SOURCE: "Top Girls, " in Taking Center Stage: Feminism in Contemporary U.S. Drama, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1991, pp. 101-15.

Brown is an American educator and critic who specializes in feminist critical theory, concentrating on the relationship between gender and class. In the excerpted essay below, she argues that Top Girls is not, as many critics believe, a purely "feminist" drama, but rather a critical examination of the limitations of the women's movement and a call for the audience "to move beyond individual solutions to confront the larger contradictions created by a capitalistic patriarchy. "

Caryl Churchill's play Top Girls opens with a feminist fantasy of the past, a dinner party for extraordinary women from history and fiction, and ends with a young girl's nightmare of the future. The dream of the past reminds us of the historical weight of women's oppression, but also of the futility of individual solutions...