Cynthia Sutherland (Essay Date September 1978)

Sutherland, Cynthia. "American Women Playwrights as Mediators of the 'Woman Problem.'" Modern Drama 21 (September 1978): 319-36.

In the following essay, Sutherland examines a withdrawal from more strident portrayals of feminist concerns in plays of the 1920s, including Zona Gale's Miss Lulu Bett.

Ibsen's Nora shut the door of her "doll's house" in 1879. Among the generation of American women born in the 1870's and 1880's, Zona Gale, Zoe Akins, and Susan Glaspell all won Pulitzer Prizes. Rachel Crothers, the successful dramatist who wrote more than three dozen plays, characterized her own work as "a sort of Comédie Humaine de la Femme." In an interview in 1931 she said: "With few exceptions, every one of my plays has been a social attitude toward women at the moment I wrote it…I[do not] go out stalking the...