Feminist theatre

Aristotle
• Criteria regarding the nature of dramatic character:
• First and foremost character should be good….goodness is possible
for each class of individuals. For, both a woman and a slave have
their particular virtues,even though the former of these is inferior
to a man and the latter is completely ignorant.
• For it is possible for a person tobe manly in terms of character, but
it is not appropriate for a woman to exhibit either this quality or the
intellectual cleverness that is associated with men.
• The slave has no deliberative faculty at all, the woman has , but it is
without authority.
• The courage of a man is shown in commanding, but of a woman in
obeying……..Silence is a woman’s glory.
 1ST NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE
WOMEN’S LIBERATION MOVEMENT
4 Basic Demands
• -Equal pay
• -Equal education and opportunities
• -24 hour nurseries
• Free contraception and aborting on demand
A document wa s issued declaring that feminism
challenged the following:
• That men are the centre of the universe.
• That women are secondary and dependent on men.
• That the social/sexual division of labour is natural and
unchanging.
Feminist Theatre Study Group 1978
Do the characters in the play imply that:
- Blondes are dumb.
- Wives nag.
- Feminists are frustrated.
- Whores have hearts of gold.
- Mothers –in-law interfere.
- Lesbians are aggressive.
- Intellectual women are frigid.
- Women who enjoy sex are nymphomaniacs.
- Older women are senseless.

The group declared that: We are a group of theatre workers who are tired of
playing cardboard cut-outs. We want theatre managers, directors and writers
to stop producing plays which insult women.
 Feminist Theatre- Dominant Themes
and Ideas
• Feminist playwrights are playwrights , whose art is related to their condition as women,
whether or not theyidentify themselves publically and politically as feminists.
• The characters in their plays are normally women, especially the main characters.
• In their plays women are the central initiators of action and feminist playwrights often use
their own lives as material for their plays.
• Sometimes feminist drama looks at women in history
• And retells their stories from a feminist point of view.
• Many feminist plays exploit the very nature of theatre to demonstrate the distinction
between gender and sexuality. The gender of a character defines not only his or her
biological sexual characteristics, but also implies imaginative and social assumptions about
his/her personalityt, power and place in the world.
• Much feminist drama shows the home and family as a site of political struggle, which is in
essence intricately bound to the political struggle for powere at work.
• Plays with a feminist message urge women torebel against the Interior colonization of male
over female which pervades all societies and religions.
• They also motivate women to reject the clearly defined stereotypes that partriarchal
societies have defined for male and female, regarding temperament, role and status, which
are all learned after birth and are therefore psycho-sexual and socio-sexual in origin
• Many feminist playwrights write on a collaborative basis of collective scripting in
order to avoid an over emphasis on the personal. This kind of flexible scripting
exemplifies the resistance to any form of hierarchy and authoritarian control,
which is exactly what they associate with the male dominated world of theatre.
• There is a great concern for the quality of communication between performers
and the audience and very often theaudience is made to feel responsible for what
is happening on the stage.
• Feminist playwrights use the stage to show that women’s liberation is not a
rejection of family life, but a means totransform and improve it.
• The importance of educationalopportunity and ecomomic independence is
stressed,in order that women may attain transformation and emancipation.
• Much feminist drama looks at the way the feminine is represented in language.
• The majority of feminist playwrights are also socialists and their plays are protests
against inequality and injustice in our society.
• Feminist drama gives the audience a female vision of the world, a world in which
women can only be transformed by resisiting the traditional male-female
relationships.