In this slightly abbreviated excerpt from another of author Elaine Partnow’s introductions, we see an argument at work that informs as it asks us to consider the absence of women from lists of notable playwrights.  Partnow has put her book together, she says, to “allow women playwrights throughout history to resurface, as well as to introduce some of the great female dramatists writing in other languages.” It was preferable to her in collecting the work that selected plays had been considered critically, and that there was some body of work about them. If the playwright “addressed some feminist issues of her day, that, too, was desirable, but not necessary.”

Preface to The Female Dramatist
By Elaine Partnow

Today’s women playwrights have become a force to be reckoned with, both in the United States and Canada and in Europe. Though this may seem a new phenomenon, it is not: The same occurred during the Restoration in England and again during the suffrage movements in both England and the United States. What is also not new, despite these recurring booms, is how few women have emerged as members of the canon of dramatic literature. What is also not new is the same old neglect and dismissiveness with which women of talent in so many pursuits have been treated. Of the seventy-eight Pulitzer Prizes for drama awarded since the inception of the prize in 1910, eight have gone to women (ZONA GALE, 1921; SUSAN GLASPELL, 1931; ZOE AKINS, 1935; MARY CHASE, 1945; KETTI FRINGS, 1958; BETH HENLEY, 1981; MARSHA NORMAN, 1983; WENDY WASSERSTEIN, 1989). It is interesting to note that the longest gap between Pulitzer Prizes to women playwrights was 1958 to 1981 — from the late fifties through the rise of feminism and the arrival of this century’s “new woman.”

Susan Faludi maintains in Backlash, her watershed 1991 book, “It has not been unusual that during periods when women have made great social strides they have been ignored or vilified.” Looking back to the first great period of women playwrights, the Restoration, when, between 1660 and 1720, some sixty plays by women were staged, talented and popular playwrights such as APHRA BERN, SUSANNA CENTLIVRE, HANNAH COWLEY, and DELARIVIERE MANLEY were scathingly abused by the press. There was an expression in that day, the “Salic law of wit,” which derived from an ancient penal code, the Salic law. It contained, among “sometimes enforced by audiences who heckled women’s plays because of the author’s sex.” ⁽¹⁾ This helps to explain why so many prologues and epilogues by women playwrights of the day were filled with a defense of the author’s sex. Play writing was a threat to women’s reputations in that day because of its very public aspect: Playwrights had to attend rehearsals, readings, performances, benefits. The backstage atmosphere of theater at that time was not as we now know it. It was often an unruly place filled with drunkenness, fisticuffs, even an occasional murder. Long banned from the boards in Great Britain, actresses began to appear on English stages at about the same time as women playwrights began their ascent in the 1660s. The actresses were inexperienced performers who were assigned roles as objects of beauty or sexuality, regardless of talent. Often, with all the resulting male attention, they took on lovers; some, like Nell Gwynne, became famous courtesans. The reputation of actresses became tarnished; women playwrights were guilty by association. (Some of this attitude has carried over right into this century: I can remember when, as a teenager, I stated my desire to become an actress. My father was disgusted. They were all prostitutes, as far as he was concerned. It took my own struggling career, with its concurrent friendships, to demonstrate to him that this was not so.) The historic connections harken back to the late Middle Ages when, as noted by Susan Case, “the Church had secured the notion that such immoral sexual conduct was the province of women: that is, that prostitutes caused prostitution. Therefore the control of prostitutes would control prostitution, or, more specifically, banning women from the stage would prevent the stage from becoming the site for immoral sexual conduct.” ⁽²⁾ Such association was sometimes spoofed by the playwrights themselves in their plays.  In the epilogue of Aphra Behn’s Sir Patient Fancy, she quips, “Quickest in finding all the subtlest ways/To make your Joys, why not to make your Plays?”

 If female dramatists were not shunned as whores, they were accused of plagiarism, insinuating that women had no ideas of their own. In the preface to MARY DAVYS’s The Northern Heiress, she writes, “As a Child born of a common Woman, has many Fathers, so my poor Offspring has been laid at a great many Doors… I am proud they think it deserves a better Author.” When a woman’s works were praised to be of exceptional quality, comments abounded as to how she wrote “like a man.” Patronizing to today’s ears, these remarks must be heard in the context of a time of strict patriarchy: Even the few women critics of the day made similar allusions.

The next great surge of women playwrights came between 1900 and 1920, when about 400 women wrote plays. Many of these works were concerned with the campaign for female suffrage, as well as the growing crusade for women’s inclusion in higher education and the professions. Some of the propaganda plays were written by women such as Mary Shaw, the actress, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the noted sociologist and writer, MERCY OTIS WARREN, RACHEL CROTHERS, RIDA JOHNSON YOUNG, and SUSAN GLASPELL. The majority of these plays, however, were written by women who were neither writers nor theater professionals, but were active in the women’s movement. Because most of these 400 women did not consider themselves playwrights and did not build any body of theatrical work, they have been excluded from this book. Bettina Friedl, in her fascinating and comprehensive collection On to Victory: Propaganda Plays of the Woman Suffrage Movement,⁽³⁾ gives voice to this unique phenomenon that theatrically documents the rise of the women’s movement from 1848 through 1920.

Although plays about women have existed since the origins of drama, and plays by women have been written and performed in the western world at least since the time of Sappho,⁽⁴⁾ only in the last fifteen years or so have playwrights in significant numbers become self-consciously concerned about the presence — or absence — of women as women on stage. “Every time a woman writes a play about women, then, she is implicitly challenging the men still at center-stage,” writes MICHELENE WANDOR.” She may not be a conscious feminist, she may want to take no part in changing things for other women in the theatrical profession, but she will still in some way be justifying her existence as a woman playwright, and justifying the existence of her subject matter as valid.” ⁽⁵⁾ The author of Understudies, published in 1981, which took an intriguing look at sexual politics in the theater, Wandor goes on to note that while women playwrights may tend to write about their own sex, so do male writers. “It is just that they rarely see that that is what they are doing,” she remarks. I might add, the public does not usually see it either.

Wandor, an avid anthologist of plays by women, asks “Why an anthology of plays by women? If one looks at the contents page of any play anthology, one is already halfway to the answer.”  ⁽⁶⁾

The 1992 edition of the International Directory of Theater contains “the greatest and most performed plays in the world”: 350 works are documented, including all thirty-seven of Shakespeare’s plays, thirteen by Ibsen, nine each from Moliere and Brecht, and one by a woman — Lillian Hellman, a white, American, middle-class woman. An investigation of other anthologies that embody what is considered the “dramatic canon” yields similar results: In John Gassner’s A Treasury of the Theatre, the anthology used when I was a student of theater arts at UCLA in the late 1950s, early 1960s, thirty-nine plays are anthologized, two of which are by women (LADY GREGORY and LILLIAN HELL-MAN); in a supplemental index, “A List of Modern Plays” cites 425 plays worldwide, of which seventeen are authored by women. Two decades later, when I was teaching theater history at a private school, Haskell M. Block and Robert G. Shedd’s Masters of Modern Drama was the Baedeker of the day. In it, forty-five plays by thirty-five playwrights are anthologized; none is by a woman. Women have been writing plays since the time of Sappho; their contributions to the commedia del 1’arte troupes in sixteenth-century Italy were an essential part of the evolution of classic comedy; some of the most beloved comedies of the Restoration were written by women; eight American women have received Pulitzer Prizes (Hellman is not among them) — however, these facts are grossly overlooked by the scholars who collect and critique these anthologies. And it is anthologies such as these that shape public perception of who the world’s major playwrights have been. “The very concept of the ‘writer’ implies maleness, so that the sub-category ‘woman writer’ had to be developed in the nineteenth century to cover a species of creativity that challenged the dominant image. To a great extent we still live under the cloud of gender-confusion in our image of the ‘writer,’ especially in the theater.” ⁽⁷⁾ This book is one response to Wandor’s observation. By eliminating the choice of one gender over another, the biographical profiles assembled here offer readers the opportunity to examine the lives and works of playwrights whose stoutness in the body of theater demands their inclusion.

Critics, too, have had their part in the repression of the works of women playwrights. For decades male drama critics — from George Jean Nathan to Heywood Broun, from Norris Houghton to Whitney Bolton — have been railing against women playwrights, either for portraying men as ineffectual, or women as too strong, too melodramatic, or too absolutist. In the seventeenth century, JUANA INES DE LA CRUZ penned, “Critics: in your sight/no woman can win:/keep you out, and she’s too tight;/she’s too loose if you get in.” Yet so-called “feminist” plays, more often than not, merely “attempt to pay attention to the lives of women — as individuals, in relation to each other, and in relation to men.” ⁽⁸⁾

Lastly, even though there has been an influx of production and publication of women’s plays in the last two decades, the networks of money and power that bring drama to the public remain primarily in the hands of men: That glass ceiling has yet to be shattered.

My goal has been to simply allow women playwrights throughout history to resurface, as well as to introduce some of the great female dramatists writing in other languages. My basis for inclusion encompassed a broad range of criteria: Some playwrights, for example, were part of the maturation of the theater of their day; others brought an original approach, pioneering a form or setting a precedent. Certainly, the entrants had to be playwrights of note. To be included, a playwright need not have been prolific, but her work must have made a significant contribution to the theater of her day. Almost without exception her plays must have been produced professionally and, with rare exception (see KATHERINE OF SUTTON, the 14th-century English baroness), published, and must still be available (even if only in archives), preferably in English. It was also preferable that her work had been considered critically, and that there was some body of work about her and her plays. If her plays addressed some feminist issues of her day, that, too, was desirable, but not necessary.

Although American and English dramatists comprise the bulk of this English-language anthology, a special effort was made to include foreign playwrights. Some of their works are available in English translation, which was preferable, but not in all instances possible. This book includes a smattering of playwrights from such countries as Germany, France, Finland, Israel, Italy, Ghana, Mexico, and Chile; in no way, however, is the work intended to be representative of the contributions made by women playwrights in those countries.

Playwrights from the Middle Ages — from whence derived the first extant dramas by a woman playwright, HROTSVTTHA VON GANDERSHEIM — through the Restoration to the twentieth century are represented. Receipt of an award, such as the Antoinette Perry or the Obie (off-Broadway) Award in the United States or the Olivier in England, for example, was a strong consideration, though not a necessary criterion for inclusion.

Asked to define “major playwright” by an editor of People magazine, playwright VELINA HASU HOUSTON could only reply how subjective that definition must be, with the exception of such contemporary giants as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber (the latter of whom maybe considered “major” due to box office receipts rather than critical reception). Perhaps we must rid ourselves of this desire to consider major playwrights, and instead consider major plays (after all, not all plays by major playwrights are in themselves major). One might ask oneself, as Houston has, what makes a play important? She says,
The kinds of plays that are important to me are plays that give something to the world in which we live, that recycle our emotions, spirits, and intellect to refuel and improve the world — not destroy it. Important plays are rich with cultural and political substance. They reflect a social consciousness without losing a sense of the personal. Their vision remains inextricably tied to the never-ending exploration and excavation of the human condition. For theater should not only entertain but also enlighten. ⁽⁹⁾
Theater is a democratic art form — it speaks to the myriad complexities of mood, intellect, station, age, and social status that make up an audience. If it succeeds in moving that amorphous body, whether to laughter, tears, reflection, or anger, it is good theater. If it happens to speak particularly to the members of “the ruling class” — upper class, white, powerful — it may garner the reputation of great theater. But greatness is mostly personal. Although Shakespeare consistently created many great plays, it is rare that a play, even by a great playwright, is so great that it moves those beyond its evident ken. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and LORRAINE HANSBERRY’s A Raisin in the Sun come to mind as rare exceptions.

Success in theater is most often measured by box office receipts. The relationship of feminist drama to commerce and public attention in many ways follows a predictable pattern. While some of the most innovative and challenging plays by feminists are produced in obscure venues and are heralded by a relatively small group of supporters, the dramas by women that have achieved commercial success in the West End or Broadway tend to take fewer theatrical risks and to be less threatening to middle-class audiences than those performed on the fringe of the theater establishment. Thus we juxtapose the better-known Wendy Wasserstein and Beth Henley against the lesser-known Maria Irene Fornes and Megan Terry, A rare exception to this rule of risk is Caryl Churchill, whose cutting-edge works have actually achieved a modicum of commercial success.

Many talented and important women were left out of this collection because, though they were intrinsically involved with the creation of many plays — such as those of the many collaborative feminist theaters begun in the 1970s — they had not specifically authored a play. The one exception I have made is JOAN LITTLEWOOD, who was instrumental in helping to create a number of plays by heralded male and female dramatists.

A brief note with regards to my use of the word theatrician. There are some members of the theatrical community so multi talented, so accomplished that hyphenates describing their contributions might be endless: to wit, playwright-director-actor-designer- producer …, etc. This became apparent to me many years ago when I was doing research for my first book, The Quotable Woman, originally published in 1977 and now in its sixth edition (New York: Facts On File, 2001). I coined the word at the time, making conservative use of it in the biographical index. Since that time I have noted its use elsewhere on occasion, as in Jack Kroll’s introduction to Transients Welcome, a collection of ROSALYN DREXLER’s plays (New York: Broadway Play Pub., 1984). Language is a living, breathing element in our lives and if my use of “theatrician” causes some eyebrows to rise, I ask that you recall the words of the great Emily Dickinson: “A word is dead when it is said, some say/I say it just begins to live that day.”

The trouble with creating a work of this nature is knowing when and how to place boundaries on it. It could just continue and continue, there are so many talented and worthy women playwrights in the world. Perhaps to assuage my distress more than anything else, I have created a Supplemental Index listing 140 playwrights: that they were not profiled in the body of the text has to do with the fact that either I was unable to find sufficient information to write a meaningful sketch or the entrant has not yet created a sufficiently significant body of dramatic works to warrant inclusion, or the entrant’s foray into theater has been an insignificant part of her career.

Even with the inclusion of the Supplemental Index, I am fully cogent of the many omissions that are bound to surface in relation to a work of this nature, and I fully assume all responsibility for such…

…It is my sincere wish that this book will inspire and encourage those in a position to do so to produce the unknown yet laudable plays of some of the incredibly talented but unsung playwrights in this book.

— Elaine Partnow
— Seattle

Footnotes
1. Cotton.
2. Case.
3. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987.
4. While it is known that Sappho wrote dramas as well as poetry, all that remains of her works are scattered fragments; thus, she has not been included among these profiles.
5. Wandor (1)
6. Wandor (2)
7. Wandor (2).
8. Keyssar.
9. Houston.

Bibliography for footnotes
Case, Sue-Ellen. Feminism and Theatre. New York: Methuen, 19881.

Cotton, Nancy. Women Playwrights in England, c. 1363-1750. London: Assoc. Univ. Presses, 1980.

Houston, Velina Hasu. The Politics of Life, Four Plays by Asian American Women. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.

Keyssar, Helene. Feminist Theatre, An Introduction to Plays of Contemporary British and American Women. New York: Grove Press, 1985.

Wandor, Michelene. Plays by Women. Vol. 1. London: Methuen, 1982. (1)

—–  Understudies. London: New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. (2)