George Bernand Shaw (1856-1950)

Mrs. Warren’s Profession

He is considered one of the best play writers of English Literature. He starts writing in the late
80s, mostly journalism. This is one of the early plays that he writed and it’s among his most
well-known works. He was very involved in social problems and women. He created very
powerful women in his works and he defended women and their rights.
He has a set of works that are very clean by the public and that follow more conventional
topics and perspectives and then he has other kinds of works that are truly polemical. Mrs.
Warren’s profession is one of them.

Gender ideologies and the New Woman

The ideologies are being defied. Before they had not really been questioned or formulated.
People just accepted the differences between man and women and their domesticity. With
Mrs. Warren’s profession we are moving forward from this conventionality, from “the angel in
the house”. There are no angels in the house in the play.
The idea of the new woman, which is the heart of Shaw’s plays, is a topic that has been
investigated but not that much in this history of gender ideology in Britain.

A Challenge to Victorian Stereotypes & Female Labor

There was a decrease of working middle-class women during Victorian age ue to the separate
spheres determined by gender and class. There was domestic labor, home education, and
women schooling institutions.
Prostitution, “White slave traffic”, and the overlooked public business. There was also a
political struggle related to prostitution. It was the time of “Women’s suffragette movement”.
Changing professions in the late 19th century: emergence of the popular stereotype of the
Girton College, Cambridge University educated girl.

Before the 19th century, women jumped from the father’s house to the husband’s house
without a chance of getting educated or working. They also didn’t inherit anything. It all went
straight to the son, if they had one. Their source of their economy was the husband or the
son/s.

Mrs. Warren’s Profession

It didn’t pass the censorship. The theather censorship was called The Lord Chamberlain, who
said that you couldn’t talk about prositution so openly and that people would be shocked, so it
could not be performed. In 1902, it was secretly performed by a private club, and later on it
was performed in 1905 in New York. In the middle of the perfomance police came and stopped
the play and arrested a few people. It was not performed in London in a public stage until
1925. For nearly 30 years, this work was prohibited. At that time, it was very menacing because
of the way sexuality was discussed in the play and how the author broke the women
stereotypes.