The Female Economic Independence in Mother Courage and Her Children

Abstract

This research investigates female economic independence throughout the war in Brecht's play Mother Courage and her Children (1941). Mother Courage is a single mother alongside her three children making sacrifices and hustling to provide for herself and her children not being dependent on a male to live but only on her personal wagon. The methods used to prove her perseverance to achieve economic independence are through the lenses of two materialist feminist theories the first one is Simone De Beauvoir and her theories are taken from her book The Second Sex (2011). The second theory belongs to Charlotte Gilman and her book Women and Economics (1898). These theories are used to analyze the text of the play and spot the whereabouts of materialist feminism and how this character is following what is called materialist feminism, even though it was written before the theories. At the end of this study, a clear picture is formed of how Mother Courage truly proved herself worthy of the title “Mother Courage” in a sense of achieving or at least never giving up to create her financial goals to be an independent working mother through the worst possible scenarios.