"This book provides a detailed account of the lives of five American women playwrights who were highly successful in their times but whose work remains largely unexplored and neglected. It adds an exploration of the area of theatre to our understanding of the opportunities available to the professional woman writer at the time. The greatest strength of the project is ... Read morein the enormous amount of contemporary material Engle has discovered and drawn on in her accounts. A lucid and engaging study." - Susan Croft, former Senior Curator at the Theater Museum; Author of She Also Wrote Plays: an International Guide to Women Playwrights "Thorough and carefully documented...Engle places [these women's] dramas in the context of early twentieth-century Broadway theatre, demonstrating how these women fulfilled, perpetuated, and in a few cases transcended audiences' expectations" - Theatre Survey Show Less