Foothills: Precursors of Feminist Drama

Abstract

The roots of feminist drama wind through the history of the theatre, but their adequate uncovering remains the task of research only now being conducted. Both the feminist theatre movement and feminist drama were foreshadowed in the hundreds of plays by women written in the early part of the twentieth century and more recently in a dozen powerful works by women dramatists in the 1950s and early 1960s. Current research calls attention to the seventeenth-century plays of Aphra Behn, and comedies and melodramas by women playwrights such as Cora Mowatt in the nineteenth century. These were not only plays by women but plays that pointedly revealed the complexities of women’s lives and that subverted assumed notions of women’s social powerlessness.