Daughters as Mothers: The Teenager as Potential Parent

Abstract

Motherhood in situations where the protagonist is not yet an adult, and consequently needs to negotiate becoming a parent while, often, dependent on parents herself, is dramatized in a broad range of seventies and eighties plays. This preoccupation reflects ongoing changes in societal attitudes concerning the timing and circumstances of parenthood; but plays about teenagers emerge at this particular time also as a result of significant transformations on the social, political and legal terrain. Adolescents gradually emerge as subjects in their own right in the wake of the late sixties and seventies counter-cultural protest movements, and I test this claim by examining a number of case studies from the British women’s theatre scene, such as the Women’s Theatre Group’s (WTG’s) My Mother Says I Never Should (1975), Grace Dayley’s Rose’s Story (1984), Sharman MacDonald’s When I Was a Girl, I Used to Scream and Shout…(1984) and Trish Cooke’s Back Street Mammy (1989). These plays examine various contexts in which young protagonists take centre stage, and in particular address situations where teenage pregnancy arises. As the playwrights and practitioners interrogate some of the options available to the adolescent subject, they also react to the changing legal and ethical climate in this period, especially regarding contraception and abortion.