He and She Is an Avant-Garde Feminist Play

Whose finished version was written and produced in 1920s New York City. They play is one of many of those by Rachel Crothers, who’s heroine is typically “young, sensible” and “equates financial independence with self-respect”. He and She captures the drama of married life in which gender roles are questioned when wealth and success are won by the woman instead of the man. This essay will examine the ways in which Rachel Crothers’ He and She reflects the feminist movement preceding the play’s composition in 1920. He and She will be analyzed through its comparison with number of historical and literary sources concerning the feminist atmosphere in America from the mid-19th century to the 1920s to illuminate the ways in which it reflects that new feminism.

He and She’s main characters are husband and wife, Tom and Ann Herford who are initially both sculptors, though Tom is the patriarchal breadwinner of the house. The story begins with Tom’s decision to enter his frieze into a competition in which the winner earns a one hundred-thousand-dollar commission. Ann feels like it isn’t good enough to win, however, and suggests that Tom pass her design off as his own. After Tom dismisses her offer because her frieze isn’t in the same “class” as his work, Ann decides to enter the competition herself. She wins, but instead of congratulations, she only receives disapproval and objection from her family. Tom refuses to let Ann use any of the winnings to contribute to the household, for it is not her place.

There is a significant subplot to the work, focused on the relationship between fiancées Keith McKenzie, Tom’s assistant and Ruth Creel, a workaholic with an up-and-coming editorial career for a women’s magazine. Keith wants Ruth to quit her job, as he is able to provide for her financially and wants her to have children and keep house. He cannot understand why Ruth’s first priority is her career, and that she is not willing to sacrifice that, even for her fiancée. She gets a major promotion and Keith cannot feel happy for her, as he realizes he cannot achieve the same success in his work that she does in hers. Ruth ends their relationship because of this.

He and She is similar to a variety of Rachel Crothers’ most significant works in that she addresses and questions women’s rights and responsibilities in the wake of the first wave of American feminism. Crothers was born in Bloomington, Illinois in 1878. She is a graduate of the State Normal School (now Illinois State University) in 1982. Her father was Dr. Eli Kirk Crothers, a well-known physician and pharmacist and acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln. Her mother, inspired by her husband’s profession, studied medicine after the age of forty, becoming the first female physician in central Illinois. In biographical details given by Crothers, she confides that her “interest in the stage was entirely foreign to the deeply religious conservative traditions of my family but began when I was very small, asserting itself through the writing of plays”. Perhaps her relationship with her family provided her with inspiration in the writing of He and She, in which the heroine faces criticism from her family when she pursues a career in art.

Following her graduation, Crothers traveled to Boston and New York City to study dramatic art and spent three seasons on the stage. It was after this period that she began professionally writing plays. She produced a series of six small-scale plays which debuted in minor New York theatres between 1902 and 1911. The sixth play in that series was The Herfords (He and She) which began its tour in 1911, however it was not successful. The play was extensively revised and produced at the Little Theatre in New York in 1920, where it gained significant popularity. Crothers herself starred as “Ann Herford” alongside Australian actor Cyril Keightley as “Tom Herford.”

The feminist critical lens allows us to evaluate literature through the perspectives and rules of feminist theory. Lois Tyson writes that “Broadly defined, feminist criticism examines the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforces or undermines the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women”. This feminist literary theory wants the reader to recognize the relationships between male and female characters and their societal gender roles in the world of the work. This lens intends to remind the reader that historically the societal relationship between men and women is an unequal one, and that a patriarchal view of the world if often the foundation for literary works. Feminist theory asks us to analyze a work’s “patterns of thought, behavior, values, and power” in the relationships between males and females (Carleton University).

There are specific rules or assumptions that the feminist lens uses to evaluate literature. Examples from this extensive list are that “Women are oppressed by patriarchy economically, politically, socially, and psychologically; patriarchal ideology is the primary means by which they are kept so” and “Gender issues play a part in every aspect of human production and experience, including the production and experience of literature, whether we are consciously aware of these issues or not.” A work can be analyzed through the feminist critical lens by taking these assumptions into account in forming questions that reveal to what extent a text has been written from a feminist perspective. Questions that could be asked in the evaluation of Crothers’ He and She under the feminist lens are “What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politically, socially, or psychologically) of patriarchy? How are women portrayed? How do these portrayals relate to the gender issues of the period in which the novel was written or is set? In other words, does the work reinforce or undermine patriarchal ideology?”

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