Abstract:
American women’s quest for equality came into focus in the early 1900s. Amidst the cultural and societal forces pushing for suffrage, some chose the mechanism of theater. This thesis is a work of rhetorical criticism. It applies Lloyd Bitzer’s situational approach to two suffrage theater artifacts: Mary Shaw's The Woman of It; or, Our Friends the Anti-Suffragists (1914) and The Parrot Cage (1914). The question that is the focus of this thesis is: how fitting were Mary Shaw’s plays as responses to the exigence of a lack of suffrage? The analysis that follows demonstrates the continued importance of proper audience identification for social justice movements.
