Helen Krich Chinoy (1922–2010)

This is a book of contributed papers about the role women have played in shaping American theatre. It suffers from two weaknesses: one, the fact that contributed papers are always spotty in quality, and this book is no exception. Some are very admirable and readable in the quality of their writing and analysis; others are dense and nearly incomprehensible or lightweight and prone to flights of fancy. That leads into the second weakness: the assumptions of feminist theory, which can often get even devoted feminists such as myself into a flaming rage with the silliness and lack of rigor in the methods used to evaluate claims (which is to say, no rigor at all, and in many cases, no evaluation). There were a few papers that did actually do some solid work, and described how they conducted their study; the most thorough and rigorous being a paper about the role of women in plays as wife or whore, virgin or prostitute. The sections on women playwrights, women actors, and other women who were pioneers were interesting and well written, describing the lives and contributions of some very important women most of us have never heard of. The first chapters, on images, got downright creepy at times with the focus on ritual, and the seeming assumption that women were a single homogenous group who all wanted bonding, closeness, and motherhood. In particular, the statement "to be a woman is to bleed" and the description of a loopy interactive play that is perceived as being more real for women than standard conventional theatre. The final chapters, which discussed feminist theory, were pompous and overblown, with very little data to support most of their claims. This is a field that cries out for some real rigor which appears to be missing. Until we get that, women will continue to be relegated to this mushy mass of motherhood and emotional needs that leave many women shaking their heads and wondering where they could possibly fit in. Also, this fits right into that class of women's studies that allows men to totally ignore all of this, and leaves women standing outside as a separate group, forever condemned to be the other, often by their own insistence on making their own insular groups that seem to validate by their presence the fact that "women" is a different enough group to be excluded from the larger family of "people". Books like this end up unwittingly and unintentionally ceding the normative to men.… (altro)