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=Welcome to ASTR 2009 Working Session= =Contemporary Women Playwrights=

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**Aphra Behn (1640-1689)**

"All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds" Virginia Woolf, //A Room of One's Own// (1929).

"What has poor Woman done, that she must be Debar'd from Sense and sacred Poetry? Why in this Age has Heaven allow'd no more, And Women less of Wit that heretofore?" Aphra Behn, //Epilogue to Sir Patient Fancy// (1678)

Contemporary Women Playwrights Working Session:
===Sunday, November 15, 2009, 10:30 AM-1:00 PM  ===




In her ground-breaking 1989 volume //Making A Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre//, Lynda Hart remarked, “The latter half of the twentieth century has seen an emergence of women playwrights in numbers equal to the entire history of their dramatic foremothers.” Hart regarded the book’s contributors, as well as the playwrights themselves, as working “in defiance of the warning generally given to women to avoid having attention drawn to themselves, a prohibition against being publicly seen and heard.” Like the playwrights, feminist critics were “appropriating the stage to assert [their] own images.”

More about Working Session 

Conveners of Working Session: Anna Birch (annabirch1@mac.com) Penny Farfan, University of Calgary (farfan@ucalgary.ca) Lesley Ferris, The Ohio State University (ferris.36@osu.edu) 

The link to the ASTR conference