Reconfigurations of Female Gender Performance and Proto-Radicalism in Rachel Crothers’ A Man’s World
Reconfigurations of Female Gender Performance and Proto-Radicalism in Rachel Crothers’ A Man’s World

Author(s): Furkan Tozan
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, Social Sciences, Psychology, Essay|Book Review |Scientific Life, General Reference Works, Geography, Regional studies, Library and Information Science, Sociology
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: First-wave feminism; American women’s drama; egalitarianism; feminist ethics; sisterhood
Summary/Abstract: The intersection of first-wave feminism and literature has been a well-trodden path in academic scholarship, especially after the hectic and generative political climate of the 1950s and 1960s which saw the first discursively replete emergence of identity politics. Despite electoral and legal gains being the primary goals of first-wave feminist movements in the West, an underlying subtler current co-existed that aimed beyond the explicit agenda of these movements, imagined a fuller realization of gender equality, and in so doing anticipated the radicality of second-wave feminism. Situated in the transitory period before the First World War, Rachel Crothers, one of the earliest female American playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote extensively on the theme of gender and tackled systemic social issues facing women from all walks of life. Her A Man’s World, first produced in 1909, centers upon the female protagonist Frank Ware who has adopted an orphan boy named Kiddie as an act of solidarity with his biological mother Alice Ellery. Alice was disgraced, suffered and died as a result of the embarrassment and abandonment by her then lover, Malcolm Gaskell whom Frank has been inadvertently involved with as a romantic partner. The play follows Frank’s struggles in the turn-of-the-century New York as a single mother and a prototypical modern independent woman. Reaching beyond the general feminist discourse of the period, the unembellished portrayal of a woman who has internalized equality as a core governing value functions to starkly contrast with the traditional modes of gender performance of the pre-war United States. This study argues that A Man’s World conceives—ahead of its time—a unique socio-cultural radicality by offering a defiantly variant woman of principle who refuses to negotiate for anything short of the structural change her convictions envision in the world while heralding the concepts of feminist sisterhood, ethics, and pedagogy that would gain ground decades later.

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