A Faint-Hearted Feminist
Adapted from my keynote address at the 2013 Dramatists Guild National Conference
I’m a nervous public speaker. I pop a beta-blocker and have a glass of wine before every speech, interview, or panel I sit on. I need both, to keep my hands from shaking and my voice above a whisper. Which is to say, being any, even minor, kind of leader of or public face for gender parity in the theater is not something I was cut out to do. A few years ago I was asked to do exactly that, to give a keynote address at the Dramatists Guild National Conference on the quest for parity in productions for female playwrights. The following is adapted from that speech.
When I was asked, I panicked, and I called my teacher, theater mom and friend, Marsha Norman, to beg her for advice. She’s good at public speaking. She does it a lot. She’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, Tony Award-winning Marsha Norman. I’m not. What could I possibly say that would be worth the time? Marsha said, “Okay, here’s how it goes.” She talks like that, straight to the point, boom, boom, boom, done.
“Here’s how it goes, this is who I am, regular nice girl from Minnesota, just writing my plays, very nice, whatever, cause there was this one little problem I kept pushing under the rug, but then I heard the voice of God and it told me, thou shalt face the problem under the rug, go forth and do good work and so, yeah, this is what I did and this is what happened, conflict, conflict, conflict, and here is where we are, so what are we all going to do about it?”
That is Marsha’s perfect storytelling structure. Now anyone reading this can skip two years at Juilliard and go write a great play.
I am a nice girl from Minnesota, as was my grandmother before me. But I’m a nice writer girl from Minnesota, who’s always looking for a better story. And my grandmother has a better story than I do. So I’m not going to tell you mine, I’m going to tell you hers.
My Grandma Mary passed away last year, with all her mental faculties intact, at the age of one hundred. She had just finished her exercises, which meant slow dancing to Roy Orbison, a singer she discovered in her mid-nineties. She had “Only the Lonely” on a loop in her living room. She would get this swooning, rapturous look on her face whenever she heard his falsetto. She was a hundred-year-old girl with a crush on a pop star. She called Mr. Orbison, “that young man with the beautiful voice.” That’s how old one hundred is. At one hundred, you think Roy Orbison is a young man. She was not happy with me for informing her that he wasn’t exactly young, or alive.
Mary Margaret McCauley was born in 1910 on a farm in Minnesota. The land wasn’t very good—part leech-infested lake, part rock—and her father had a knack for buying dairy cows that didn’t produce much milk. Which is to say, they were dirt poor: so poor, her father couldn’t afford to spend his time farming. So he picked up a job as a janitor in Minneapolis to supplement their income. The five children of the family and their mother worked the farm. My grandmother hated it. She would tell my sisters, brothers, and me stories about the itchy black wool stockings her mother forced the girls to wear on their arms while they were out in the field in hundred-degree heat, in an attempt to keep their skin white, so people in town wouldn’t think they were “country.”
Because she hated farm life, my grandmother never understood the concept of pets. Animals inside a house disgusted her. She never learned any of our pets’ names; she referred to them as “that damned cat,” “that damned dog,” “damn rodent,” or “damn fish.” She basically damned them all and then designated the species that the creature belonged to. Animals belonged in barns. If you didn’t have a barn…. Fantastic! You didn’t have animals. You didn’t have to take care of or clean up after them. Done. She also didn’t understand farmers’ markets. Why would anyone want to shop outside? What if it rained? The potatoes were dirty. And sometimes there were musicians there. “Why, for God’s sake?” Oh, and she would never sew. She would refuse to sew a button back onto her own blouse. I remember wanting a little pink plastic sewing machine for my eighth birthday. I’m not sure why. I think a friend had one. Her mom sewed. My mom, my grandmother’s daughter, definitely did not sew. In any case, I must have told my grandmother that I was hoping for a sewing machine, because I clearly remember the lecture she gave me. I was not to learn to sew. If I did, people would have me fixing every little tear for them and would notpay me to do it. If your shirt tore, what you did was, you went to work abig city, in an office, behind a desk, wearing nice, clean clothes. You wore a skirt that fell to just below the knee—no higher, because that looked cheap, and no lower, because you never know when someone might take you dancing. And you wore lipstick and heels—always heels.In that nice, shiny office, dressed like that, you earned the money you needed to buy yourself a brand-new damn blouse. And then a handsome man took you dancing.
My grandma’s two brothers were sent to public school. Afraid that his daughters’ virginity would be in jeopardy in the wilds of public schooling circa 1920, my great grandfather managed to enroll his three daughters in a Catholic school. Exactly how the poor farmer managed that financially was revealed on my grandmother’s graduation day. Rolled up inside her diploma was a bill, for her entire grade-school and high-school education.
All this is to say, my grandma was poor—country poor; country-girl poor. And she was determined not to be.
So, neck-deep in debt, Mary hightailed it out of Minnesota to the big city of Chicago. She learned how to type really, really fast. Got a job in an office. Cut her hair short. Went out dancing a whole, awful lot. And paid off every cent of her schooling. She met my grandfather. They fell in love. And then, the Depression hit. Her father lost his janitor job. Her brothers were unemployed. The farm was as unproductive as ever, and they couldn’t pay the mortgage. So my grandma did. For six years, she paid for the piece of land she hated, the one she couldn’t wait to get away from. For six years, she put off her marriage to my grandfather, James. She would have lost her job if she had married him, and her family would have become homeless. In times that hard, a woman didn’t keep her job if her husband already had one. And she swore to me that she didn’t sleep with my grandfather in all that time. Six years she waited. She was a nice Catholic girl from Minnesota, after all.
The McCauleys kept their land. The Depression ended. My grandparents married, had five children, and were gloriously happy. Then one day, when my mom was sixteen, and the youngest child was six, after my grandfather had dropped the children off at school, on the way to taking my grandmother to her shiny office job, James suffered a massive heart attack and died. She was alone, far from help and home, with five kids, no life insurance, no savings, and a mortgage.
Meanwhile, back in Minnesota, that crappy old farmland was about to become one of the wealthiest suburbs of Minneapolis. A few years later, when Mary was struggling her hardest to get my mother into college and to keep a roof over their heads and food in five children’s mouths, her father passed away. In his will, he divided the land into three parcels—one third to each of his sons; the remaining third, the unbuildable swampland, he willed to his three daughters, to split.
A few years after that, my grandmother’s eldest brother died. The real estate and the money all went to his wife. So a woman ended up getting it anyway, and a Swedish woman, at that. (My great-grandfather was sexist, and racist, for some reason, against Swedes.)
Mary slogged on. She got all of her kids through college on one scholarship or another. And they all did fine, thank you very much. Their children have attended nearly every Ivy League institution in the country. There’s a microbiologist, a pathologist, two English professors, an intellectual-property lawyer, lots of lawyers, businessmen and businesswomen, some arty types; my grandmother was productive. At her hundredth-birthday party, the last time I saw her, she was surrounded by over fifty offspring and descendants. We’ve lost count.
Sometime in her seventies, my grandma married the boss of her last office job. He was a sweet, funny man, and a good salesman, but he made some boneheaded investments with his large paycheck. Mary, however, made some extremely wise ones with her small check. By the end of his life, she was financially supporting him. (It does make you wonder who was really running that office all those years.)
My grandmother’s story, to me, is epic. It’s tragic, and triumphant, and important, because it is not unique. I think about what it must have been like for her to look into the faces of five children depending on her alone, then get up and go to work and be underpaid, as we all know she and almost all women were and are. If she had been a man, she would have been a salesman, not a secretary. Life would have been hard, but not as hard—not nearly as hard. Never mind that she started her adult life with debt that her brothers didn’t incur; never mind the land and the will, and the six years.
So, that’s who I am, the granddaughter of that woman. And I’m complaining that my theater career isn’t exactly where it should be. It really does feel unseemly to complain publicly.
That said, I have never given an interview to promote a play where the headline and the bulk of the article didn’t end up focusing on the fact that I was a female writer who was actually getting a production. I’ve had artistic directors of Tony Award-winning regional theaters tell me that they would be more likely to produce my work if I would write something with a male lead, because that’s what (they said) the audiences preferred. (There’s ample evidence that the opposite is true, by the way.) Almost every female character I’ve created has caused someone (director, producer, actor, critic) to bluntly assert that she wasn’t “likeable.”
I’ve watched my male and female contemporaries forge extremely different paths. I’ve been out of school nearly twenty years now, and I look around at the writing group we started so long ago, whose members have come and gone and multiplied. We’re all about the same age and have been writing about the same amount of time. We were all accepted into the same grad programs. We’ve all won awards and we respect each other as equals. We all drag ourselves out on Wednesday nights, year after year, to hear what the rest of the group thinks of what we slogged out the night before. That magic insight that clears the clutter out of your mind could come from any one of the men or women there, and it does. But it is impossible not to note that the majority of the male members are actually making a living writing scripts for theater, TV, and film. They often have productions lined up for plays that they haven’t yet finished writing. The women are writing on the side of their money jobs. They are often worried about whether they can continue to afford their apartments. They have piles of scripts in drawers that no one will read. The careers of male writers seem to be relatively impervious after a series of plays receive mixed reviews. Their female counterparts’ careers seem to end before they begin if they don’t have a big juicy hit right out of school. And these are your lucky Julliard and Yale grads with access to agents, who live in New York and know all the same people the boys do. This is the kind of stuff we women writers have been bitching about in private for years. And for years, it was enjoyable. It felt good to have others tell me they saw it too and that I wasn’t crazy. But when the subject came up in the presence of males, I’d cringe. I preferred the problem remained under the rug and pulled out only on certain female-only occasions, ideally when many strong cocktails were being served.
But then, about five years ago, I heard the voice of God. That is, if God is a writer named Sarah Schulman. A few years ago, Sarah Facebooked me, saying that for her birthday, she wanted to get a whole bunch of female writers together. I thought, Girl Cocktail Party! Let the bitching begin! She and I have different circles of friends. She’d meet mine. I’d meet hers. Then, she sent me a list of NYC theaters that were producing the work of zero women in their upcoming season, and the list was longer than usual. That year, women’s work was being produced in a ratio under the “one in five” to which we had been accustomed. This was my tipping point. I firmly believe that if the percentage of plays by women had stayed above the commonly quoted 17 percent mark, I would have kept my mouth shut—in public, anyway (sad but true). Before that year, I had listened and seriously considered all the “reasons” why female-written plays were produced in such small numbers. Some said that male artistic directors were simply more drawn to male work; that women just had to wait for the day when half of the artistic directors were female and THIS would even things out. Others claimed that male writers were simply more dramatic, women more poetic, and DRAMA (in all-bolded caps) sold more tickets than poetry in flowering script. Or, that although women bought the vast majority of theater tickets, they bought them to shows their husbands wanted to see. Some said “established” writers were skewing the balance; that they were overwhelmingly male because of past bias, but that younger writers were being produced with parity. (They were, and are, not.) My personal favorite is still the—surprisingly enough—uttered-out-loud belief that there finally seemed to be a crop of competent female playwrights around! As if there hadn’t been before.
Somewhere in her eighties my grandmother started swearing. She only used one choice curse word. It was all anyone ever needed, she declared. “Bullshit.” When you see it, name it. The female gender has not been evolving at such a stunning and unprecedented rate that we couldn’t write well ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years ago, but now we can. Or maybe they believe women just recently started taking an interest in theater and writing? Girls have been dominating those classes for a long time now. The artistic directors that produce with gender parity are equally divided between men and women. Tennessee Williams is pretty darn poetic and he sells tickets. I personally prefer writing about murder to flowers. Maybe women do buy tickets to shows their husbands want to see, if the husbands want to see plays about women, because those tend to be the most successful plays.
Let’s get this straight: if you don’t know the names of many female writers, you can’t conclude that they didn’t exist, all you can conclude is that you don’t know their names. I’m not even talking about the writers that lived a hundred years ago. I’m talking about ten, twenty, thirty years ago, and they’re alive. They are still writing. Very well meaning people have been assuring us ladies for a very long time that everything will be better in the future. The future, always the future—we are writing now; we’ll be dead then.
The purported reasons have stayed the same the same since I was a student at Juilliard. I’ve covered for Chris Durang as a teacher at Juilliard and taught my own class at Barnard. Twenty years have passed. The one-in-five ratio is still standard. All-male seasons are still bizarrely common. In the past few years, there has been a little jump in the numbers in New York City, following a rash of publicity about the problem. But I have no reason to believe there was a jump nationally, and frankly, the New York numbers have already begun to wind their way down again.
When Sarah called our meeting, I reread the 2002 NYSCA report that put female writers at 17 percent of national productions. And I found TCG’s list of the top ten plays, which should really be called the list of most frequently reproduced plays. I found that though women only wrote 17 percent of plays produced, they held double that percentage of the top two most-produced plays for the last ten years running.
My date to my high school senior Valentine’s Day dance just happened to have been Freakonomics economist Steven Levitt. So, I called him, and I asked him if I had single-handedly proven bias in the American theater at my own kitchen table that morning. He said, “No.” But he added that he might be able to find someone with more sophisticated tools and a trained mind to take a look at the situation.
Meanwhile, I was googling away: “bias in the arts,” and I kept coming across Cecilia Rouse and Claudia Golden’s landmark study of blind auditions, “Orchestrating Impartiality,” which showed that when the orchestras, concerned about allegations of racism, began holding auditions behind screens, not only did musicians of color begin to win seats, but so did men and women who didn’t have fancy schools and mentors behind them. The group that benefitted the most was women. We went from all-male orchestras to virtual parity in under thirty years. The most coveted position in the orchestra, the first violin, has been dominated by females. Cecilia Rouse was fairly easy to reach back then. Since, she has sat on Obama’s economic council and been named the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Economics at Princeton. I wrote her an e-mail asking if she would talk me through the finer points of her study over lunch. She agreed and we set a date, but before we could even get together, I got another e-mail from her. Her star student, Emily Sands, had just returned from the University of Chicago. Steve Levitt was trying to convince Sands to come there for her grad studies instead of going to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. These institutions were warring over the young talent. Steve had mentioned my little finding to Emily and suggested it as a possible thesis subject. She had come back to Princeton intent on pursuing it and Cecilia put two and two together. Emily Sands and Sheri Wilner joined Cecilia and I for lunch a week later. And Sands got to work.
She did three studies in one thesis. The first was about supply.
Every time stats come out showing that women are underrepresented in journals, theaters, or museums, the question always comes up about supply. Are female artists applying? Are they present in the same numbers as men? And almost always the answer is—sorry, ladies—the answer is probably not. In a town-hall meeting that was held in New York City a few months earlier, artistic directors held forth that about 30 percent of their submissions came from women. Emily looked at Doollee, an enormous online database of scripts, and at the Dramatists Guild membership. In both cases, she found that about 30 percent of the writers represented were female.
When Emily’s thesis came out and noted these facts, there was a huge outcry from women. The Doollee website is like Wikipedia; produced plays can be logged in by anyone, but unproduced plays must be logged by the only people who know they exist: the writers themselves. Maybe women don’t use Doollee? Maybe they don’t join the Guild because they aren’t produced playwrights? (Actually, at the moment, female student members slightly outnumber male student members of the Dramatists Guild). The fact is, Emily didn’t claim to have proof. She offered findings. She found that the 30 percent the artistic directors reported was mirrored almost exactly on Doollee and at the Dramatists Guild.
I do think it makes sense that the people who actively log their unproduced plays on Doollee are probably the same people who are actively sending their unsolicited scripts in to theaters. A lot of women don’t like that theory. It doesn’t match up with their observations and it seems to disprove their assertion that bias is to blame. But it doesn’t. They shouldn’t even be surprised by it. Where bias is found, there are always discouraged workers. Women are human. Humans tend to make decisions in their best economic interest. It’s a necessity. At some point, men and women have to adjust their artistic dreams to the reality that they also need a roof over their head and food in their mouth. Some say that men are bigger risk-takers. I’d counter that playwriting as a career choice is a much bigger risk for a female, and that is why the attrition rate is steeper for women than men—therefore, less supply.
The second part of Emily’s work was a blind-audit study. She sent out the same four script samples to theaters across the country. Each script sample was sent to half the theaters under a male author’s name and half the theaters under a female author’s name, and the four were sent out in equal numbers. She asked that the respondents rate each of their four scripts according to eighteen criteria.
Now, I’m going to try to clear something up that the papers got wrong again and again: Emily found that whether the same script was purportedly written by a man or a woman, the participants judged them to be of equal artistic value. When it came to judging excellence, no bias was found. But, Emily also discovered that it was predominantly the female respondents who believed that audiences would buy fewer tickets, plays would receive more negative reviews, and top talent would be harder to attract if they believed that the script was written by a woman. She also found that a female character was deemed far less likable than the exact same character, saying and doing the exact same things, when the character was thought to have been written by a woman. Literary managers’ responses showed a belief that artistic directors would be less likely to produce a play purportedly written by a woman, and that ultimately, scripts with female pen names did not “fit” with their theaters’ missions. They believed the exact same play under a male pen name to have no such drawbacks. (In fact, all the scripts were written by women, one a Pulitzer Prize-winning woman!) The overall effect was that the samples represented as written by women were deemed by theaters to be of lesser overall value than the exact same pages when purportedly written by men. The plays least likely to be produced, according to the respondents, were those with the double whammy of female pen name and female protagonist.
The finding of significant bias on the part of female respondents and significantly less from male respondents caused the greatest ruckus. “Women Beware Women” was one of the unfortunate headlines. But Emily’s work did not place all blame on the women of theater. She simply found what she found and didn’t find what she didn’t. It is impossible to prove a null hypothesis: It is impossible to prove that bias doesn’t exist on the part of male respondents. It is only possible to prove that it does. If I sent you out into the world to find undiscovered species and you returned a few days later empty-handed, you have not proven that none exist. If you did return with a strange new bug in the palm of your hand, all we could conclude is that when you set out there was at least one undiscovered bug out there. And in fact, we had been warned by Cecilia Rouse that the publicity our town halls had garnered would most likely skew our results. We did get a few letters from theaters stating that they knew what we were up to and would not fall for such shenanigans. So all we can conclude from section B of Emily’s thesis is that there is at least some bias against female work. And it’s a really interesting kind of bias. It’s not based in self-hatred. It’s not internalized bias; it’s what I would call prophetic bias. It’s a lot like John Maynard Keynes’s beauty contest theory, which he uses to explains that to win in the stock market, people need not pick the “best” stocks, but instead must pick the stocks the majority of the stock-buying public thinks are the best stocks. It’s not that the women in Emily’s study believed women to be lesser writers. They appeared to think that the bias of others would cause scripts by women to have less value for their theaters. Is it a terrible self-fulfilling prophecy? Or is it simply that women in theater are honestly reporting what they see and know to be true? (Or some combination of the two?) Emily’s findings were so stark that they reached the highest degree of significance that the field of economics recognizes, meaning that if you could redo the study under perfect circumstances, you should expect to get the same result at least ninety-five out of a hundred times. And yes, the sample size was big enough, according to Ms. Rouse and the Princeton economics department, who gave Emily’s thesis the highest honor they bestow and called it the best they had seen in thirty years. Emily is finishing up her Ph.D. at Harvard right now and will be running our country in short order.
The third study in her thesis was the Broadway study. This one brought out all sorts of armchair statisticians. Basically, Emily looked at the last ten years of Broadway shows, threw out the outliers (the ones that closed in a day and those that broke every record) and shows whose entire runs were not inclusive of the ten years. The only data not publicly available were the costs of mounting the individual productions. She compared the reported earnings of plays only to that of other plays, musicals to musicals, and one-person shows to the same type. What she found was that shows written by women made an average of 18 percent more per week but yet were given shorter runs than shows written by men. This is the strongest evidence of bias, in economic terms. It’s all in the numbers. Producers are not acting in their own economic best interests when they close shows that are more profitable earlier than the ones that earn less. They must therefore be acting on bias—unconscious bias, obviously.
The complaint about this study was about the assumption (that had to be made) that all plays cost the same, and all musicals cost the same. Of course they don’t. But remember, the female-written plays made an average of 18 percent more week by week! The only way that this finding would be meaningless is if the average play by a woman cost 18 percent more to mount. It has been established many, many times, over and over again, that work by women is generally produced on smaller stages, with less financial investment, and that plays by women that reach production have smaller casts than plays by men. Julie Taymor’s outlier, Spiderman, was not part of the study.
Emily’s three studies paint a portrait of what happens to women’s scripts. Bias and discouragement are circling. Women dominate theater in high school and college; 50 percent of graduate playwriting degrees go to women; 40 percent of agents’ clients are women; theaters report 30 percent of their scripts are submitted by females, of which they produce just under 20 percent. That’s what happens to female playwrights.
The numbers are worse in film and TV. Honestly, most successful playwrights make their actual living by leveraging theater success into paying Hollywood jobs.
Intelligent, educated, politically liberal people in the arts still talk to me about “merit,” believing that artistic directors should choose work based on their personal assessment of “merit” alone. Does that mean that if an artistic director is convinced that work by white male artists is inherently superior to work by women or artists of color that he or she has the right to run a nonprofit, tax-exempt, grant-receiving theater for white male work only? Can we not see, throughout history, how incredibly crappy human beings have been at determining merit? I looked at the Broadway season a hundred years ago and I didn’t recognize one title. I recognized only one author’s name. I’m a theater nut. Not one of the plays apparently stood the test of time. We all go to the theater and see new plays and think, “Why this one, for heaven’s sake?” The wrong movie wins best Oscar nearly all the time. We know this. Arguing about bias or merit is silly. Artistic directors don’t pick plays based on merit; they pick them with biases their minds, history, and culture have created. As the human mind develops, it learns from what it sees and hears. It does not learn what it does not see or hear. No one is immune to bias. Not even artistic directors. This is common knowledge. It is bizarre that educated people bother to deny it.
My grandmother never complained about her history. She didn’t even tell me about it. My mother did. The only anger I ever saw in my grandmother was when she spoke of the lost six years with my grandfather. She deeply regretted that. When I became pregnant before my marriage, I knew I had to confess to my grandmother before she heard it from anyone else. Her response, after a long, loaded pause: “We Catholics don’t believe in birth control.” It didn’t hurt that my now husband had previously danced her around a restaurant or two. All of it, the money, the land, being a secretary, a salesman, she overcame all that—in the end, anyway. But, the during part must have been excruciating. My mom cries when she remembers. But I never saw my grandma cry about it. Never.
So here I am, with a husband who is as good at changing a diaper as I am, and a father who has done nothing but encourage and support me unconditionally. As far as my career goes, most of my plays have been produced. I’m one of the lucky ones who actually do make a kind of a living at art. What do I have to cry about?
I remind myself constantly, as we all need to, that I can’t whine about my own career. None of the statistics or any of the studies proves anything at all about anyone’s individual career. We are all a combination of talent and advantage—economic and otherwise—being at the right places at the right times, luck, and determination. A young female playwright who lives in New York City obviously has a huge advantage over a young male writer in Boise. But if both leave Boise and head for the big city to work as artists in virtually any artistic field—not just playwriting, but acting, directing, painting, dance, poetry, filmmaking, conducting, choreography—if you were to bet on which person would be more likely to support him or herself from the person’s art, you would be ignorant and foolish to bet on the woman. (Except in the case of a female orchestral musician, at least since the orchestras started holding the auditions behind screens that would hide the musician’s gender.)
Is the plight of the female playwright really that epic or tragic in the great scheme of things? The fact that one out of five productions is written by a woman, in a good year, is— well, it’s just a tiny, little corner of a problem; a small piece, that, in reality, only a very small number of people even thinks about, much less cares about. But it is piece of an epic tragic contemporary problem. It’s piece of a travesty that permeates the whole globe. It does seem to me that at this point in history, forces are coming together from the world’s many, many corners—large and small—to address the state of women in the world. The American theater is my corner, my piece of the world, and so it’s mine to try to fix.
