American Women Playwrights as Mediators of the "Woman Problem"

American Women Playwrights as Mediators of the "Woman Problem" CYNTHIA SUTHERLAND IBSEN'S NORA shut the door of her "doll's house" in 1879. Among the generation of American women born in the 1870's and 1880's, Zona Gale, Zoe Akins, and Susan Glaspell all won Pulitzer Prizes. Rachel Crothers, the successful dramatist who wrote more than three dozen plays, characterized her own work as "a sort of Comedie Rumaine de la Femme." In an interview in 1931 she said: "With few exceptions, every one of my plays has been a social attitude toward women at the moment I wrote it. .. . I [do not] go out stalking the footsteps of women's progress. It is something that comes to me subconsciously. I may say that I sense the trend even before I have hearsay or direct knowledge of it.'" During a period in which most American playwrights confined their work to representations of the middle class, these women were distinctive because they created principal roles for female characters whose rhetoric thinly veiled a sense of uneasiness with what Eva Figes and others more recently have called "patriarchal attitudes." By the tum of the century, the mostly "abolitionist" women who had originated the battle for suffrage in the 1840's and 1850's were either dead or retired, and a new generation of leaders was attempting to expand popular support through the use of muted political rhetoric which intentionally avoided controversy.' The majority of women resisted arguments advocating changes in sex roles on the grounds that their inherent femininity would be diminished and their homes threat319 320 CYNTHIA SUTHERLAND ened. In the Ladies' Home Journal, Jane Addams argued benignly that a woman who wanted to "keep on with her old business of caring for her house and rearing her children" ought to "have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying outside her immediate household.'" The conciliatory strategy of feminist leaders like Addams and Carrie Chapman Calt exalted the family, motherhood, and domestic values, minimized conflicts between self-realization and inhibiting social conditions , and often disregarded the arguments of radical feminists who insisted that only basic alterations in the organization of the family and sexual relationships could effect substantive changes in women's lives. For many members of audiences, political issues continued to be dissociated from personal lives in which an equator divided the world of human activity marking "homemaking" and "breadwinning" as hemispheres. In 1924, a study of a fairly large group of young girls indicated that a substantial number planned to choose marriage over a "career" and that few had developed alternative goals. Asked to "name the four heroines in history or fiction whom [they) would most like to resemble," only two of 347 chose women identified chiefly or even at all with feminist causes.' They elected, rather, to live vicariously through husbands and children, accepting the traditional sex-role differentiation in which "instrumental/ task functions are assigned to males, and expressive/ social functions to females.'" Glaspell, Akins, Gale, and Crothers chronicled the increasingly noticeable effects of free love, trial marriage, the "double standard," career, divorce, and war on women's lives. Public rhetoric generally subsumed private sexual rhetoric in the theatre during this period, and dramatic discourse tended to mediate conflicting views of women's "legitimate" place in society more often than it intensified dispute. Although the sector of life subtended by domesticity was being steadily decreased by technological and economic developments in the early years of the century, feminist leaders, artists, and housewives shared the common inability to suggest an alternative social structure through which discontent might be alleviated.' To the extent that female characters on the stage accepted the traditional sex role, a diminished state of consciousness manifested itself in language that avoided strong or forceful statements, evinced conformity, consisted of euphemism and question-begging,' and celebrated the processes which safely domesticated erotic pleasure' As contemporary critics, we tend to be disappointed by portrayals of women who cannot express, much less resolve, their problems. Yet, here, precisely, I believe, is the reason for the popular success and the "critical" failure of many of these plays. The spectacle of dramatic characters conducting themselves in the ironic...