The New Woman (Which is Not One) in Githa Sowerby's Rutherford and Son

Abstract

Githa Sowerby's 1912 Rutherford and Son is a play in which no one utters the phrase “New Woman”. Yet there is little doubt that this is indeed a “New Woman” play (at the time, the Vote—the newspaper of the Women's Freedom League—suggested that this was a “suffrage” play, though no one used this word either, presumably because it was loaded). Moreover, as this sort of “New Woman” play, Rutherford and Son is curious as it features (unusually for the time) not one, but two New Women: Janet and Mary, respectively the daughter and the daughter-in-law of the family patriarch and tyrant John Rutherford. In a double sense, therefore, there is the New Woman which is not one in Githa Sowerby's Rutherford and Son. As this way of putting it might imply, the idiolect, as well as the feminist theory, of Luce Irigaray—notably, her work in “This Sex Which Is Not One”—is employed throughout this essay as a means of opening out Sowerby's play for discussion, specifically as a form of women's writing. The play itself, successful in its own day but now rather neglected, is seen as an astonishingly forward-thinking work of the Georgian theatre.