ABSTRACT
This volume offers an introduction to the lives and careers of two of the most significant American women playwrights of the modern era: Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell. Glaspell and Treadwell wrote during a time of rapid change in American society, as ideas of progressive modernism challenged and supplanted the Victorian, traditionalist world into which both women were born. Biographically, both women moved from small Midwestern or rural Western locales to become actively engaged in the modernist bohemian culture of New York City, the center of progressivism in politics and art during the first few decades of the twentieth century. As writers, both employed a variety of media – including journalism, fiction, and drama – to examine and redefine women’s roles in modern society, including the exploration of such issues as suffrage, sexual freedom, society’s moral double standard for the sexes, and women’s rights for autonomous identities both within and outside of marriage. Yet their traditional upbringings and subsequent marriages to well-known and sometimes domineering husbands contributed to personal conflicts in their desires for career and family that can be seen in both their own lives and in some of the central female characters of their dramas. At times, Glaspell’s and Treadwell’s search for a sense of community took them to Europe as expatriates and relative outsiders – Glaspell to Delphos, Greece, and Treadwell to Vienna and later Torremolinos, Spain. Finally, both
women survived the deaths of their husbands by many years, later wrote more fiction than drama, and ultimately returned to the United States – Treadwell initially to Newtown, Connecticut, and ultimately to Tucson, Arizona, and Glaspell to Provincetown, Cape Cod.
