Introduction

Early American women playwrights wrote on a variety of topics and employed a variety of dramatic methods and techniques-ranging from propaganda plays to social comedies, melodramas and romantic tragedies. Although many American women tried to write for the theater, only a handful of them managed to bring psychological insights of their own gender into their plays and explore new areas of women's lives, alternative social roles and definitions. American women playwrights published in every field of letters: they wrote histories, essays for periodicals, political pamphlets, juvenile literature, translations and adaptations of classic plays and popular novels and, of course, original plays. However, in order to present as full a picture as possible of women's early dramatic writing, it is important to add that American women proved really adept at moral dialogues, pastorals, and dramatic sketches. The woman who dared to aspire to the unconventional role of actress and/or playwright certainly deviated from ideal image of womanly purity, modesty, and religiousness.