55 pages • 1 hour read
Caryl ChurchillTop Girls
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Caryl Churchill (1938–)
Caryl Churchill is one of the most significant and prolific British playwrights of the postmodern era, and her experiments with form have had enormous influence on the landscape of contemporary British theatre. She has written over thirty plays, along with several translations and adaptations, and her work has been celebrated not only in the UK, but internationally as well, particularly in the US. Her works explore issues of feminism, oppression, and abuse of power. Churchill was born in 1938 to a father who was a political cartoonist and a mother who left school at age 14 and took jobs as a secretary, an actor, and a model, often removing her wedding ring before going to work. She continued to act occasionally after giving birth to her daughter. Churchill’s parents encouraged her to strive toward having both family and career. The family moved to Canada when Churchill was 10, and she returned to England to earn her undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature at Oxford, where her first plays were staged by student theatre organizations. Churchill married a barrister, David Harter, in 1961, and subsequently had three sons. She struggled to find time to write, and although the family had the financial privilege to afford domestic help and childcare, the demands of motherhood were nonetheless a serious obstacle to her work.
Churchill spent the 1960s in the domestic sphere, writing some radio and television plays for the BBC in her spare time, and her duties as a housewife and mother were isolating. The women’s liberation movement was occurring outside while, Churchill says, “I had small children and was having miscarriages.” But in the next decade, Churchill broke through the solitude and frustration to write her first major play. She had just been discharged from the hospital after an especially horrible miscarriage. Exhausted and aching, she wrote Owners in three days. The play—about gentrification and displacement in the London suburb where she lived—opened in 1972 at the Royal Court, which was and continues to be the most significant writer-centered theatre in London. Churchill became the first woman to serve as the Royal Court’s resident playwright from 1974-1975, during which she penned Objections to Sex and Violence (1974), her first overtly feminist play. Churchill’s success as a playwright began during a period when it was rare for women’s work to be professionally produced. She realized that although she had felt that the need to write plays about men to demonstrate her legitimacy as a professional playwright, what she really wanted was to write plays that centered women’s complex voices.
In 1976, Churchill started collaborating with Monstrous Regiment, a feminist theatre group, as well as Joint Stock, an experimental theatre group with which she began playing with structure, form, and casting. Churchill had her first international success in 1979 with Cloud Nine, which transferred from the West End to New York, receiving an Obie Award. In Cloud Nine, Churchill experiments with casting and representations of history to explore the politics of sexuality, sex, gender identity, and colonialism. Top Girls (1982) became Churchill’s second major international success, running first at the Royal Court and then at the Public in New York, which is arguably the American equivalent of the Royal Court in its mission to nurture writers. Cloud Nine and Top Girls remain two of her most widely read and produced plays, held up as paragons of structural innovation. Over the subsequent decades, Churchill has continued to experiment and explore form and style, continually shifting her approach to fit the social issues that form her subject matter. She plays with time, the performance of history, breaking down expectations of naturalism, and language. Her feminist perspective, which infuses her writing, rises out of her experiences as a woman in both the domestic and professional spheres. She approaches contemporary social issues in her plays through constant reinvention of structure, blurring the boundaries between genres of performance and undermining audience expectations as to what theatre looks like.
Ideological Context: British Second-Wave Feminism
The primary purpose of the feminist movement is and has always been to dismantle the patriarchy. Women have been advocating for equal rights throughout human history, and many protofeminists have made their mark, but British feminism as an organized protest movement began in the late 19th century. Notably, feminism in the US occurs in the same pattern and time frame. The period that historians label first-wave feminism was focused on taking apart the strict gender roles that had been codified into law, relegating women to the private domestic sphere and to a prescribed social role that took its popular name from Coventry Patmore’s 1854 poem “The Angel in the House.” Accordingly, first-wave feminism focused on winning the right to vote (achieved in the US in 1920 and in the UK in 1928) and to work outside the home. These victories allowed women to move out of the private and into the public sphere. It’s important to note that this first wave of the movement was largely populated by middle-class white women. Poor women and women of color have always had to work outside the home, but they were paid less and limited in the jobs they could do. First-wave feminism didn’t disappear after this seeming peak of achieving suffrage. Feminists continued to fight for legislation changes with a lot of success, but the social turmoil of two world wars and the global effect of the Great Depression in the US tends to overshadow their victories.
Second-wave feminism began in the 1960s, and one of the central philosophies of this surging of feminism was that “[t]he personal is political.” This means that all gendered issues for women, even those that feel like individual interpersonal conflicts, are a result of the system of power and oppression created by the patriarchy. Personal issues like domestic abuse, rape, reproductive coercion, poverty as a result of unequal pay, or even just feeling trapped by a deep dissatisfaction with one’s life can’t be separated from the need for political change that would take away the tacit social permission created by a patriarchal power structure. Feminist philosophies, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), argued that gender is a social construct. The second wave urged women to band together as a united sisterhood. Especially with the newly available contraceptive pill in 1961, feminists wanted social, sexual, and reproductive freedom. This meant equal access to the birth control pill, which was, at first, only offered to married women who had children. It also meant abortion rights, and the 1967 Abortion Act legalized abortion in the UK. Women fought for equal pay and for the right to own property. Feminists protested beauty standards and the objectification of women, notably at the 1970 Miss World pageant in London, where they tossed flour bombs at contestants.
The new understanding of gender as a social construct allowed women to start breaking out of beauty standards and the socially ingrained obligations of oppressive gender roles that dictated appropriate behavior and every aspect of a woman’s life. The notion that personal gendered oppression is political led to action in the form of help for women who suffered domestic violence, rape, or other types of violence or harm as well as the successful fight for legislation outlawing discrimination based on sex (passed in 1975), employment protection for pregnant women (1975), the right for a woman to have her violent husband removed from the home by court order (1976), and many more fights that continue. In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a critical race theorist, coined the term “intersectionality,” which refers to the way different types of oppression intersect and multiply each other. For instance, a Black woman is oppressed for being Black and for being a woman, and she is more oppressed as a woman for being Black and more oppressed as a Black person for being a woman. This idea broadened the idea of feminism to include in a more specific way women whose marginalization is intersectional. A transgender woman’s fight against both transphobia and misogyny is part of feminism. The idea of intersectionality is evident in the play, as most of the women face economic, racial, age, or other oppressions that intersect with their oppressions as women.
Historical/Cultural Context: Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) was elected as the first female Prime Minister in all of Europe. She remained in office until she resigned in 1990, which made her the longest continually serving prime minister of Britain in the 20th century. Thatcher’s election seemed, on the one hand, like a victory for feminism. But on the other hand, Thatcher was a right-wing conservative, and her policies and beliefs were critiqued for a lack of support of women or other vulnerable populations. In a 1984 interview, Churchill discusses the election of Thatcher as one impetus for writing Top Girls, explaining, “[Margaret Thatcher] may be a woman, but she isn’t a sister, she may be a sister but she isn’t a comrade.” Although the play barely mentions Thatcher, and the politics of the day don’t even arise until a brief moment in the third act, the ethos of Thatcherism is pervasive throughout the play. Thatcher’s rhetorical emphasis on individual responsibility translated, in practice, to the slashing of the social safety net. Her economic policies, which also involved withdrawing subsidies from businesses, led to the doubling of unemployment rates within two years, the doubling of inflation in just over a year, and a drop in manufacturing output. These numbers—except unemployment—improved before her first term ended, but the British victory in the 1982 Falkland Islands War is credited with restoring her low popularity and winning her a second term.
However, Thatcherism isn’t simply about supporting her policies and decisions. It’s also about Thatcher’s performance of identity. Like Marlene, Thatcher came from a humble background. When she left it behind and went to college, Thatcher took lessons to adopt an upper-class accent and mannerisms. Like Win, she earned a degree in science, although Thatcher moved straight into politics instead of working in a lab. She wasn’t interested in being seen as a woman pushing boundaries in politics and preferred that her womanhood not be considered at all. Thatcher’s refusal to compromise, her perceived arrogance toward subordinates and heads of state alike, and the dry, emotionless quality of her public performance earned her both admiration and loathing. Thatcher opposed unions and was determined to cut them off at the knees. When coal miners went on strike in 1984, Thatcher refused to negotiate. When they ended the strike after a year of picketing, they received none of their demands. Thatcher was staunchly capitalist, and often repeated what became her catchphrase: “There is no alternative.” After she gave an anti-communist speech in 1976, the Soviet press nicknamed her the Iron Lady, a moniker that quickly caught on around the world. Thatcher’s individualism and disdain for the poor echo in Marlene’s views. Churchill’s belief in socialist feminism, a firmly anti-Thatcher stance, is apparent in the third act of the play, when Marlene reveals her self-aggrandizement and disdainful feelings about poor people.
Related Titles
By Caryl Churchill
