Dell'Amico is lecturer in the English Department of California State University, Bakersfield. In this essay, she discusses the feminism of Prida's play.

In 1976, Prida was in Caracas, Venezuela, to report on a theater festival for a magazine. She was struck by the fact that none of the plays she saw addressed a current major area of concern, women's issues, and she decided to write such a play herself on her return to New York City. This play is Beautiful Señoritas.

Beautiful Señoritas explores gender roles and stereotypes as they manifest themselves in Latin American and U.S. Latino cultures. Like so many feminists of the time, Prida is driven to question notions of what women are and how they should behave. In this play, she also looks at ideas about men, masculinity, and the stereotypical concepts of Latins held by non-Latins.

Although Beautiful...