Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: The Women Who Grow Up : Feminism in the Works of James Barrie

James Barrie (1860-1937) is known today, if at all, as the creator of Peter Pan, the boy who didn't want to grow up.  Yet, he wrote many other works that were so successful with the public that he has been described as “the Andrew Lloyd Webber” of Edwardian theatre in London.  He had six major plays produced in London's West End, and produced uncountable shorter works of drama, fiction, and journalism.

And he was a feminist, from his earliest surviving works until the end of his life.  The prime of his career, roughly 1900-1914, coincided with British women’s bitter and often violent struggle for the right to vote and other rights.  The female characters in all of Barrie’s plays are presented as responsible, intelligent, vibrant—and adult—human beings.  In this presentation, Payer considers four of his short plays that most directly express his feminism: The Twelve-Pound Look, about a trophy wife who decides to become self-supporting; The Ladies’ Shakespeare, in which Barrie revised The Taming of the Shrew  to reveal that it was Kate who was manipulating Petrucchio all along; The Fatal Typist, in which he made fun of gendered body language, and The Little Policemen, puncturing sexist slanders against the suffragettes.

Cheryl Payer holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University and a J.D. from New York University Law School.  She is the author of three books on international political economy, including The Debt Trap, none of which have anything to do with James Barrie.