First-wave feminist theatre, 1890-1930

This study explores women's use of theatre in the first-wave feminist struggle for personal and political freedom. The frame of inquiry includes not only their stage dramas, but also the rituals of the women's college, suffrage pageants, the anti-lynching crusade of the NAACP, and the festivals of the Neighborhood Playhouse. Dramatic performances of all kinds provided an ideal way for projecting a new definition of gender, contracted by women and announcing a new presence in civilization. By staging themselves in radical ways, women questioned not only the image of the American Woman, but the language of aesthetics itself. Women dramatists covered extensively are Djuna Barnes, Susan Glaspell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marita Bonner, and Angelina Weld Grimke.