Abstract
Ellen Ecker Dolgin examines four plays from the decade before World War I: The Doctor’s Dilemma , Androcles and the Lion , Pygmalion, and Overruled . In the first three plays, she finds that Shaw warns his audiences and readers of the danger of misalliances that result from the pressure of obligatory matches, when marriage was often the only career choice a woman had for economic survival. Shaw proposed instead a life of hard work and self-fulfillment, which involved much the same choices faced by men. In so doing, Shaw was turning his back on the accepted notions of a woman’s place in marriage. Even in Overruled , a one-act play set in a conventional drawing room, he features wives reflecting the empowerment of the New Woman .
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Dolgin, E.E. (2017). Ruled by Autonomy: Women’s Evolving Marital Choices from the Doctor’s Dilemma (1906) to Pygmalion (1914). In: Gaines, R. (eds) Bernard Shaw's Marriages and Misalliances. Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95170-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95170-3_8
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