Home
LATEST NEWS & EVENTS….
This site is managed by UK charity, Aurora Metro Arts and Media which champions equality, diversity and inclusion through arts and education projects. See more at www.aurorametro.org
To book our exhibition about the Suffragettes for your school or college, contact us at aurorametroartsmedia@gmail.com
We can tailor the exhibition to include suffragettes in your area. The cost is £250.
To get regular updates on what’s happening go to our SuffrageArts Facebook page
SuffrageArts are writers and curators, Susan Croft and Irene Cockroft, authors of Art, Theatre and Women’s Suffrage (Aurora Metro, 2010) and co-curators of the How the Vote Was Won exhibition at Museum of Richmond in 2010.
NEW BOOKS
VOTES FOR WOMEN AND OTHER PLAYS
ISBN 978-1-906582-01-2
PRICE £12.99
BUY HERE
A collection of the best suffrage plays, introduced and set in an historical context by Dr Susan Croft together with an expert chronology of suffrage drama.
The astonishing women involved in the Actresses Franchise League set up their own theatre companies and engaged with the battle for the vote by writing and performing campaigning plays all over the country. They launched themselves onto the political stage with their satirical plays, sketches and monologues whilst at the same time challenging the staid conventions of the Edwardian Theatre of the day. The legacy of their inspiring work to change both theatre and society has survived in the political theatre, agitprop and verbatim theatre we know today.
CONTENTS
Introduction | Plays: Votes for Women (1907) | A Change of Tenant (1908) | At the Gates (1909) | How the Vote was Won (1909) | The Apple (1911) | In the Workhouse (1911) | Jim’s Leg (1913) | Chronology | Bibliography | Universal Suffrage dates | Useful links
THE PLAYS INCLUDED ARE:
Votes for Women by Elizabeth Robins
“The play offers a passionate argument for female suffrage but is much more than propaganda. It is a richly invigorating piece about the interaction of sex and politics…” (recommended by Michael Billington in The Guardian)
A Change of Tenant by Helen Margaret Nightingale
At the Gates by Alice Chapin
How the Vote was Won by Cicely Hamilton and Chris St. John
The Apple by Inez Bensusan
In the Workhouse by Margaret Wynne Nevinson
Jim’s Leg by L.S. Phibbs
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Susan Croft is a writer, historian, curator and researcher. She worked in the USA with the Omaha Magic Theatre in the early 1980s, returning to Britain to work as a dramaturg with small-scale theatre companies and founding New Playwrights Trust, of which she was Director from 1986-89. She taught Creative Arts (Performance) at Nottingham Trent University and then was Senior Research Fellow in Performance Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University to 1996. From 1997-2005 she was Curator of Contemporary Performance at the Theatre Museum where she worked on the National Video Archive of Performance. She also curated four major exhibitions including Let Paul Robeson Sing! and Architects of Fantasy and pioneered a range of initiatives to record the history of black and Asian theatre in Britain.
She has written extensively on women playwrights, including: She Also Wrote Plays: an International Guide to Women Playwrights from the 10th to the 21st Century (Faber and Faber, 2001). She is working on a Critical Bibliography of Plays Published by Women Playwrights in English to 1914 for Manchester University Press and a major anthology Staging the New Woman, with Sherry Engle. She also runs the project Unfinished Histories: Recording the History of Alternative Theatre, with Jessica Higgs, a major initiative to record oral histories and preserve archives of the alternative theatre movement from the 1960s to the 1980s. She lives in London with her partner and two children.
For Aurora Metro Books, her other books are Classic Plays by Women (2010) and Art, Theatre and Women’s Suffrage, written jointly with Irene Cockroft and 50 Women in Theatre ed. Cheryl Robson
About the authors
Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952) born in Louisville, Kentucky, and educated at Putnam Female seminary in Ohio she became an actress with the Boston Museum Company, where she played almost three hundred parts in Boston and on tour. In 1885, she married an actor, George Parks, who killed himself two years later. In 1889, Robins moved to London where she established herself as a major actress and soon became active in the movement to bring Ibsen’s plays to Britain, working with her close friend the critic William Archer. In Ibsen and the Actress (1928), Robins writes of the life-changing experience of seeing A Doll’s House and her determination, with fellow American actress Marion Lea, to produce Hedda Gabler themselves when the managers expressed indifference and loathing towards it. She performed leading roles in many Ibsen plays and produced the work of other playwrights including fellow Norwegian Alfhild Agrell’s Karin, (Vaudeville, 1892) translated by Florence Bell. Bell was Robins’ close friend and coauthor on the controversial play Alan’s Wife (1893), dealing with infanticide, which they produced and published anonymously.
Fifteen novels followed, many with theatrical themes (some under thepseudonym C.E. Raimond) including The Coming Woman (1892), George Mandeville’s Husband (1894), and The Open Door (1898). Several were adapted for the stage or from her stage plays, like The Convert, based on Votes For Women, which was one of the first plays directly about the suffrage campaign in Britain (both 1907).
Robins was a prominent member of the WSPU and first President of the WWSL. She lived for many years with Octavia Wilberforce, the doctor andfeminist, with whom she adopted a child.
In 1913, many of her speeches, lectures and articles on the Suffrage Movement were published in volume form as Way Stations. These and many of her novels are now available online. Later, Theatre and Friendship, her correspondence with Henry James was published. Further (unpublished) plays include: Mirkwater, The Silver Lotus (1895) Benvenuto Cellini (1899/1900), Judith, (c1906), The Bowarra (1909) and Where Are You Going To…?, originally written for Bensusan’s Women’s Theatre (also known as My Little Sister), Evangeline (1914) and The Secret that Was Kept or Fear ( Robins’ unpublished works are in the New York University Fales Library).
Helen Margaret Nightingale (?-1921) Little is known of Nightingale apart from her two romantic novels Savile Gilchrist M.D. (1906) and The Choir at Newcommon Road (1909) together with the collected poems The Men in Blue and Other Poems, which were published in her memory in Reigate in 1922. Many of the poems were first published in the ‘Gazette of the 3rd L.G.H’, most deal with the war, including one titled ‘Demobilised’, which suggests that Nightingale worked as a nursing auxiliary:
“Never more
Shall stand outside the Matron’s door,
And wonder if my cap is straight”
Two other poems refer to the nursing and recovery of her (female) lover.
A Change of Tenant was published with the author accredited as a ‘Miss H. M. Nightingale’, but it has often gone unrecognised. It was published by the Woman Citizen Publishing Company and is undated though the Bodleian Library gives it as 1908. Originally entered as a work by ‘anonymous’ at The British Library and recorded with the author as H. M. Nightingale in The Players Library (British Drama League,1950).
The play was toured by the AFL in 1910 and produced by other suffrage organisations. Elizabeth Crawford records that the feminist and novelist Isabella Ford performed in a production of A Change of Tenant at the Leeds Women’s Suffrage Society. The AFL Report of 1909-1910 lists productions of A Change of Tenant for the Sevenoaks Branch of the National Union for Women’s Suffrage, (along with Cicely Hamilton’s Pot and Kettle and How the Vote was Won) and another production at Battersea Arts Centre. On 21st April 1911, it was performed in aid of the NUWS, with Graham Moffat’s The Maid and the Magistrate.
see Spotlight On…Helen Margaret Nightingale (1883-1921) (francesca-scriblerus.blogspot.com)
Alice Chapin (1858-1924) born at Keene, New Hampshire, Chapin became an actress and spent her career partly in the USA, and partly in Britain. She married H.M. Ferris in 1885, by whom she had a daughter, Elsie, a suffrage activist and a son, actor/playwright Harold Chapin with whom she wrote A Knight Errant (Grand, Falkirk, 1906). She also co-wrote plays with others including Shame (1892) and the extravaganza Dresden China (both with E.H.C. Oliphant, both Vaudeville, 1892), The Happy Medium (with P. Gaye, Ladbroke Hall, 1909) and most interestingly Outlawed (Court, 1911) a dramatisation with Mabel Collins of Collins’ and Charlotte Despard’s suffrage novel of the same name. Her other plays included The Wrong Legs (Ilkeston, 1896); Sorrowful Satan or Lucifer’s Match (Kentish Town, 1897); A Woman’s Sacrifice (St George’s Hall, 1899) and A Modern Medea (Rehearsal Theatre, 1910) directed by Edith Craig. Chapin was a suffrage activist and dedicated member of the WFL and an early and committed member of the AFL.
Accounts in the suffrage press or AFL reports mention her chairing meetings such as that in Victoria Park, Manchester when the “platform was singled out by a band of rowdies, and the speakers not given a hearing”, addressing a meeting in Edinburgh and chairing three meetings for the AFL in Hyde Park during 1913. A one-page version of her play appears in The Vote (16 Dec, 1909) before its pamphlet publication by the Woman Citizen Publishing Society.
In 1909, at the age of 51, she was arrested for pouring acid into ballot boxes, together with her fellow-protester, Alison Neilans[1]. Only Chapin was found guilty, as the acid slightly splashed and “injured” one of the tellers. Chapin was sentenced to imprisonment for four months. She later returned to the USA for some years and died in Keene.
[1] See The Ballot Box Protest, and the trial of Mrs Chapin and Miss Neilans, at the Central Criminal Court (Miss Neilans’ Defence) London: Women’s Freedom League, 1911.
Cicely Hamilton (1872-1952) was the daughter of an army officer, Denzill Hamill, and born in London. Her mother, Maude, died (or disappeared, Hamilton is evasive in her autobiography, Life Errant, 1935) when she was young and Cicely helped bring up and later support her younger brothers and sisters in foster-homes and boarding with relatives while their father served abroad. After a brief stint as a pupil-teacher, she became an actress, touring throughout the provinces, and began writing short popular fiction alongside acting and in 1906, her first play The Sixth Commandment was produced at Wyndham’s in London. It was followed by The Sergeant of Hussars, Play Actors, 1907. In 1908 her Diana of Dobson’s was produced by Lena Ashwell at the Kingsway Theatre. In the style of the “new drama” of Shaw, Granville-Barker, Galsworthy and others, it introduced themes later developed in her book, Marriage as Trade (1909), an important feminist analysis of the marriage market, combining realism and comedy in addressing problems of the economic subjugation and the denigration of single women, subjects. It was highly successful, enjoying a long run, extensive tours and a series of revivals. Hamilton put her public recognition to the service of the suffrage campaign, joining the WSPU and becoming a speaker at rallies and co-founding WWSL with Bessie Hatton and writing three classics of the suffrage campaign: the play How The Vote Was Won, with Chris St John, the words to her friend, Ethel Smyth’s anthem, “March of the Women” and A Pageant of Women (AFL, Scala, Nov 1909.
Her later plays included numerous one-acts such as Mrs Vance (1907) and Just To Get Married (1910), and the unpublished The Pot and the Kettle (with St John, AFL, 1909), The Home Coming (1910) and The Cutting of the Knot (Glasgow Royal, 1911Constant Husband (1912), Lady Noggs (1913) and the same year Phyl, which enjoyed the distinction of being banned by the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University[1]. At the start of the War, Hamilton joined the Scottish Women’s Hospitals Organisation as a hospital administrator and went on to establish concert parties and organise theatre performances for the troops. Her nativity play The Child in Flanders is set in the trenches. She continued writing after the War as a successful journalist, helping found the feminist magazine Time and Tide, with Rebecca West, Winifred Holtby and others, and novelist: William: an Englishman (1919) A Matter of Money, Full Stop which includes suffrage scenes). She also produced non-fiction works, including a history of the Old Vic with Lillian Baylis, an autobiography Her last plays, such as The Old Adam, focus on the devastation of war, and the indifference of women who tried to ignore its horrors.
[1] For publication details see Croft, 2001 or Whitelaw
Christopher St John (1871-1960) Christabel Marshall assumed this name upon her conversion to Catholicism and because she felt herself better suited to a man’s name. She was the youngest of nine children, daughter of banker Hugh Graham Marshall and novelist, Emma Marshall who supported the family by historical fiction-writing after the bank failed. Chris grew up in the West Country, went to Oxford University and then worked as Secretary to Lady Randolph Churchill. In 1899 she met Ellen Terry and fell in love with Terry’s daughter, Edith (Edy) Craig.
The two set up house together in Smith Square, becoming active members of the suffrage movement. They also provided a retreat and safe-house for other women at their home, the Priest’s House, at Smallhythe, Kent where they were later joined by the visual artist Claire ‘Tony’ Atwood. Their circle grew to include other lesbians such as Vita Sackville-West, whose Sissinghurst home was close by, Gabrielle Enthoven, (whose theatre collection formed the basis of the Theatre Museum’s Collection now in the V&A) and Radclyffe Hall.
With Edith Craig, she established the Pioneer Players, an innovative theatre company which produced many of Chris’s plays, as well as plays by other feminist writers and experimental works from the European repertoire.
St John’s numerous plays and translations, largely unpublished include The Decision (1906); The Wilson Trial (1909); Eriksson’s Wife (Royalty, 1904), Macrena (1912,) The First Actress (1911), The Coronation (1912, with Charles Thursby), and The Plays of Roswitha (1923), the tenth century nun and first woman playwright. St John also edited Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, wrote music and dramatic criticism, in particular for Time and Tide and The Lady, and a biography of the composer and feminist, Ethel Smyth.
Inez Bensusan (1871-1967) the eldest of ten children, she was born in Sydney, Australia into a wealthy Jewish family, eight of whom survived. She appears to have wanted to act from her youth, staging recitals and entertainments for the community. Sometime after 1893 she emigrated to Britain, travelling via South Africa.
Best known for her work as journalist, writer and campaigner for women’s suffrage, she was active in Australia and New Zealand Women Voters and the Jewish League for Women’s Suffrage, serving on its Executive Committee. Most centrally she made a vital contribution to the work of the AFL, developing and running the Play Department and working in conjunction with the WWSL to encourage and commission women to write plays in support of women’s suffrage. Bensusan also performed with and was on the Council of the Play Actors.
Later, she ventured into film, writing and starring in True Womanhood (1911), playing a starving woman sweatshop worker, saved from the workhouse by a suffragette fairy godmother (it also featured Decima Moore and Auriol Lee). In 1913, Bensusan went on to set up the Women’s Theatre, launched at the Coronet Theatre that December, which aimed to establish a permanent season of work dealing with women’s issues. She played the grandmother in Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot (Court, 1914) and in 1916 produced and performed in Jennie (Mrs Herbert D.) Cohen’s The Lonely Festival as part of an All Jewish Matinee.
During the Great War she worked with the first Women’s Theatre Company to perform for the Army of Occupation in Cologne and then with the British Rhine Army Dramatic Company for three and a half years. She later converted to Christian Science and became active in the Women’s Institute and on issues of child welfare. She maintained her involvement in small-scale and experimental companies serving on the committee of The 1930s Players and, as late as 1951, appearing in a House of Arts Drama Circle triple-bill, at Chiswick Town Hall.
Margaret Wynne Nevinson (1858-1932) grew up in a Welsh-speaking vicarage. She took a degree at St Andrew’s University and then travelled and taught before marrying the journalist and Manchester Guardian war correspondent Henry Woodd Nevinson in 1884. They worked together in an East End settlement before moving to Hampstead where she worked as a journalist.
She served for 25 years as a school manager and later Poor Law Guardian and Justice of the Peace. She was active in the WSPU, the Tax Resistance League and especially the Women’s Freedom League who published her pamphlets Ancient Suffragettes (1911) and Five Year’s Struggle for Freedom: a history of the suffrage movement (1908-1912).
Her husband was also active in the Suffrage Movement, becoming a founder of the Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement for which he wrote at least one dramatic sketch. Margaret Wynne Nevinson spoke several times at AFL events including on Women Under the Poor Law.
Her collection of short pieces, originally published in newspapers and journals, Workhouse Characters, based on interviews with sailors, drunks, dossers and attempted suicides, some of which in are in the form of dramatic monologues, was published in 1918. In 1922 she wrote Fragments of Life, a further volume of short autobiographical pieces and stories on social issues, and published her memoirs, Life’s Fitful Fever in 1926.
After Margaret’s death her husband remarried to her close friend and prominent suffragist, Evelyn Sharp.
L.S. Phibbs (Dates unknown) No information has been traced about L.S. Phibbs though she may well be the same person as Mrs Harlow Phibbs, who wrote another AFL piece, The Mothers’ Meeting. This play too is a monologue about a workingclass woman, spoken by Mrs Puckle who, in search of the mothers’ meeting of the title, stumbles instead on an anti-suffrage meeting. There, she becomes so outraged by the absurdities of Lady Clementina Pettigrew’s speech that she stands up and tells her that she’s talking nonsense and fills her in on the realities of life – the hardship and suffering women undergo equally with men and she finds herself condemning the iniquities of taxation without representation.
The working-class woman who trounces the upper-class anti-suffrage woman was a favourite device of AFL plays (see also Glover) though it is probable that Phibbs, like most other AFL playwrights, was herself middle-class.
A further one-act play by Mrs Phibbs, The Rack, was presented at the Rehearsal Theatre in 1912 with Madeleine Lucette Ryley[1] in the cast.
[1]Ryley was a Vice-President of the AFL, prominent actress and playwright with a career in both Britain and the US. See Engle 2007 for reprinted interview with Ryley from The Vote.
REVIEWS
by Naomi Paxton
for A Journal of Cultural Materialism
No. 15 (2017), pp. 97-99 (3 pages)
Published By: Raymond Williams Society
CLASSIC PLAYS BY WOMEN FROM 1600-2000
Essential resource for libraries, schools and colleges.
Staged in theatres by successive generations and proving relevant to contemporary audiences, the plays demonstrate the wit, theatrical skill and innovation of their creators in exploring timeless topics from marriage, morality and money to class conflict, rage and sexual desire. An essential resource for students, playwrights, colleges, universities and libraries, this collection also provides theatres with the opportunity to programme a range of theatrical classics by women. Plays from: Hroswitha’s Paphnutius (extract); Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam(extract); Aphra Behn’s The Rover; Susanna Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke For A Wife; Joanna Baillie’s De Montfort; Githa Sowerby’s Rutherford and Son; Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (extract); Marie Jones’ Stones in his Pockets.
ISBN 978-1-906582-00-5
£16.99
BUY HERE
CONTENTS
Paphnutius (extract) by Hrotswitha | The Tragedy of Mariam (extract) by Elizabeth Cary | The Rover by Aphra Behn | A Bold Stroke for a Wife by Susanna Centlivre | De Monfort by Joanna Baillie | Rutherford and Son by Githa Sowerby | The Chalk Garden by Enid Bagnold | Top Girls (extract) by Caryl Churchill | Stones in his Pocket by Marie Jones
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Hrotswitha (935-c1002) Born into German nobility and educated in the Benedictine convent at Gandersheim, famous for its piety and learning, where her special teacher was Gerberg, a niece of Otto I. She was a highly accomplished woman, and became the abbess of Gandersheim (959-1001). She later became Canonness. Her works draw on the writings of the Church fathers, the Apocrypha and show familiarity with classical texts by Plautus, Ovid, Virgil and Ovid as well as Terence. Hrotswitha’s works, rediscovered in a manuscript volume in the 15th century include three books: one of legends and epic poems, one of historical writings – including a history of her religious order, and a volume of six plays: Dulcitius, Sapienta, Abraham, Callimachus, Paphnutius and Gallicanus. The first published translations in English appeared in 1923 when three different translators brought out versions including Christopher St John’s The Plays of Roswitha.
Elizabeth Tanfield Cary (1585-1639) was born into the Tanfield family at Burford Priory in Oxfordshire. Brought up strictly, she learnt Latin and Hebrew and modern languages. Forbidden further learning, she turned to the servants and ran up a large bill paying them to smuggle her candles for secret reading. She was married at 15 to Henry Cary, Lord Falkland and bore him 11 children, though she went through deep depression during the pregnancies. She brought up her children with a strong reverence for their father, to whom she also strove to be obedient, subordinating her own wishes and beliefs to his. However in 1626, unable to deny her convictions further, she converted to Catholicism, remaining unwavering despite Cary’s removal of the children from her, his bitter recriminations and financial pressure. Through these hardships she continued to write as she had throughout her marriage, producing many translations of Catholic works. She was gradually reunited with her seven surviving children, following Henry’s death. Two of her sons became priests, four daughters became nuns and one, Anne, wrote her mother’s biography. Cary is also supposed to have written a verse tragedy of Tamberlaine now lost, but in 1627 did write The History of Edward II, formerly ascribed to Henry Cary, a chronicle with dramatic sections, notable for its sympathetic presentation of Queen Isabel, who was neglected by her husband for his homosexual lover Gaveston.
Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was born n Canterbury, probably daughter to Bartholomew Johnson and Elizabeth Denham (though accounts differ, and much of her early history has been reconstructed on the basis of conflicting versions that have come down of her) and the foster sister of Thomas Culpeper in whose house she may have been educated. There seems to have been a close relation between her family and that of Lord Willoughby, Governor of Surinam. Her father travelled to the colony in 1663, taking his family with him. Behn claimed to have witnessed the slave rebellion there and its barbarous crushing, which she wrote about many years later in the novel Oroonoko (1688), (dramatized by Thomas Southerne in 1695).
She returned to England in 1664 where she apparently married the Dutch merchant, whose name she kept and who probably died in the Great Plague of 1666. Aphra Behn lived out the rest of her life as a widow. That same year, she went to Holland to spy for Charles II, a job she undertook to support herself, sending back useful information about a planned Dutch invasion, under the code name, Astrea, later her pseudonym.
She went unpaid for her activities and, on her return to England, was thrown in jail for debt. Her career as the first woman to make a living from writing came from being “Forced to write for Bread and not ashamed to owne it”. She also produced novels such as Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684-7), a romance in verse and prose A Voyage to the Island of Love (1684); Poems on Several Occasions (1684) and translations of authors including Ovid and Sappho. Her plays include: Abdelazar (1677); The Rover (Part 1, 1677); The False Count (1682); The Lucky Chance (1686); The Widow Ranter (1690); The Forced Marriage (1671); The Dutch Lover (1673); The Debauchee (1677); Sir Patient Fancy (1678); The Feigned Courtesans (1679); The Rover (Part 2, 1681); The Roundheads (1682); and The City Heiress (1682).
Susanna Centlivre (1667-1723) Accounts of Susanna Centlivre’s early life vary. Some describe her as daughter to a Rawkins, some a Freeman, some have her born poor, others, a gentlewoman of Lincolnshire stock, the daughter of a Parliamentarian whose estate was confiscated after the Restoration. (She frequently returned to Holbeach in Lincolnshire in later life.)
She certainly learnt some Latin as well as French, Dutch and Spanish. She may have run away from home at the age of 14, either with strolling players or with Anthony Hammond, a Cambridge undergraduate, who kept her dressed as a boy, pretended she was his young cousin and taught her swordplay, logic and rhetoric, until questions began to be asked about their relationship.
She apparently married a man called Fox when she was 16, but he died within the year and she remarried (to an officer named Carroll and published her earlier work as by Susannah Carroll after he was killed in a duel.) While working as an actress, famous for breeches parts, she met and married Joseph Centlivre, principal cook to Queen Anne.
She also published Familiar and Courtly Letters Written by Monsieur Voiture and other volumes of letters, poems including contributing to a collection of elegies on Dryden’s death and possibly contributed to The Female Tatler. She enjoyed a wide circle of friends including the playwrights known as the ‘Female Wits’ – Catherine Trotter, Mary Pix and Delariviere Manley, as well as George Farquhar, Nicolas Rowe and Sir Richard Steele.
Based on the number of performances of her work, Centlivre can be viewed as one of the most successful British dramatists of all time with her comic intrigues proving enduringly popular until the twentieth century. Her plays include: The Busy Body (1710) which had over 400 performances and was republished many times during the next century; The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714) a favourite of Garrick; The Gamester (1705); The Bassett Table (1706); Love at a Venture (1706); The Platonic Lady (1707); A Bickerstaff’s Burial (1710); Marplot (1711); A Gotham Election (1715); A Wife Well Manag’d (1715); The Cruel Gift (1717) and The Artifice (1723).
A Bold Stroke For A Wife was successfully produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1718 and was revived recently in Chicago as part of The Alcyone Festival 2008 which staged plays by women ranging over nearly 1000 years.
Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) A Scottish poet and playwright, she was born at Bothwell, Lanarkshire, the third of three children of Dorothea (Hunter) and James Baillie, a junior minister at Hamilton, who later became Professor of Divinity at Glasgow University, a distant, undemonstrative father. As a child she was said to have been a tomboy, who loved outdoor sports, and though not studious, was known for her ability to make up stories and poems. She was later sent to boarding-school in Glasgow where she wrote plays and stage-managed theatricals.
After her father’s death, her uncle, Dr George Hunter, became the children’s guardian and on Hunter’s death, Joanna’s brother Matthew, who had also trained as a doctor, inherited a house in London, requiring the family to move south to Hampstead. Joanna is now recognized as an influence on her literary contemporaries such as Byron, Wordsworth, Scott and Shelley.
She published Fugitive Verses in 1790 and in 1798 the first volume of A Series of Plays, anonymously. They were well-received, the majority of reviewers assuming the author was a man. De Monfort was produced at Drury Lane where it ran for only 8 performances. It was recently revived at The Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, England in May, 2008.
“Joanna Baillie’s 1798 tragedy was a big hit in its day and a starring vehicle for both John Philip Kemble and Edmund Kean, and you can see why. Its central character gets to suffer and then rise above his suffering in an attempt to be honourable and then sink into madness and then be overwhelmed by guilt … And even if such melodramatic excess is not to most modern tastes, and … (despite what I assume is extensive cutting) it all goes on a bit too long, still we once again must thank the Orange Tree for rediscovering a lost play and re-introducing us to a lost playwright of unquestionable power.” www.theatreguidelondon.co.uk
Githa Sowerby (1876-1970) was born and grew up at Low Fell, Gateshead and later at Chollerton, Northumberland. She was the daughter of glass manufacturer John G. Sowerby, whose Gateshead based company, Sowerby and Co. had been passed down from his father and grandfather. In 1896, following financial problems and clashes with the Company Directors, the Sowerbys moved south to Colchester.
Githa was the second of five daughters and had one brother, the eldest child, John Lawrence. Githa moved to London in 1905 where she became active in the Fabian Society and wrote short stories and children’s books illustrated by her sister Millicent including a series of Little Plays for Little People (1910).
In 1912, aged 36, she married Major John Kendall (1869-1952) a poet, playwright and journalist, who had served in the Indian army. Her other plays include the one-act Before Breakfast (published,1913); Jinny (unpublished, 1914); a revised A Man and Some Women (unpublished, 1914); Sheila (unpublished, 1917); The Stepmother (1924, published by The Women’s Press in Toronto, 2008, alongside a revival directed by Joanna Falk for The Shaw Festival) and The Policeman’s Whistle (unpublished, 1934).
Rutherford and Son opened at The Royal Court Theatre in 1912, receiving considerable acclaim from the critics who assumed the author to be male. It later transferred to the West End and New York. It has since been translated into many languages.
It was revived for Northern Stage in Newcastle in 2009, with a production directed by Richard Beecham.
Enid Bagnold (1889-1981) the daughter of an army officer father, Bagnold was born in Kent but spent part of her childhood in Jamaica. She grew up in an artistic upper-class environment and later studied art at the Walter Sickert School of Art. She worked as a nurse in World War I but was highly critical of the hospital administration and wrote about it in Diary Without Dates (1917). She married Sir Roderick Jones, the Head of Reuters News Agency in 1920, moved to Rottingdean in Kent and had four children.
Bagnold’s biggest theatrical success was her adaptation of her novel National Velvet, later filmed with Elizabeth Taylor.
Besides The Chalk Garden, eight of her plays were performed including: Lottie Dundass (1942); Poor Judas (1951); Gertie (or Little Idiot, 1952); The Last Joke (1960); The Chinese Prime Minister (1964); Call Me Jacky (1967) and A Matter of Gravity (1978). She also wrote poetry and a number of novels including The Difficulty of Getting Married (1924) and notably The Squire (1938).
Her great grand-daughter, Samantha Cameron, is married to the leader of the UK Conservative Party, David Cameron.
Caryl Churchill (1938- ) born in London, Churchill grew up in the Lake District and in Canada before studying English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She began writing in the 1960s, with student productions of her early plays and then radio plays for the BBC, while raising her three sons.
Churchill’s stage works developed during the upsurge of alternative theatre companies of the late 1970s and she served as resident dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre from 1974-1975. Many plays were developed through workshops with feminist company Monstrous Regiment, such as Vinegar Tom (1976) and particularly the new writing collective, Joint Stock Theatre Company. Some of her plays were scripted as part of a company devising process, such as Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976); Cloud Nine (1979); Fen (1983), working in particular with director Max Stafford-Clark.
Open to experiment with form, her work has encompassed collaborations with opera and dance companies like Second Stride, such as Lives of the Great Poisoners (1991).
Other plays include: Owners (1972); Traps (1978); Objections to Sex and Violence (1975); Serious Money (1987); Softcops (1984); Hot Fudge (1989);The Skriker (1994); Blue Heart (1997); Far Away (2000); A Number (2002) and Drunk Enough To Say I Love You (2006).
In 1982, Churchill won an Obie Award for Playwriting for Top Girls and in 1983 Top Girls was the runner-up for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Top Girls has been widely performed, published and translated and is now studied as part of the National Curriculum.
Polly Stenham, playwright:
“She was a big inspiration to me in terms of writing. I first came across her when they did Top Girls at school. I was about 14, and I thought: “What the f***’s this? This is brilliant.” … I think that was my first introduction to how far you could go.’
“Why Caryl Churchill is the Top Girl” The Times, September 1st, 2008
Marie Jones (1951- ) an actress and playwright based in Belfast. Born into a working class Protestant family, Jones left school at 15 and worked as an actress for several years before turning her hand to writing.
She co-founded Charabanc Theatre Company, an all-women touring group which was set up to address the lack of roles for women, and began writing as part of the group, contributing to plays like Lay Up Your Ends (1983), based on a 1911 strike by mill girls, Oul Delf and False Teeth (1984), on women’s post-World War II hopes for a better life, Gold in the Streets (1986), and Somewhere over the Balcony, on life in the notorious Divis flats (1987). She remained with Charabanc until 1990 when she left and in 1991 co-founded DubbelJoint Theatre group.
She has also written extensively for Replay Theatre Company including Under Napoleon’s Nose (1988) as well as Stones in His Pockets. Other plays in a prolific career include The Hamster Wheel (1990); A Night in November (1994) and the highly successful Women on the Verge of HRT (1996) as well as community plays like Weddin’s, Wee’ins and Wakes and the musical, The Chosen Room (2008).
She has written extensively for radio and TV including: Tribes (1990); Fighting the Shadows (1992); Wingnut and the Sprog (1994); and the adaptation of her play, The Hamster Wheel (1991).
Stones in his Pockets received an Olivier Award and an Evening Standard Award for Best New Comedy in 2001. Marie Jones has received the John Hewitt Award for her outstanding contribution to the cultural debate in Northern Ireland, a Special Judges Award at the Belfast Arts Awards in 2000 and an OBE in 2002.
REVIEWS ****
In her introduction to this collection of plays by female dramatists spanning four centuries, from 1600 to 2000, Susan Croft, a theatre historian, discusses why she believes it necessary to group these plays together at all. There is still an issue of visibility when it comes to writing by women, a lack of balance. She commends the work of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond and its continued efforts in resurrecting neglected plays and celebrating the talents of writers like Susan Glaspell, but cites them as a welcome exception to the usual way of things. She holds up the fact that Rebecca Lenkiewicz s 2008 play, Her Naked Skin, was the first play by a woman to be produced on the National Theatre s Olivier stage as a more familiar situation when it comes to the staging of work by women writers. –Exeunt Magazine
Though Croft only skims the surface of the discussion of what constitutes a canonical text there s a lengthier and meatier debate to be had about that her selected plays demonstrate the diversity of women’s writing, the richness of material out there, while also celebrating particular milestones. In this light she begins well before 1600 with an extract of Paphnuitus, a work by the medieval abbess Hrotswitha. Writing in the 10th century, her status as the earliest known woman writer for the stage has made her an iconic figure and Croft includes her as a torch-bearer for things to come. She follows this with an extract of Elizabeth Cary s The Tragedy of Marian, the first original published play by a woman, touching on the argument that this closet-drama has the feel of something written with a wider audience in mind. –Natasha Tripney
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Susan Croft is a writer, historian, curator and researcher. She worked in the USA with the Omaha Magic Theatre in the early 1980s, returning to Britain to work as a dramaturg with small-scale theatre companies and founding New Playwrights Trust, of which she was Director from 1986-89. She taught Creative Arts (Performance) at Nottingham Trent University and then was Senior Research Fellow in Performance Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University to 1996. From 1997-2005 she was Curator of Contemporary Performance at the Theatre Museum in London where she worked on the National Video Archive of Performance. She also curated four major exhibitions including Let Paul Robeson Sing! and Architects of Fantasy and pioneered a range of initiatives to record the history of black and Asian theatre in Britain. She has written extensively on women playwrights, including: She Also Wrote Plays: an International Guide to Women Playwrights from the 10th to the 21st Century (Faber and Faber, 2001). She is working on a Critical Bibliography of Plays Published by Women Playwrights in English to 1914 for Manchester University Press and a major anthology Staging the New Woman, with Sherry Engle. She also runs the project Unfinished Histories: Recording the History of Alternative Theatre, with Jessica Higgs, a major initiative to record oral histories and preserve archives of the alternative theatre movement from the 1960s to the 1980s. See www.susan.croft.btinternet.co.uk for further details. She lives in London with her partner and two children. Dr Susan Croft has done extensive research and published widely on women playwrights. Her work includes Classic Plays by Women (Aurora Metro Books, 2010); Art, Theatre and Women’s Suffrage, written jointly with Irene Cockroft (Aurora Metro Books, 2010.); Votes for Women and Other Plays (Aurora Metro Books, 2009) and She Also Wrote Plays (Faber 2001).
An international collection of dramatic works across several generations of women playwrights including plays from the US, UK, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and Canada. It includes plays by established writers such as Elizabeth Baker, Catherine Dawson-Scott, Ruth Draper, Miles Franklin, Amy Levy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Katherine Mansfield as well as lesser-known writers. Three thematic sections looks at aspiration to education and the world of work, social activism for the vote, workers’ rights, temperance and other issues, and lighter satirical works about contemporary fads and fashions.
Edited by Sherry Engle and Susan Croft
Available now as an e-book and in print ISBN 978-1-4917-6804-4
Published by iUniverse, 2015
Readings and talks available, please email: secroft@btinternet.com
SCROLL DOWN FOR DETAILS OF EARLIER WORK
EARLIER EVENTS
For further information see Aurora Metro Facebook or web site
Or go to Chichester Cinema and for events around the country see The Time is Now
Please email if you have any new events or other news related to the arts and women’s suffrage by clicking here
This project is currently without funding so is only updated intermittently – so if you contact us, please be patient!
We are hoping to do a project in 2015 looking at suffrage art and theatre in selected other London boroughs, including Camden.
If you would like to help with a donation towards this or would like to know more, please contact here
A variety of events took place in 2010 and afterwards to mark the exhibition How the Vote Was Won: Art, Theatre and Women’s Suffrage at the Museum of Richmond
These included:
the inaugural meeting of:
Feminist History Research Network (Richmond)
Wednesday 23rd June, 2010 6 – 7.30 pm
at the Museum of Richmond, Old Town Hall, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond
It is:
– a group for anyone interested or actively involved in investigating women’s history, especially the history of women’s suffrage movement in Richmond and its neighbouring boroughs.
– a grassroots history network designed to share information and enthusiasms, contacts and support.
If you are interested in attending, please come along to our initial meeting.
So we can have an idea of numbers, please call Pauline to confirm attendance on 020 8948 7179.
Suffragettes in Richmond Walk
Tuesday 17th August, 2010 1pm
Meeting Point: Richmond Station, upper concourse.
Tickets £3. Book on 020 8332 1141
Forgotten Plays of the Women’s Suffrage Movement
A reading of three little-known plays connected to the Actresses’ Franchise League and its members.
Women In Theatre Talk
Speakers include writer Winsome Pinnock and academic Dr Susan Croft.
Book Launch
Classic Plays By Women ed. Susan Croft and
Art Theatre and Women’s Suffrage
by Irene Cockroft and Susan Croft
Saturday 4th September, 2010 11am
Orange Tree Theatre
1 Clarence Street, Richmond, TW9 2SA
www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk
£10 / £8 concs.
Box Office 020 8940 3633
How The Vote Was Won:
Exhibition: The Museum of Richmond
Old Town Hall, Richmond, Surrey TW9 1TP
1st May – 4th Sept 2010
Free entry
020 8332 1141
This exhibition celebrates the incredible artistic and political work of the suffragettes, how the movement inspired the work of artists, writers and theatre-makers, as well as the involvement of local people in the suffrage movement.
Download press release for further details
Download review
Exhibition Panel Resources
‘How The Vote Was Won’ follow up workshops for schools and community groups‘
We offer a range of workshops adapted to the age and ability of the class. The workshops can be based on creative writing, drama or the discovery of local history. Workshops are led by a qualified and experienced teacher who has already delivered many successful workshops in the borough to schools and community groups.
- Workshops for 10 – 18 year olds
- 20 – 40 students per session
- Cost £100 or subsidised
- Subjects involved: history, citizenship, politics, feminism, personal & social health, relationships.
Download our education leaflet for further details
To book a workshop contact info@aurorametro.com or 020 3261 0000
‘A Suffragette in the Family’
Presentation by Peter Barratt
&
‘Women’s Poetry in the Great War’
Lecture by Audrey Ardern-Jones
Featuring flautist Rachel Aukett
Date: Thursday 8th July at 7:30pm
Venue: The Library Room, Old Town Hall, Whitaker Avenue, Richmond, TW9 1TP
Tickets: £5 / £3 concs
Tel: 020 3261 0000
Or send SAE, with cheque payable to ‘Aurora Metro Arts & Media Ltd’ to:
67 Grove Ave, Twickenham, TW1 4HX
http://www.alicesuffragette.co.uk/
Download press release for further details
‘Art, Theatre and Women’s Suffrage’
by Irene Cockroft and Susan Croft
A new book to accompany the ‘How The Vote Was Won’ exhibition by curators Irene Cockroft, writer, lecturer and specialist in Arts and Crafts of the 19th & 20th centuries and Dr Susan Croft, writer, academic and formerly Contemporary Curator at the Theatre Museum.
Publication date July 2010
For a review copy please contact Cheryl Robson