ABSTRACT
New Comedy stages much female trauma. Citizen women lose children; risk permanent separation from families; suffer rape and then either expose or bring up the inevitable babies; face enforced concubinage, physical abuse, violence, and threats from men. Mothers undergo trauma with their daughters. Non-citizen women—both enslaved and free—experience abduction, abuse, rape, slavery, and torture. In performance, such traumas, which reach off the stage to female viewers, would be unmistakable. These exaggerated, melodramatic plots represent what citizen women fear constantly and what non-citizen women experience daily.
