. Dr Fairely disapproves of one of her friendships.
And now since she's stuffed you up with all this fudge about votes for women - Suffragette processions and I don't know what [...] the next thing is I shall have you burning down churches [...] throwing acid into letter boxes. [12]
To which Daryll replies;
Alexia's wonderful. I can't bear silly little half-witted flappers [...] I wish you'd let me join Alexia's business when I've finished my training [...] what's the use of learning anything. I'll sit at home and be useful and cut bread and butter [...] I want to be independent. [13]
Stern opens the play by establishing a differential between three close generations of Edwardian women and their social ambitions, as well as establishing the rule of the patriarch as being reliant on the fact that it is he who holds the economic power.
The audience are then taken forward to 1926; Daryll's father and elder brother have been killed in action and she is now the head of the family. The male characters in the play are shown as being financially inept. Her mother's new husband is a musician without work Daryll's sister's husband the same. They constantly ask her for financial support as she is now the head of her friend Alexia's business, which has become a large West End concern. The men discuss women and power with such statements as:
Ben: She's not masculine to look at. I can't bear women with gruff voices who cover half the room in a stride. [14]
Daryll herself feels that she cannot get married because she already has such a large family to support. She sees herself as the father of the family:
[...] in this house [...] there isn't a father [...] not one single father except me [...] Of course I come home and behave abominably [...] It's got into my bones [...] And all the men come to me as man to man and thank me rather resentfully for what I've done [...] I'm not going to wish this on any daughter of mine. [15]
Act Two is full of discussions on economics, gender and power, where Daryll points out that it is the 'man who pays the piper who holds the purse strings that plays the tunes.' [16] Stern presents a vibrant contrast in Daryll's sister, Fay:
This is 1926, Independence and work and bright young bachelor girls [....] Oh no I'd much rather live at home.[17]
The Act ends when Daryll's mother inherits a fortune from one of her dead husband's patients. At this point, Daryll turns to her long-time fiancé and asks him to
[...] take me, marry me, smash me, begin me all over again, and make me into the usual sort of wife [...] it's not too late [...] I don't care how you do it [...] but break me. [18]
Act Three is set four years later: Daryll has been married two years, she has given up work and taken on the domestic role; she feels bored and unchallenged. When she discovers that the business that she helped to build up is in a state of collapse Daryll goes against her husband's wishes and decides to go back to work, telling him:
Oh Rufus [...] you're being quite unendurably silly and such a cave man. This isn't the time to stand with folded arms and a rocky scowl [...] If I hadn't been bored from morning till night do you think I'd have been so wildly frantically glad to get back again [...] back to my business [...] oh to have something to do again [...] something continuous and constructive [...] I'm no good for marriage [...] it's the war, we had to take over then [...] I expect there's a whole generation of us [...] We're none of us fit for marriage, we fathers of nineteen fourteen [...] I'm a freak. We're all freaks my generation of girls [...][19]
Her husband, who feels that they cannot both work (that is to say, take on a 'masculine' role), offers to become a 'house husband' saying that it is just traditional prejudice which says that men must work and women must weep. Daryll rejects his suggestion as being 'unnatural', and because of this reaction he tells her that she is perfectly conventional, perfectly feminine and she falls into his arms. There might be the end of the play except that Daryll does go off to 'save' the business and the ending of the play is left open with her leaving saying, 'just this once, we can arrange things differently afterwards'.
Stern's play brings up all kinds of questions about the nature of femininity. Daryll's femininity has been constructed through social and historical imperatives. She represents a whole generation of women who were required to leave their traditional feminine roles behind and take control during the war, and were then literally dropped from the public domain when the war was over. One of the key questions which Daryll asks, and others ask of her, is whether she can be both economically powerful and feminine. She struggles to find an acceptable feminine identity which fits her actual fragmented experience. The discourse of the play is centred around recognition and a need for transformation. Both genders discuss feminine social roles in terms of their social constructedness rather than their biological innateness. Daryll's confusion and fragmented experience of femaleness is seen as a symptom of a political and economic system based on the supply and demand of labour. She is not a victim of patriarchal ideologies as much as capitalism itself.
Contemporary writers of the period, such as Winifred Holtby, [20] were aware that, especially amongst the 'new' philosophies of the sexologists in the 1930s, there was a very strong desire to discredit the notion of 'equality of the sexes'. Simultaneous to praising feminists, Havelock Ellis also felt that, 'the Banner under which they fought, while a wholesome and necessary assertion in the social and political realms, had no biological foundation.' Ellis was greatly alarmed at the idea that women should have the, 'same education as men, the same occupations [...] This idea he described as the source of all that was unbalanced, sometimes a little pathetic and a little absurd in the old women's movement. He wanted women to have independence [...] this was to be achieved through an endorsement of motherhood.' [21]
Stern was concerned that a woman's personal fulfilment cannot be achieved through family or marriage alone; that a woman should have the opportunity for fulfilment in the public as well as the private sphere. The play exposes a desire for emergence, a need to break out of constructed roles into ones created by need and experience.
Sylvia Rayman's Women of Twilight [22] works on a social-economic rather than a social-psychological level. Rayman is interested in moving from emergence to exposure. In Women of Twilight, Rayman's first play (written while she was working in a London snack bar), there is a deliberate subverting of the image of 'charming English home life'.
Originally staged at The Embassy in 1951, transferring to The Vaudeville and then playing briefly on Broadway, the play was later made into a film . It is a tragic but socially observant tale of the life of single mothers living on the margins of society, in the 'twilight zone.' The action of the play is staged in a semi-basement living room of a large house near London. The room is characterised by neglect and untidiness. Helen Allistair is a widowed middle-class woman who at first glance appears to be a well-meaning philanthropist, providing shelter and childcare for a community of women who have in common the fact that they cannot find homes because they are single mothers, who have to earn their living as well as carry out the job of mothering.
During the first act, we are introduced to some of the women who live in the house. Rosie is an eighteen-year-old 'factory girl', and Laura presents herself proudly, as here, as an unmarried mother:
[...] I don't want no man tied to me [...] all I wants is my baby. [23]
Sal is the ex-maid who now looks after the children; she is old and rather slow, hardly featuring in the play until her dramatic revelations in the final act. Vivianne is expecting a child by a man who is on trial for manslaughter, and Christina has just arrived at the house with her very young son. The women are unsettled and unhappy; they are caught in the poverty trap in that their wages only just cover the rent and childcare fees; few of them manage to save any money and the only escape is provided by the hope of either the return of the estranged fathers of their children or through finding another man to marry. It is not long before Vivianne reveals the true nature of Mrs. Allistair's supposed altruism:
[...] I didn't want this baby [...] nine out of ten are like Rosie and they're better game for Allistair than the wiser ones. She takes every penny they've got and lets them live in squalor and talks to them like the salvation army [...] all her saccharine talk about taking the homeless in off the street and giving them shelter; shelters just about all at three guineas a week with a quid on top if you want her to look after the kid. [24]
The first Act draws to a close when Rosie comes in from a day out with her boyfriend to reveal that she has been told that her child has malnutrition; Helen Allistair's response is:
[...] He may be weak and sickly, but that's the result of generations of squalor and ignorance and unwholesome stock [...] some mothers were not in a condition to produce model babies [...] healthy trees produce healthy fruit.[25]
The second Act ends when Christina comes back from a week away to find her child on the brink of death. In Act Three Vivianne has a conversation with the old maid, Sal, who tells her:
[...] one day Nellie ( Allistair) 'it 'im with a stick and 'e just lay there on the carpet. I wanted to put 'im to bed but Nellie said it weren't no use, 'cos he was dead [...] she says girls like me didn't ought to have babies and if they found out they'd put me in prison. [26]
Vivianne's suspicions are reaffirmed when she is told by Sal that, 'Nellie used to take in babies and the nice ladies who 'adn't any babies of their own would take them away.' Vivianne says:
A lot of things go on that the public don't want to know. So they look the other way the same as the Welfare people do when they come down here. They're not really fooled by the show you put on for them, but its easier not to look too closely. I've seen so much dirt I'm not squeamish anymore. [27]
One attempted murder later we come to the last scene of the play. The whole of the basement has changed; it is now bright and clean. Christina returns to the house to be told by Allistair that Vivianne has had her child and is unable to see anyone as she is so close to death. Finally, Helen Allistair's evil intent is revealed and her final words are spoken centre stage, just before her arrest:
[...] sluts all of you with your rotten little bastards. I took you off the streets, when decent people wouldn't look at you. God when I think what I've done for you; slaved morning and night. What have I kept for myself since my husband died. I gave up my house to you, and this is how you repay me. You've no gratitude, no loyalty [...] how dare you speak to me, you sanctimonious little bitch. [28]
In her preface, producer Rona Laurie points out how the play 'challenges the social conscience of the audience'. [29] It condemns, through Helen, a bourgeois and Victorian attitude toward the poor and in particularly toward single unmarried mothers. The physical stage space is interior and claustrophobic. Laurie suggests that a small cramped stage can only enhance the mood of the play. Helen Allistair is a product of her own greed and sociopolitical beliefs, left over from the 'days of the Empire'. Her bitterness is taken out via the exploitation of others, usually women of a lower social class, under the guise of philanthropy. As Deidre Beddoe has acknowledged, 'housewife and mothers [...] this single role was presented to women [...] to follow all other alternative roles was presented as wholly undesirable'. [30] What Rayman is clearly expressing in her play is the complete contradiction in women's 'inherent' social roles, in a society that cannot cater ideologically or economically to the requirements of its so-called moral culture.
Both of these writers have much in common with many of the other women playwrights of the fifty year period under discussion. Lib Taylor has recently stated that writers like Agatha Christie were successful in their theatre writing largely because their plays re-affirmed cultural stereotypes [31] and acted as a form of imaginative anaesthetic against the immense social changes that were happening after the Second World War. Yet when we look at a greater selection of plays written by women of the period, very clear patterns of dissension become apparent in their choice of focus, both in terms of character and narrative. During the 1950s there were a whole series of texts where the place of motherhood and the role of mother was put into question and challenged. Again, during the early 1930s, where the eugenics movement and the rise of fascism in Europe became important components in a cultural political system where women were being encouraged back into the home and into private domestic roles, there are a number of plays written by women and produced in commercial theatres to acclaim, where the connection between motherhood and femininity were put directly into question.
Writers of the period under discussion, such as G.B. Stern, Susan Glaspell, Gordon Daviot in the 1920s and 1930s, and Margaret Neville, Joan Morgan, Rose Franken, Sylvia Rayman, Aimée Stuart, E.M. Delafield in the 1940s and 1950s, do not often directly refer to specific political events or movements which specifically effect the lives of women. However, an understanding of both the source and effect of new cultural ideologies and sociopolitical movements which were contemporary to their playwrighting careers, is vital to an understanding of what is being foregrounded in their work.
My point is that those of us who are interested in text must allow ourselves to expand our framework of analysis beyond the confines of a closed feminist framework. Unless we can do this, then we are refining an already refined version of women's place in theatre history, and negating the possibility of re-discovering an historical continuum of work by women playwrights. When I began my research I was completely unaware of the vast number of plays written by women and produced professionally between 1918 and 1968 in Britain. Obviously, and this could be seen as somewhat subjective, some of the plays are as 'unworthy' as texts as any of those which are both 'unworthy' and written by men. Yet many are valuable, both as indicators of developments in playwrighting by women during a period when there was, superficially, no large and homogeneous political pressure group for them to identify with or against, and as links in a chain of unwritten history. Further links in the chain can be found in plays written by women for the amateur theatre, which thrived in Britain during the inter-war period; but this research is only just beginning.
Thus, from studying the work of women playwrights produced on the British stage between 1918 and 1968, it becomes clear that writing women's work out of theatre history based on an analysis of either its commercial, feminist or contemporary political validity alone invites only marginalisation, ghettoising, and the depleting of the importance and cultural significance of women's creative presence in theatre throughout history. There have been women writing for a multiplicity of theatres throughout this century in Britain, 'writing out the experience of the female into public dramatic fiction' [32] - and faction.
1.
S. Bassnett, 'Struggling with the Past; women's theatre in search of
a history'. New Theatre Quarterly , V,18, (May 1989), p.108.
(CUP).
2.
M. Wandor, Carry On Understudies (Routledge, 1986),
pp.3-4.
3.
N. Cotton, Women Play-wrights in England 1363-1750. (London:
A.U.P., 1980), pp.16-21.
4.
J. Russ, How To Suppress Women's Writing (The Women's
Press,1983), p.43.
5.
H. Keyssar, Feminist Theatre (Macmillan, 1986), p.25.
6.
Ibid. p.1.
7.
C. Dane, A Bill of Divorcement (Heinemann, 1961).
8.
C.L. Anthony, Autumn Crocus (Pan Books, 1967).
9.
E. Short, Theatrical Cavalcade (Eyre and Spottiswoode,
1942).
10.
L. Hudson, The Twentieth Century Drama (Harrap and Co.,
1946).
11.
G.B. Stern, The Man Who Pays The Piper (Samuel French,
1929).
12.
Ibid. p. 9.
13.
Ibid. pp. 9-10.
14.
Ibid. pp. 40-41.
15.
Ibid. pp. 60-65.
16.
Ibid.
17.
Ibid. p. 70.
18.
Ibid. p. 77.
19.
Ibid. pp. 95-98.
20.
W. Holtby, Women in a Changing Civilisation (Lane & Bodley
Head, 1934), p.109.
21.
S. Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies (Pandora, 1985), p.
137.
22.
S. Rayman, Women of Twilight (Evans Bros., 1951).
23.
Ibid. p. 14.
24.
Ibid. p. 23.
25.
Ibid. p. 34.
26.
Ibid. p. 78.
27.
Ibid. p. 81.
28.
Ibid. p. 91.
29.
Ibid. pp. 5-7.
30.
D. Beddoe, Back To Home And Duty (Pandora Press,1985), p.
137
31.
L. Taylor, 'Early Stages; women dramatists 1958-68', in British
And Irish Women Dramatists Since 1958, T.R. Griffiths & M.
Llewellyn Jones (Open University Press, 1993).
32.
L. Walsh Jenkins, 'Locating The Language Of Gender Experience', in
Women and Performance Journal, II (1984), pp. 5-20.