Votes for Women and Other Plays

Dr Susan Croft has done extensive research and published widely on women playwrights. Her work includes 'She Also Wrote Plays' (Faber 2001). From 1997 to 2005 she was the Curator of Contemporary Performance at the Theatre Museum in London.

A collection of seven of the best suffrage plays written to encourage their audiences to allow women the vote. Funny, biting, short and powerful, these plays are perfect for colleges, youth theatres and amateur dramatic societies who want to explore how an earlier generation dealt with misogyny.The astonishing women involved in the Actresses Franchise League set up their own theatre companies and engaged with the battle for the vote by writing and performing campaigning plays all over the country. They launched themselves onto the political stage with their satirical plays, sketches and monologues whilst at the same time challenging the staid conventions of the Edwardian Theatre of the day. The legacy of their inspiring work to change both theatre and society has survived in the political theatre, agit-prop and verbatim theatre we know today. Introduced and set in an historical context by Dr Susan Croft together with a chronology of suffrage drama.

Introduction Author biographies Complete Playtexts Chronology of Suffrage Drama International Chronology of introduction of Universal Suffrage Bibliography Notes