Feminism and Diversity

The history of female characters in theater before the modern era is very complicated one. Only in modern drama did women take on more significant and positive roles. By an large female characters have been negatively treated. What I failed to mention in my last post which was admittedly a bit scattered is that theater and the arts operates in the context of the time that the theater is created.

How women were treated in those earlier times is consistent with the theater of the day. Women had no rights throughout most of history. In the medieval period they were sometimes burned as witches. Women were just property. Even most royal women could not own property. Male heirs were supreme. In Elizabethan and Restoration and even Victorian England women could not own property. Women who were widowed were assigned an overseer of their husbands property and if they passed the property went to the property overseer and NOT her children. The only way a woman prospered was if she married a man of means. Women have been at the bottom of the totem pole for most of history. Women for the most part have never had the right to vote.

It took 5 decades after the Civil War in the US to get the right to vote. During WWI women protested outside the White house. They were jailed and mistreated. Some were force fed and tortured while on hunger strike. And the Women's Suffrage Amendment passed by ONLY one vote with a last minute change. Even after 5 decades suffrage was facing almost certain failure. And the GOP was against suffrage and too many male Democrats were as well.

I am trying to vastly summarize hundreds of years of history. I hope I am clear enough.