Battles of the sexes onstage: explorations of changing Gender roles by four American women playwrights of the 1910s-1930s

Abstract

Battle of the Sexes Onstage: Explorations of Changing Gender Roles by Four American Women Playwrights of the 1910s-1930s analyzes plays by Rachel Crothers, Susan Glaspell, Sophie Treadwell, and Dawn Powell in order to discover how these playwrights dealt with changing female social roles throughout the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. To provide a context for analysis, the first chapter includes an overview of major events in those decades that shaped women's rights and background information on each playwright whose work is discussed. The plays are categorized according to the marital status of their protagonists in order to compare how each playwright portrays characters in similar situations. Rachel Crothers's Mary the Third (1923) serves as an introduction with three different female characters from three generations with varying marital statuses. The first group of plays focuses on women trapped in unhappy marriages and includes He and She (1911) by Rachel Crothers, Trifles (1916) and The Verge (1921) by Susan Glaspell, and Machinal (1928) by Sophie Treadwell. The second category deals with married women who choose to leave their husbands and includes Crothers's Let Us Be Gay (1929), Treadwell's Ladies Leave (1929), and Dawn Powell's Big Night (1933) and Jig-Saw (1934). The final category of plays focuses on single women who have never married and includes Glaspell's Inheritors (1921), Powell's Women at Four O'Clock (1929) and Walking Down Broadway (1931), and Crothers's When Ladies Meet (1932). In addition to close analysis of these plays, production history and selected reviews and criticism are cited to provide a context for how the plays were received and interpreted in the decades in which they were written and beyond. Analysis and comparison of the work of these four playwrights highlight issues that were most pressing to women during the 1910s-1930s, the social spheres in which inequality of the sexes existed most drastically, and various ways in which women fought and re-defined traditional feminine roles in American society