Communities of Women in Drama: Pam Gems, Michelene Wandor, Ntozake Shange

Abstract

By the mid-1970s, the women’s movement in both Britain and the United States was no longer the isolated terrain of scattered groups of women dismissable as eccentric, unfeminine or academic. Although never fully organised nationally in either country, it became a mass movement with vast legal and social ramifications, a movement that provoked aggressive assaults from its increasingly visible opposition and that suffered internal conflicts concerning values and future strategies. Consciousness-raising groups, a main source of energy in the late sixties and early seventies, were gradually vanishing from the scene, and public media and institutions were making modest if often hollow gestures towards ‘equality’ of the sexes. In the United States, women spoke of ‘radical feminism’, a conceptualisation of society and power in which men and women were oppositional forces, and in which a patriarchical tradition had to be overthrown; a number of women turned to psychoanalytical techniques to examine personal and collective issues of identity and power. In Britain, a Socialist-feminism emerged that placed its emphasis on a conjoining of gender analysis with class analysis; here, the methodology was a modification of Marxism in which women’s economic and social liberation would instigate rather than follow structural changes in society.