The Sociable Playwright and Representative Citizen

Feminists point out that the social division of public and private realms is asymmetrical by gender —in structure, ideology, and practices—so that women's proper domain was the domestic, and men's was the marketplace. Ergo, women who took their plays into the marketplace transgressed gender norms, and to avoid damage to their sensibilities or reputations they frequently conducted their pecuniary, contractual, and dramaturgical activities by male proxy (a husband, father, brother, or helpful friend). But by accepting such an explanation, and normatively relegating women to the domestic realm, scholars replicate the oppressive ideology, for the domestic realm is a zone as much marked by male-defined ideology as the public realm; this is why the phrase "head of household" connotes a male, revealing how male authority and female subordination pervade all realms of the social, both at home and beyond. Women had a great deal at stake in writing plays, for it represented in the composition, publication, reading, and performance, widespread and important modes of participating in the political act of sociability; as Jeff Weintraub puts it, this is politics in the form of "discussion, debate, deliberation, collective decision making, and action in concert" amounting to citizenship in the form of "participatory self-determination, deliberation, and conscious cooperation." I argue that though it matters when women playwrights did successfully take their work into the public realm, it matters equally that many plied the craft within their homes or schools, because the "intimate domain of family, friendships, and the primary group" and the "instrumental domain of the market and formal institutions", which are in constant tension with each other, are merely a continuum of sociability (Weintraub 20-1). In this model, akin to what Bruce Robbins calls "a more relaxed, decentered pluralism (publicness as something spread liberally through many irreducibly different collectives)," "the public" is not simply a place, a range of eligible activities, or even an idea; and it is certainly not the antithesis of "the private." Neither the public nor the private is bounded. Neither sphere is singular. One may garner more prestige at a major metropolitan theatre, registering strongly enough to enter the historical record, but activity in any realm was notable activity, and in many respects it was the same activity. When Joanna Baillie writes to another woman about retiring to her study to prepare the last edition of her plays, she illustrates this issue beautifully: In other words, retiring into her study to correct proofs constituted a public act, for it would result in publicity, publicness, and posterity over which she exerted agency. The house-bound woman had many ways to be public. Jane Porter describes how, in theatricals put up by family and friends involving a new play by her sister Maria, an audience of twenty people made her fearful, yet the next night's crowd of fifty people "terrified to death all of us" because of their numbers and because they included individuals who were not part of the Porters' regular circle. Thus, even within the home theatrical, varying degrees of exposure were incurred when audiences expanded beyond the close circles of everyday sociability. In this approach to women's dramatic and theatrical activity, we not only pull into focus the dynamics of the commercial stage as a domain of activity, we shape the public sphere rather than taking it as a given. This "associative public sphere" is where socializing and cultural production occurred —be it a salon in which women predominated, or a men's club where women were banned—as distinct from the "solitary." The public, in this formulation, aligns with the perceptible and thus the authoring of a …