Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Three Women Work, Marriage, and the Old(er) Woman

k at h a r i n e c o c k i n Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Three Women Work, Marriage, and the Old(er) Woman The writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman were familiar to the British women’s suffrage movement, featured in recitations at events and reviewed in the movement’s newspapers. This essay is concerned with a comparative analysis of the published text of Gilman’s one-act play Three Women and the prompt copy of a production of the play in London in November 1912 for a women’s suffrage organization.1 As Marie Farr notes, there are several texts entitled Three Women by Gilman: her short story of 1908 was reworked into a play of the same title, published in 1911, and this published text was revised for the London production of 1912. The issues explored by the play were sufficiently controversial to bear such revisions: the imposition on (white, middle-class) women of a choice between work and marriage.2 The play disrupts the assumption that such a choice is necessary, proposing instead that it is neither inevitable nor desirable by demonstrating that a woman may achieve both. However, Three Women is not only a play about the specific choices imposed on some women, but also one which explores the ways in which those choices are made. This is achieved in two ways: first, the apparently ‘‘natural’’ choice for a woman between marriage and work is deconstructed and revealed to be no real choice at all – a critique of gender ideology which was not unprecedented in drama (and in other genres) written by women in this period. Second, the play explores how choices can be made, specifically presenting a young woman ask- ing advice from older women. The ‘‘three women’’ of the title represent an understated but distinctly alternative set of choices becoming available in women’s suffrage discourse in Britain. In November 1912 two performances of Three Women were given at Chelsea Town Hall, London, as part of a major event in the calendar of the Women’s Freedom League (WFL). They were directed by Edith Craig (1869–1947), a woman who was attracting a nationwide reputation for directing plays for the women’s suffrage movement.3 The actors in Craig’s production were members of a play-producing subscription society closely affiliated to the WFL, called the Pioneer Players.4 This society was founded by Craig to produce plays for its membership at various London theatres which were hired for the occasion.5 Many of the Pioneer Players’ early productions were concerned with issues relating to women’s suffrage or other political issues, such as the campaigns for food reform and against the censorship of the stage.6 Reading Edith Craig’s production of Three Women in the context of her work with the Pioneer Players and other women’s suffrage organizations reveals some of the difficulties which the play encounters in its critique of gender ideology. The changes made to the play in the prompt copy invite reflection on some of the complexities , if not difficulties, of Gilman’s thinking. Craig’s prompt copy emphasizes the ambiguities of the play, destabilizing the resolution in marriage and the representations of the female protagonist . Such changes were appropriate for a production associated with Craig at this time. The Pioneer Players performed many plays before the First World War which were interested in women’s independence in work and marriage. Some of these explicitly rejected marriage or represented women’s relationship to a range of work, examining the tensions between class and gender conflicts through the roles of the prostitute and the sweated worker as well as the writer and actress. The representation of woman as worker in the Pioneer Players’ productions was not limited to the nurturing role, but considered work for women as a source of self-development through a career and as a necessity, when women were the sole earners for dependents. Although Three Women was not one of the Pioneer Players’ annual subscription productions and therefore was not acknowledged in the society’s annual reports, and Work, Marriage, and the Old(er) Woman 75 since it was not performed in a theatre, it eluded the main bibliographical work on London productions in this period.7 Craig and members of the Pioneer Players would have been attracted to Gilman ’s play for several reasons: both Craig and the Pioneer Players were associated with...