Race, Sex, Class, and Essential Maternity

Notes Introduction If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother? Race, Sex, Class, and Essential Maternity 1 . A y e l e t W a l d m a n , “ T r u l y , M a d l y , G u i l t i l y , ” New York Times, March 27, 2005, accessed August 1, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/fashion /27love.html . The New York Times essay was written for the HarperCollins anthology Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write about Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race and Themselves (2005). Waldman’s most recent published exploration on motherhood and popular culture is Doubleday’s Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (2009). 2 . I b i d . 3 . I b i d . 4 . I address my use of the term “American” later in this Introduction. 5 . Waldman, “Truly.” This comparative itinerary of whose death could and could not be endured appears in the article’s infamous “God forbid” section. As Waldman worked out the “God forbid” game that, she argues, all mothers play out in their head, she explains that God forbid her children should perish before her, she could imagine a future happiness—contrary to the same God forbid scenario featuring her husband’s death. 6 . Bridget Kinsella, “The Bad Mommy: Ayelet Waldman Take the Heat and Keeps on Writing,” Publishers Weekly , January 2, 2006, 26. Among Waldman’s “favorite” responders was a Winfrey audience member who, upon the former’s initial entrance to the set, stood up and screamed, “Let me at her!” (Waldman Homepage, accessed August 1, 2011, http://ayelet- waldman.com/books/bad.html .) 7 . Carol Memmott, “Maternal Ambivalence is Ayelet Waldman’s Baby,” USA Today , February 24, 2006. 8 . Henry Bial and Scott Magelssen, eds., introduction to Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 4–5. With this, Bial and Magelssen provide early summary of Alan Sikes’ historiography in the latter’s “Sodomitical Politics: The 1737 Licensing Act and the Vision of the Golden Rump.” 170 Notes 9 . Bottoms’ conceptual use of a “braid of efficacy versus effeminacy” arises out of Richard Schechner’s analysis in the latter’s Performance Theory, which posits theatre and performance as two opposing poles of a continuum. 10 . Stephen J. Bottoms, “The Efficacy/Effeminacy Braid: Unpicking the Performance Studies/Theatre Studies Dichotomy,” Theatre Topics 13, no. 2 (2003): 173. 1 1 . I b i d . , 1 7 4 . 12 . Bial and Magelssen, introduction, 3. 13 . Using Schechner’s work with the TDR as his primary but not exclusive example, Bottoms’ argument points to the extensive linguistic and conceptual history of “theatre and theatricality” connoting effeminacy, (male) homosexuality, and sterility, while the more culturally “subversive” “performance and performativity” implying effectuality, potency, and virility. 14 . Bottoms, “The Efficacy/Effeminacy Braid,” 173. 1 5 . I b i d . , 1 8 1 . 1 6 . I b i d . , 1 8 4 . 1 7 . I b i d . , 1 8 5 . 18 . Stephen Watt, Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 3. 1 9 . R i c K n o w l e s , Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), i. 20 . Catheine Schuler, “The Gender of Russian Serf Theatre and Performance,” in Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies , ed. Maggie Barbara Gale and Vivien Gardner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 216. Here Schuler unpacks her own methodology supporting her exploration of women performers in Russian serf theatre. 2 1 . S e e S . E . W i l m e r ’ s Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), 19–22. 22 . See, specifically, Wilmer, “On Writing National Theatre Histories,” in Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories , 23. 23 . See Ann E. Kaplan’s Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (London: Routledge, 1992). 24 . See, for example, Baz Kershaw’s The Radical in Performance: From Brecht to Baudrillard (London: Routledge, 1999). 25 . David Savran, “Queer Theater and the Disarticulation of Identity,” in The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater , ed. Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 152–167. 26 . This sentiment is admittedly only an early portion of Savran’s analysis in his “Queer Theater and the Disarticulation of Identity,” an essay that evolves into a more far-reaching argument, relying on what Pierre Bourdieu desig- nates as the “dominated position” of the “literary and artistic field” (Savran, “Queer Theater,” 154–157). 2 7 . I b i d . , 1 5 5 . 2 8 . J i l l D o l a n , Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 52–54. Notes 171 29 . David Savran, Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), x. 3 0 . C . W . E . B i g s b y , Modern American Drama 1945–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1. 31. Minna Caulfield, “The Family and Cultures of Resistance,” Socialist Revolution 20 (1975): 81. 1 New Woman (Re)Production in Rachel Crothers’ Alternative Maternities 1 . R i c K n o w l e s , Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), i. 2. Sharon Friedman, “Feminism as Theme in Twentieth Century American Women’s Drama,” American Studies 25 (Spring 1987): 69. 3 . A consistent trope within Victorian narratives and imagery, the “Fallen Woman” most commonly (though not always) emerged in the form of an adulterous wife. On the American stage, English-born Olga Nethersole is probably the most famous embodiment of the fin de siè cle Fallen Woman. Along with her portrayal of Paula in Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray , Nethersole’s performance of Sapho in Clyde Fitch’s adap- tation of the Alphonse Daudet novel of the same name title titillated huge American audiences while shocking and provoking conservative critics. Joy Harriman Reilly, “A Forgotten ‘Fallen Woman’: Olga Nethersole’s Sapho,” in When They Weren’t Doing Shakespeare: Essays on Nineteenth-Century British and American Theatre , ed. Judith L. Fisher and Stephen Watt (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 106–107. 4 . Lois Rudnick, “The New Woman,” in 1915, The Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theatre in America , ed. Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 69. While the Progressive Era in the United States is understood by some as the period beginning in the 1890s and last- ing through the 1920s, others consider the term delineated by the narrower time frame of 1900–1913, or even 1917. Throughout this chapter I utilize the term to imply roughly 1900 through 1915. 5. Rhetoric of women’s moral superiority worked integrally with factions that argued for (and often gained success with) temperance platforms, women’s suffrage, and even reproductive control. To quote one of the many exam- ples, influential women’s advocate, educator, and suffragist Frances Willard worked tirelessly in her work with temperance reform; one of the found- ers of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, she served as its national president from 1879 to 1898. Willard is a provocative example, as she is also regularly identified as a lesbian and an activist who invoked (platonic) woman-to-woman love as a bulwark of social reform. See Eric Burns’ The Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol . 172 Notes 6 . Judith L. Stephens, “Gender Ideology and Dramatic Convention in Progressive Era Plays, 1890–1920,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre , ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 284. 7 . I b i d . ; m y i t a l i c s . 8 . Motherhood and domesticity was more than just the locus of gender equal- ity debates; off the stage it was regularly offered as the reason for more progressive social and legislative actions. Reformers such as Carrie Chapman Catt, Florence Kelly, Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and Anna Howard Shaw supported an agenda for that increased sociopolitical freedoms for women with rhetoric that advocated extending women’s moral advantage (over men) from the domestic sphere to the public. Stephens notes, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman asked women not to limit their nurturing ability to a nuclear family but to assume their full duty as ‘mothers of the world.’” Ibid., 285. 9 . E l a i n e S h o w a l t e r , A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 12. 10. Jill Bergman, “‘Natural’ Divisions/National Divisions: Whiteness and the American New Woman in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs,” in New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism and International Consumer Culture, 1880–1930 , ed. Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham (London: Routledge, 2004), 229. 1 1 . I b i d . 12 . Anna Stubblefield, “‘Beyond the Pale’: Tainted Whiteness, Cognitive Disability, and Eugenic Sterilization.” Hypatia 22, no. 2 (2007): 164. 1 3 . C h a r l e s B . D a v e n p o r t , Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York: H. Hold, 1911), 207, quoted in Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 157. 14 . Bergman, “‘Natural’ Divisions/National Divisions,” 227. 1 5 . I b i d . 16 . Angelique Richardson discusses how issues of feminism, “national efficiency,” and eugenics existed as political partners: “In the wake of the new biology, concern over the future of women was converging with concern over national fitness.” And while the escalating attention and texts devoted to the study of “the Woman Question and the issue of national efficiency” may have made “curious bedfellows,” they were nonetheless regularly “thrown increasingly together at this time of social and sexual instability.” Angelique Richardson, “The Birth of National Hygiene and Efficiency: Women and Eugenics in Britain and American 1865–1915,” in New Woman Hybridities , 241.

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