Traditional History: A Feminist Deconstruction

Abstract

From a feminist perspective, initial observations about the history of theatre noted the absence of women within the tradition. Since traditional scholarship has focused on evidence related to written texts, the absence of women playwrights became central to early feminist investigations. The fact that there was no significant number of extant texts written by women for the stage until the seventeenth century produced a rather astounding sense of absence in the classical traditions of the theatre. The silence of women’s voices in these traditions led feminist historians who were interested in women playwrights to concentrate on periods in which they did emerge: primarily the seventeenth century in England, the nineteenth century in America and the twentieth century in Europe and America. These studies produced, beginning in the early 1970s, a number of new anthologies of plays by women and biographies of women playwrights.