Roots and Contexts

Abstract

Feminist drama emerged as a distinct theatrical genre in the late 1960s in both Britain and the United States. Although plays about women have existed since the origins of drama, and plays by women have been written and performed in the Western world at least since Sappho, it was not until the last decade that playwrights in significant numbers became self-consciously concerned about the presence — or absence — of women as women on stage. Parented by the women’s movement and the ‘new theatre’, feminist drama had its most immediate roots in the political and aesthetic disruptions of the 1960s. As the contemporary playwright Honor Moore has remarked, whether or not they identify themselves publicly and politically as ‘feminists’, there are now playwrights whose ‘art is related to their condition as women’.¹ The plays created in the context of that recognition do not just mirror social change but assert a new aesthetic based on the transformation rather than the recognition of persons.