Feminist Concerns in Rachel Crother’s Drama
Feminist Concerns in Rachel Crother’s Drama

Summary/Abstract: The present paper focuses on the dramatic work of Rachel Crothers, a famous female American playwright who has provided the American public with significant dramatic works mirroring their own problems and concerns. The realities she portrayed on stage raised the audience‘s awareness of their false mentalities or prejudices that affected the community’s life and needed reformation and change for the better. The name of Rachel Crothers is scarcely known to lots of contemporary readers or theatre goers. However at the beginning of the 20th century she was one of the most prolific and successful American playwrights, theatre directors, producers and actresses. She wrote and produced 37 plays inspired from the American reality, with great appeal to the public. Most of them focused on extremely sensitive issues of her time, mainly related to the inequality of sexes, the double moral standard, the trial marriages, the emancipation of women, the effect of their economic independence on the traditional family as well as other topical matters American society had to cope with. Many of them were made into films produced by famous producers starring famous actors and actresses. Rachel Crothers seems to have reflected the position of women in the United States more accurately than any other dramatist of her time and some of her plays were considered to be real ‘ feminist manifestos’. That is why her name is closely linked with the American feminism and the feminist concerns mentioned above are at the core of all her dramatic creation. It is more than obvious nowadays that the feminist issue –including woman’s identity, her status in society, her feeling of discrimination, of being undervalued, her bad treating and subordination in most societies-continues to arouse interest and to draw the attention of lots of scholars, politicians, and writers throughout the world. In fact, this topic is not at all new; it used to concern people in former times and, no doubt, will keep doing so in future, as long as the matter under discussion has not been completely solved and men and women are “condemned” to live together and share the benefits and ills of human existence, in a world ruled by men.

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