Top Girls

Caryl Churchill Click to edit Master subtitle style

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Context- Churchills Questions

Quotes by Churchill: Playwrights dont give answers, they ask questions. She asks quite a few questions in Top Girls which we need to answer for ourselves.

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In Top Girls she asks, Is it more important to break out of a cycle of poverty and make something of yourself, or to fulfil your responsibilities to your family and community? if you are a woman, are you more likely to answer this question in a certain way? How can a woman balance the

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Top Girls has become emblematic of contemporary womans struggle! Churchill wrote the play as a

response to the election of Margaret Thatcher.

Some thought that her rise to power in politics was as indicative of progress for women. Churchill worried that Thatchers right wing politics benefited a minority of wealthy Britons while 3/5/12 leaving the less fortunate behind.

Churchill wrote Top Girls in opposition to Thatcherism. Having become politicized during the 1970s, Churchill saw the 1980s shift from a socialist mindset to a capitalist emphasis as an ominous change. This difference became clear to her when comparing British and US concepts of female equality.
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The Sisters Marlene and Joyce

Each of the sisters has different answers to the questions the play asks: while one sister decides to follow a path that emphasizes her career at the expense of her family life, the other maintains close familial ties but continues to lead a life of economic drudgery. Churchill avoids idealizing either path, but her portrayal presents an 3/5/12

Churchill Experiments with style and form

She establishes the principle of overlapping dialogue, a technique that has become widespread in British Theatre. The play presents scenes out of sequential order, thereby requiring the audience to actively participate by connecting the plays plot lines.
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Act 1

The first act depicts a trans historical tableau in which Marlene, an eighties career woman, hosts a dinner party for a table full of disparate women drawn from history, literature and art.

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Act 2 and 3

The next two acts focus on Marlenes career and family life during the 1980s, with the last act being set a year before the previous act. In the production, actors were cast as both contemporary and historical characters, a precedent which subsequent productions have followed. This process opened up possibilities for audience members to 3/5/12

Churchills Achievement

She achieved the balance of addressing feminist politics and appealing to popular audiences. She placed womens concerns unapologetically centre stage in a male dominated theatre environment. The play gives female actresses a chance to portray complex 3/5/12 characters.

Feminism and Churchill

In the 1960s and 70s women had been involved in protests against Vietnam and wanted to take revolutionary goals further, breaking with the traditionally domestic role of women. The women made a series of demands that became foundational to the 1970s Womens Liberation movement: equal pay, equal education and opportunity, 24-hour 3/5/12 nurseries, free contraception and

1970 Miss World

The movement became more public when the womens libbers demonstrated at the Miss World Contest of 1970, and soon after staged their first large march in London. By protesting against the sexist beauty standards of beauty contests, the British feminists were joining their US counterparts, who in 1968 had famously protested against 3/5/12 a Miss America Pageant. Later

American Feminism

Churchill recalls that her initial motivation to write Top Girls stemmed from confronting different understandings of feminism:

When I was in the states in 79 I talked to women who were saying how well things were going for women in America now with far more top executives being women, and I was struck by the difference between that 3/5/12

Different types of Feminism The main three

Radical Feminism support separation from male-dominated culture, emphasizing womens unique and superior characteristics. Bourgeois Feminism seek equality with men within existing social structures, and minimize the differences between the genders. Bothe feminisms focus on the 3/5/12 individual, which differentiates them

Socialist or Materialist Feminism

Churchill considers herself a socialist feminist, which is also referred to as materialist feminism, stemming from Karl Marxs focus on economic relationships. The Feminist Theatre Scholar Sue-Ellen Case explains what differentiates materialist feminism from other feminisms:

Rather than assuming that the experiences of women are induced by 3/5/12

The connection to Thatcher and Marlene.

Cases description particularly parallels Churchills examination of sisterhood, with Margaret Thatcher and Marlene in Top Girls both being rejected as sisters. Although both women could be seen as having achieved success from a bourgeois feminist perspective, they engage in intra gender oppression of their working-class counter-parts.
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British v American Feminism

US and British branches of feminism developed differently, resulting in British feminists being more sympathetic to socialism while Americans assumed a more bourgeois perspective. The US emphasis on bourgeois concerns led to the movement being criticized for ignoring the concerns of blue-collar workers and minority 3/5/12

British Success

British efforts towards legislative reform were generally successful, with the Equal Pay Act passing in 1970 and instituted in 1975, while the year that Top Girls premiered, the Equal Rights Amendment was defeated in the USA. However, a mid-1980s survey of British employers revealed that many were avoiding or unaware of the 3/5/12

Churchills Views

Churchill sees socialism and feminism as intimately conjoined. Top Girls builds to a debate between us and them that harks back to Marxist concepts regarding class structure. From a Marxist perspective, us means those who are economically downtrodden, and them to the 3/5/12 members of the upper classes who

Thatcherism

Churchill states that the play was closely linked to Thatchers rise to power:

Thatcher had just become prime minister; there was talk about whether it was an advance to have a woman prime minister if it was someone with policies like hers: She may be a woman but she isnt a sister, she may be a sister but she isnt a comrade. 3/5/12

Parallels between Thatcher and Marlene

Thatchers father was a grocer and she was an outsider to political circles. However she worked her way through the political ranks. Like Marlene, she found it necessary to leave class markers behind her, taking elocution lessons in college. As PM she spoke in an upper -class accent and adopted the royal we on occasion. She gained the iron lady 3/5/12 and later her TINA nickname for her

Thatchers Politics

She believed in monetarism, trying to control the money supply and inflation. Budget cuts functioned to disband the Welfare State. She pursued privatisation, selling off nationally owned utilities, she viewed private ownership as more efficient. She was very hard on Education and the Arts. While women who were able to

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