SOURCE: Fowler, Patsy S. “Rejecting the Status Quo: The Attempts of Mary Pix & Susanna Centlivre to Reform Society's Patriarchal Attitudes.” Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research 11, no. 2 (winter 1996): 49-59.

In the following essay, Fowler interprets Centlivre's plays as feminist texts intended to advance the social status of women. Focusing on The Basset Table and The Busie Body, Fowler views Centlivre as the inheritor of a feminist agenda promoted earlier by Aphra Behn as well as the beneficiary of Behn's efforts to create a space for women playwrights.

Aphra Behn may have cracked the glass ceiling of the male-dominated Restoration theatre, but the patriarchal attitudes of English society continued to make survival and success difficult for early eighteenth-century female playwrights. As Paula Backscheider points out, “Whoever controls representation controls identity, history and morality” (83), and until this point, men had been doing mostly all of the writing, thereby controlling cultural...