"Men and women will go through hell": Die Aushandlung der Geschlechterfrage in amerikanischen Broadway-Dramen der Progressive Era (1890-1920)

Dubbed as plays without aesthetic value and literary merit, commercial Broadway plays, by and large, have been neglected in literary and cultural studies. The Broadway plays of the Progressive Era (1890-1920), which in many cases deal with gender issues, woman's emancipation and(re-)configurations of masculinity/femininity, are no exception to this rule, as they also merely seem to submit to the restrictive stage conventions as well as the conservative gender conceptions ruling the commercial stage of that time. Thoroughly analyzing the negotiation of gender issues in a number of selected plays and taking into account the contextual circumstances of their production, reception and revision, this study demonstrates that there was at least a small number of resisting playwrights (such as Herne, Crothers, Gale, Wentworth) who made successful attempts to undermine those restrictions in the service of a progressive message of gender equality. Revealing the hitherto unknown complexity of gender negotiations in some commercial plays of that period, the findings of this study strongly suggest that the phenomenon deserves a far more discriminating treatment than it has heretofore received.