From Great Women to Top Girls: Pageants of Sisterhood in British Feminist Theater

Caryl Churchill's groundbreaking play Top Girls (1982) opens with a fleeting fantasy of transnational, transhistorical sisterhood as an eclectic group of eminent women, historical and fictional, gather to celebrate an apparent feminist victory—the promotion of a contemporary, high-powered businesswoman to a management position previously held by men. Sixty years earlier, at the height of the British women's suffrage movement, similarly fantastic gatherings of notable women from various nations and centuries were staged in support of women's rights. Like Top Girls, Pageant of Great Women (1909) and the Women's Coronation Procession (1911) revived famous women from history and drew them into a contemporary feminist cause. By bringing together women from different time periods and geographic locations, all three productions present their audiences with a spectacle of female solidarity extending across national, cultural, and class boundaries. These pageants of sisterhood enact a fundamental feminist principle; as feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti observes, "the recognition of a bond of commonality among women … is the foundation stone that allows for the feminist position or standpoint to be articulated."¹ In dramatizing this "bond of commonality," however, these productions express a feminist ideal more than they do a material reality; all three performances of united sisterhood show signs of strain, though with different degrees of self-awareness.

My purpose in this essay is to consider how British feminist productions with largely female casts from both ends of the twentieth century appropriated elements of pageantry to create a vision of sisterhood responsive to the feminism of their day. I begin with two suffrage-era productions that exploit the modern pageant revival to garner support for a feminist cause: Cicely Hamilton's pageant play Pageant of Great Women, first performed in November 1909 at a large fundraising event for the Actresses' Franchise League, and the massive Women's Coronation Procession of 17 June 1911, whose purpose was to "show the strength of the demand to win Votes for Women in Coronation year."² I then turn to a more recent feminist play, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls from 1982, whose opening act incorporates elements of pageantry reminiscent of the suffrage pageants as colorful historical women gather around a dinner table in a spectacle that might at first appear to represent female solidarity across cultures and history, but which soon dissolves into conflict and chaos. Placing these somewhat disparate moments in British feminist theater in dialogue with one another brings out revealing convergences and discrepancies in their uses of women's history, particularly their representations of women's power and martyrdom, and in their constructions of sisterhood. Anticipating some of the concerns of transnational feminism, Churchill's dystopian vision of fractured sisterhood throws into relief the suffrage pageants' fantasy of universal, united sisterhood by encouraging attention to the national, ideological, and class differences that must be elided to achieve such idealized visions of female solidarity. Despite her attentiveness to differences among women, however, Churchill does not deny the possibility of sisterhood altogether, but uses Brechtian methods to suggest its possibility beyond the social conditions represented in the play. All three productions, to varying degrees, reveal the tensions between the potent feminist ideal of united sisterhood and the material differences and disparities among women that the ideal seeks to overcome.

I. Cicely Hamilton's Pageant of Great Women, 1909

Pageant of Great Women exploited for feminist purposes the pageant revival sweeping Britain and the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century. Launched by Louis Napoleon Parker's large-scale historical pageant celebrating the twelve hundredth anniversary of the town of Sherbourne in 1905, the modern pageant movement was a deliberate return to Renaissance pageantry inspired by the late nineteenth-century arts and crafts movement.³ In 1909, as the women's suffrage movement was gaining momentum, feminist theater director Edith Craig (daughter of the actress Ellen Terry and sister of the theater designer Edward Gordon Craig) commissioned playwright Cicely Hamilton, one of the founding members of the Women Writers' Suffrage League, to write a pageant in support of women...