ABSTRACT
In most critical discussions of the first phase of Alice Childress's writing career, the period between 1949 and 1968, the interracial conflicts in her works overshadow and displace the gender conflicts. As gendered texts, the scripts of Florence and Wedding Band delineate through characterization, plot, and theme socio-psychological complexities uniquely female in insight and experience. Childress, politically aware of the racial, social, and power dissonance present among women, deliberately enacts the black woman, white woman segregated sisterhood dialectic as her first frontier for dramatic exploration. Mrs. Carter invokes white patriarchal and racial authority by implying that a white male, in this case her brother, knows more about the emotions and experiences of black people in general and a black woman in particular than a black woman does. A continuing cycle of racism and a segregated sisterhood between black and white women are evident in Wedding Band but perhaps, as Childress's optimistic ending subtly hints, not necessarily eternal.
