Canada’s Feminist Past, Present, and Future

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it takes to make feminist theatre now. When I was a graduate student in the 1990s and early 2000s, eagerly reading Elin Diamond’s essays and laughing at work by Split Britches, I imagined we had come a long way and would continue to forge ahead, achieving, if not full theatrical equality, then clear and measurable gains. Of course, gains have been made, but far fewer than any of us had hoped or dreamed. In Canada in 2006, statistics released as part of the “Equity in Canadian Theatre: The Women’s Initiative” project (jointly sponsored by Nightwood Theatre, the Playwright’s Guild of Canada’s Women’s Caucus, and the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres) revealed that “little significant change” (Scott 22) had occurred since damning statistics on women’s participation in Canadian theatre were first made public in Rina Fraticelli’s 1982 report on the same topic, commissioned by Status of Women Canada. Meanwhile, in the United States in 2009, research conducted at Princeton University by Emily Glassberg Sands produced some surprising and disturbing findings: that female artistic directors are much more likely than their male counterparts to reject work by women; that plays featuring major female protagonists are less likely to be produced, especially in major for-profit centres like Broadway; and that, while women’s theatre advocates may scoff at the notion, data analysis reveals that artistic directors do, in fact, receive far more work from men than from women (Cohen).

Statistically, then, we’re not doing very well—but statistics never tell the whole story. In the classroom, I have been running into surprises of my own: both male and female students remain inspired by the feminist work we read in my modern theatre classes, and for two years running a (totally unscientific) hands-up poll has revealed that far more students than not believe Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls has as much to say to the current undergraduate generation as it did to the world of Margaret Thatcher’s early 1980s. Contrary to my own expectations (and those of my more cynical colleagues), my students remain politically engaged and, if given the opportunity, would likely vociferously oppose the logic behind Stuart Jeffries’s recent screed against the play in the Guardian online. (As would, I’m guessing, the wide swathe of patrons who saw Alisa Palmer’s Top Girls in either its original [2007] or revival [2008] productions at Soulpepper Theatre, never mind the many critics who raved about the show in spite of its all-female aura and set it up for multiple Dora nominations.) We are, make no mistake, still knee-deep in the battle over the right to conduct and report feminist research, let alone attain truly fair compensation for women’s work—of all varieties—in the public sphere, but the thoughtful young people and the eager theatre-goers around me give me real hope that the battle will not be abandoned any time soon.

There seems no better time, then, to pick up Shelley Scott’s important history of Nightwood Theatre, A Woman’s Work Is Always Done. Collecting a vast array of primary and secondary materials on the company, its mandate, its work, and its social and economic contexts, and including a superb, lengthy, annotated chronology, Scott’s book provides, at last, a comprehensive overview of the creation and the survival of what is arguably Canada’s most important feminist theatre company. As Scott notes on the final page of the book’s main body text, her goal is to take “the weight and measure of an enduring phenomenon, and to [do] something to preserve its contribution” (224). As she “brings together material that might otherwise have remained scattered and disconnected” (224), and examines its significance for feminist theatre makers and critics with nuance, she does more than that: she gathers an invaluable archive; produces an essential resource for researchers, for students, and for interested members of the public; and tells a...