The search for power: Drama by American women, 1909-1929

Carole L Cole, Purdue University

Abstract

This study examines the issue of power in twenty-four plays by sixteen American women written during the decade before and the decade following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Analyzing these plays as social documents shows that while material conditions changed for women, the prevailing discourses did not: suffrage merely served to co-opt women into existing structures while depriving them of power developed through their women-centered communities. Playwrights include Susan Glaspell, Eleanor Gates, Mary Austin, Alice Brown, Rachel Crothers, Zone Gale, Zoe Akins, Edith Ellis, Angelina Weld Grimke, Mary Burrill, Alice Gerstenberg, Myrtle Smith Livingston, Sophie Treadwell, Marita Bonner, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Lula Vollmer. Gates' Poor Little Rich Girl posits an analysis of a power dynamic paradigmatic for the other plays. According to Gates, power is achieved by isolating the "victim," controlling information, controlling language and thus definitions of reality, and authoring a discourse which fosters fear of the outside world and establishes the one in power as protector. Broken into three time periods--1909-1914, 1915-1922, 1923-1929--the study traces female characters' responses to changing historical and material conditions that were ostensibly to give women greater power. The progression shown by these characters, however, is one of increasing powerlessness, cynicism, and despair. In the early period, characters are able to control their lives and assert their definitions of reality as they find power in a community defined in terms of reciprocity, common goals, vision, and language, and shared experience. As the power to vote was realized, women begin looking beyond the domestic sphere into the public sphere and begin challenging the language of essentialism as they examine the assumptions underlying marriage and the nuclear family. In the mid- to late-1920s, the central female characters recognize marriage as one construct in a complex of social institutions which serve to place power in male hands and define women as property. Ultimately, the plays suggest that achieving the vote did little to alter the structures of society but instead preserved the status quo.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Oreovicz, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American studies|American literature|Theater|Womens studies

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