Stifled, Staid, and Suspect: The Working Women in Arthur Miller's Drama

Author(s): Jane K. Dominik

Source: The Arthur Miller Journal , Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring 2018), pp. 12-25
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/arthmillj.13.1.0012

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Stifled, Staid, and Suspect
The Working Women in Arthur Miller’s Drama

Jane K. D ominik

abstract: Most literary criticism on Arthur Miller’s drama has focused on its male
characters. Those plays that arguably have a female protagonist or a more balanced
cast between the genders focus on women mostly in traditional roles of wives and
mothers, sisters and daughters, and mistresses. Amidst these roles is one that has
received scant attention, either by Miller or scholars—the working woman. Women
work outside of the home in twenty-two of his twenty-nine published plays. Some
women are prevented from working by the men in their lives. The few women who
have more independence through jobs with greater responsibility reflect women’s
earlier frustrations, increased opportunities, and careers beyond those earlier, more
traditional ones. An examination of the roles of the working women in Miller’s
drama reveals their struggles and strengths to survive and assert themselves in a
world dominated by men who struggle themselves to survive and succeed.
keywords: working women, Miller’s drama, developing gender roles

Most literary criticism about Arthur Miller’s work has focused on its male
characters—and for good reason: his plays have significantly more male
characters than female, and nearly all of his plays focus on the men. Those
plays that arguably have a female protagonist or a more balanced cast
between the genders focus on women as wives and mothers. A few include

The Arthur Miller Journal, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2018

Copyright © 2018 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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 The Working Women in Arthur Miller’s Drama 13

sisters and daughters, and a few also include mistresses. Amidst these roles
is one that has received scant attention, either by Miller or scholars—the
working woman.
The working women in Miller’s drama reflect both his focus on male
characters and the changing roles of, and opportunities for, women in
the twentieth century, sixty-eight years of which—if we include his plays
through his last in 2004—Miller’s dramatic oeuvre spans. In twenty-two
of his twenty-nine published plays and one of his eight as yet unpublished
scripts, female characters work outside of the home. Many of them do so
as servants, maids, secretaries, and assistants. Some are more fortunate to
work as nurses and one as a teacher, but they still find themselves in a some-
what subservient role. Other women characters in his plays garner financial
support through “being kept,” ergo as prostitutes or mistresses. Still others
pursue careers in the entertainment field as dancers, singer, or actress, but
these careers leave them emotionally bereft. Other women characters are
forced by the men in their lives to stop working, a limitation that thwarts
not only the women but their marriages and husbands as well. Finally, the
few women in Miller’s later plays who have more independence through
jobs with greater responsibility and presumably better pay reflect women’s
earlier frustrations, increased opportunities, and careers beyond those ear-
lier, more traditional ones.
An examination of the roles of the working women in Miller’s drama
reveals their struggles and strengths to survive and assert themselves in a
world dominated by men who struggle themselves to survive and succeed
amidst its challenges.
Beyond the position of wife and mother, but still within the home, the
first group of women working in Miller’s plays does so as servants and
maids. In The Crucible (1953), servants—many of them teenaged girls and
a forty-year-old Negro slave brought from Barbados—work in the Salem
homes. Reportedly led by Tituba, Abigail Williams and Mercy Lewis are
two servants who are among those first accused, and then confess and
accuse others of witchcraft; Abigail has also had an affair with John Proctor.
The significance of these servants is evident in that their actions feed the
land grab by neighbors trying and condemning others to death. Minnie, the
Kellers’ maid in All My Sons (1947), is mentioned but never appears. Other
Miller plays refer to maids: there is an unnamed housekeeper/servant who
works for the Stockmann family in Miller’s adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy

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14 Jane K. Dominik

of the People (1950), and Flora is the Gellburgs’ maid in Broken Glass (1994
but set in 1938). Carrie, Maggie’s negro maid in After the Fall (1964), appears
twice, once helping her to dress for her wedding to Quentin and a second
time toward the end of the play when Quentin tells her to call an ambulance
for Maggie who has overdosed.
Moving outside of the home, Miller’s plays include several women who
work in traditional roles—as secretaries, assistants, nurses, a teacher, and,
in a much later play, flight attendants. The secretaries and assistants have
minimal roles in the plays and are either referred to briefly or used to run
an errand, make a phone call, or announce a client’s arrival. In The Grass
Still Grows, written in 1939 as the second revision of No Villain, Miller’s
earliest play, written at the University of Michigan in 1936 and winning
the prestigious Avery Hopwood Award, now recently produced and pub-
lished, Louise works as Abe’s bookkeeper. In After the Fall, Maggie works
as a telephone operator when she first meets Quentin and later has her own
secretary. In The Price (1968), Walter apologizes to Victor for the conde-
scending way in which his nurse treated him when he called trying to reach
Walter. In The American Clock (1980), Miss Fowler works for Quinn, who
has recently been promoted from salesman to president of General Electric,
and Joe mentions the girls at the office “who like a flower on the desk” and
are presumably secretaries.
In Miller’s one-act A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), twenty-three-year-
old Patricia and Agnes, “a spinster in her late forties,” work in an automobile
parts warehouse, surrounded by men talking about, among other things,
their night time exploits, their families, and the whorehouse next door. Gus
chases the two women, opens the door to the toilet when Patricia is in there,
mimics her scream, and “squeezes her buttocks mercilessly,” blaming her:
“Tell her to stop makin’ all the men crazy.” Agnes also retreats to the toilet,
a rather amateur playwriting technique to get either woman offstage. Agnes
has a more prominent role beyond her objectification as the switchboard
operator, joining the men to literally prop up Tommy who arrives to work
drunk as his coworkers try to save his job when the bosses walk through
the warehouse.
In Death of a Salesman (1949), Jenny serves efficiently and minimally
in the play as Charley’s secretary. Her trivializing treatment by Willy is
reflected in his asking her, “Workin’? Or still honest?,” an inappropriate
remark and kind of “locker-room talk” that implies prostitution. Echoing his

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 The Working Women in Arthur Miller’s Drama 15

father, Happy asks Letta if she sells, revealing his propensity to find and pay
for “whores” as Linda refers to them later in the play. Letta assures Happy
that she does not “sell,” implying honest work instead.
The Woman with whom Willy has his affair in a Boston hotel room,
in effect, becomes a kind of secretary/prostitute as she barters her sexual
­companionship for stockings. While her relationship with Willy is of her own
volition, her insistence upon getting the stockings he has promised her and
that she shares living quarters with her sisters who would be “scandalized” if
she were to spend the night with Willy reveal her interest and perhaps depen-
dence on his gifts in exchange for putting him “right through to the buyers.”
In The Golden Years, written in 1940 but not produced until its BBC Radio
premiere in 1987, Marina serves as lover and assistant to Cortez as he makes
his way to conquer Montezuma. While he expresses his need for her, she
gradually becomes his absent conscience, urging him to stop killing, turn
back, bring Christianity to the Aztecs peacefully, and stop lying to them.
She asks whether he has come for God or for gold, and when she rushes
to warn Montezuma, Cortez slaps her and hits her to the floor. U ­ ltimately,
she is unable to prevent his conquest, remaining both subservient to, and
dependent upon him.
In After the Fall, Elsie is also desperate to support her husband, a law
professor in danger of incurring the rejection and wrath of the government.
Lou is dependent upon his wife and appears to also respect her, telling
Quentin that he is editing the manuscript of his new textbook “to incorpo-
rate her criticisms” because she is “remarkably acute.” She urges Quentin to
tell her husband how much his opinion of the brief Lou is editing for him
means, continuing to support her husband in any way possible.
In his last play, Finishing the Picture (2004), for which Miller reportedly
“had been sketching scenes for twenty-six years” (Bigsby 506), Edna plays
a more substantial, constant, and integral role in the play as the personal
secretary to Kitty, who is rarely seen or heard, but around whom the action
revolves. Having worked for Kitty for five years, Edna continues to encourage,
protect, and defend the actress now suffering anew after a romantic breakup,
under the influence, and too fragile to finish the filming of her scenes for a
movie. As a caring and devoted assistant, Edna is similar to Carrie in After
the Fall. The line between professional and personal is crossed, however,
when Phillip Ochsner, the chair of the production company, asks her to
dinner and kisses her.

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16 Jane K. Dominik

Flora is a stronger character in the play; she ran an Orange Julius stand
in New York City for six years before making it in the film industry. She is
Kitty’s coach and demands a car, chauffeur, separate suite, and respect. Kitty
depends upon her. However, much of Flora’s strength evaporates when her
husband, Jerome, the more famous acting teacher and coach, appears on
the scene, and she immediately becomes his assistant and subservient to
him even as she has bragged about him before his arrival. For his part, he
is abusive toward her, blaming her for Kitty’s condition, and her promise to
the director and producers that he would be able to help Kitty effectively.
Nurses are another traditional role in Miller’s plays. Two are in After the
Fall, one for Quentin’s father in the hospital. In The Ride Down Mt. Morgan
(1991), Nurse Logan, new on the job, is frequently onstage at Lyman’s hospi-
tal bedside, letting him know where he is and why after he has crashed his
car. She offers much commentary to him and serves as his confessor, tell-
ing him to relax when he becomes emotionally distraught upon his wives’
and daughter’s discovery of his bigamy. When the three women in his life
desert him, Nurse Logan kisses him on the forehead even though she has
not decided if she will “hate” him or not. In Mr. Peters’ Connections (1998),
Adele, a black bag lady, puts on a nurse’s hat and cape, but she is not a nurse.
Like Logan, though, she offers much commentary to the protagonist.
Two more traditional roles are also in Miller’s dramas: a teacher and
flight attendants. In his adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People,
Dr. Stockmann’s daughter, Petra, is a schoolteacher. She teaches five hours
every day, works two additional hours of evening school, and has “a pile
of lessons” every night to correct. She loves her career; as she states, “I get
so wonderfully tired.” She also has offered to translate an English novel for
Hovstad and Billing until she becomes upset with its contents. She stands
up not only to them but also to her uncle when he demands that her father
retract his findings and belief that the waters for the town’s new spa are
poisonous. Her determination and courage continue when she paints a
political poster for which she could be arrested, is fired for standing up for
her father, and fully supports her father in his decision to stay in town even
though there is danger for the family to do so. She is one of the strongest
female characters in Miller’s drama, a testament to Ibsen as much as, if not
more than to Miller.
In Mr. Peters’ Connections, the title character mentions that his four
daughters work as flight attendants, another legitimate career but one

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 The Working Women in Arthur Miller’s Drama 17

perhaps made possible by his former career as a pilot. No further r­ eference

is made of them, but theirs is a career that would provide them with some
measure of financial security, independence, and freedom through travel.
Beyond the socially acceptable roles for women as servants, maids, sec-
retaries, assistants, nurses, and teachers lie careers more suspect, notably
those of prostitution.
In his earlier plays, Miller includes women characters as prostitutes. In
his unpublished play Half-Bridge (1943), Anna, determined to stay onboard
the ship in order to meet with her lover although she is told he has already
left—and probably has left her behind—is accused of being a prostitute.
This false accusation reveals the role of men’s assumptions about women in
a traditional man’s domain.
The question of Letta and Miss Forsythe in Death of a Salesman possibly
being prostitutes echoes this in the way that Biff and especially Happy view
and treat women. In The American Clock, Joe visits Isabel, a prostitute during
the Depression, who exchanges her sexual business for her dental care with
Bernie, a dentist who graduated with Joe. The Archbishop’s Ceiling (1977)
includes a reference to Marcus’ girls, and Irina appears to be his latest. While
not explicitly stated, their purpose in his life is arguably similar to being kept.
This potential need to sell one’s body is more desperate and purposeful in
Playing for Time (1980) when Marianne trades sex for food in a World War
II concentration camp. Fania catches her “straddling a man, a kapo wearing
his striped prisoner’s” clothing and refuses to accept part of the sausage
Marianne has been given for the transaction.
In Some Kind of Love Story (1982), it is unclear how or why Angela, who
could be considered the protagonist, engages in prostitution. Her husband,
sitting in the next room during the course of the play, beats her, revealing her
lack of a positive self-concept. She stays with him because he is the father of
her daughter. She has learned to depend upon sex to keep her alive and safe,
an irony that has resulted in multiple personalities. As she states, “Everyone
I ever went to ends up trying to get into my pants” and refers to herself as a
“hooker.” Tom, the investigator visiting her late at night, though married, has
had an affair with her, and she now withholds from him information that she
might or might not have that could free a man wrongly imprisoned. She wants
to continue their affair, but Tom refuses. She arranges to meet a client even
though Tom urges her not to and then reveals that she has been involved with
the Mob, and has slept with both the prosecutor and a man who runs drugs.

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18 Jane K. Dominik

Furthermore, she reveals that she knows a lot of the corruption of police,
attorneys, and the criminal justice system by way of her services to them. Lost
amidst drugs and alcohol, sex and prostitution, she uses and is used by men,
leaving her in a mentally and emotionally deranged state.
More respectable but still suspect in terms of viability and respect are
women in careers in the entertainment fields onstage and in film. Miller
mentions only seven characters who pursue these careers in his thirty-six
published and unpublished plays. None is presented in a flattering light,
Miller instead portraying these jobs as suspect and some of the women pur-
suing them as emotionally deprived and mentally unstable.
In The American Clock, desperate for money, Lucille reports that she will
return to work at the carnival but will never dance anymore, working instead
as a magician’s assistant and telling a few jokes. The women in the family keep
Grandpa from finding out, revealing the low opinion of this kind of work.
In After the Fall, Felice, also a dancer, is dependent upon Quentin’s opin-
ion of her even after their affair has ended and even though she is still mar-
ried. In Clara (1987), Kroll mentions that his wife, Jean, was a Rockette,
“dancing in Broadway shows for years.”
In The Last Yankee (1993), in a mental hospital, Karen wants to tap dance,
but her husband rebukes and diminishes her, and leaves while her room-
mate, Patricia, supports her and Leroy, Patricia’s husband visiting as well,
plays the banjo for her to dance to.
In Mr. Peters’ Connections, Cathy-Mae, now dead, was a dancer with
the Radio City Rockettes and the title character’s lover. Appearing nude
or scantily clad, she has become nothing much more than a sexual body to
him, highlighting her objectification.
In After the Fall, Maggie has moved on from a traditional career, demon-
strating hair preparations in department stores until she is asked to entertain
at conventions, the latter requiring “parts . . . [she] did not like any more.”
Meeting Quentin, she pursues singing, but her troubled childhood leaves
her disturbed and unreliable. From his point of view, Quentin has tried to
help her, working 40 percent of his time to work out legal issues resulting
from her violating her contract with the studio and making demands of the
executives. She also understands, perhaps all too well, the lack of respect a
woman in her profession garners, stating, “I’m a joke that brings in money.”
In Finishing the Picture, Kitty echoes Maggie; the play, in some respects,
can be viewed as an extension of After the Fall. Kitty, a film actress, spends

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 The Working Women in Arthur Miller’s Drama 19

most of the play in bed, inert and unable to work. With threats to replace
her or abandon the film, Ochsner finally decides that she will spend six days
resting in the hospital with the hope that she will be able to complete the
filming of her scenes.
While the dates of Miller’s plays reveal a gradual movement from roles
socially acceptable to those more respected and independent, his ten-page,
one-act play That They May Win (1943) incorporates the central issues of
the working women in his plays. Ina must work in the gyroscopes factory.
Here, too, the foreman crosses the line between professional and personal.
She reports to her friend Delia that he has a crush on her and “keeps putting
ration stamps in [her] locker.”
Delia, Ina’s friend, who could be considered the protagonist of the play,
wants to work, but when her husband, Joe, returns from the war to convalesce
from a bayonet stabbing and learns that they have no money, he refuses to
allow her to, revealing his dream for them: “I don’t want you to have a job. I
wanted a house where you’d live . . . with the baby. I wanted it nice.” She con-
vinces him she wants to work to support the war effort, not because they need
the money. They finally agree that he will stay home until he is well enough to
work, but they wonder who will watch their baby with both of them working.
Here, the play goes off-track with the fourth wall of the proscenium broken
by audience members yelling at Joe. The social issue of child care for working
mothers and working families—presented here in 1943—has yet, of course,
to be solved in the United States. These two friends represent the women
who must work and are thwarted from working, even at times in traditional
professional positions, by men, including their husbands who believe in, and
feel the pressure to maintain the traditional social and familial roles of the
two genders, and all of the responsibility and control that come with them.
In addition to Ina, other female characters in other Miller plays pre-
sumably must work. In The American Clock, women line the welfare office,
including Irene, a middle-aged black woman—“an old lawyer woman with
three children whose husband died, and who has now no money, no work”
and marathon dancers, including several women who try to earn money
in excruciating circumstances. In addition, Rose Baum, wife and mother,
hocks many of her valued possessions to help support the family. Desperate
times call for desperate measures.
In Playing for Time, the women playing in the camp’s orchestra, for which
musicians are selected, urgently, desperately play for their captors to avoid

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20 Jane K. Dominik

the horrific conditions of the bunks, hard labor, and crematoria. They
­literally play for their lives. Fourteen of these musicians are named. In addi-
tion, Alma, their imprisoned conductor, is poisoned by Frau Schmidt who
cannot accept that Alma might be freed; Frau Schmidt herself is shot as a
result. This reveals that even women on the Nazi side of the war are forced
to work. Mandel is not immune to the restrictions and demands that her
work places on her, as evidenced by her taking a prisoner’s four-year-old
boy to carry around as her own.
In contrast to those forced to work in Miller’s plays are those prevented
from doing so. In The Grass Still Grows, written in 1939 but as yet unpublished,
Louise has a five-hundred-dollar dowry her father left her at his death. She
and Ben love each other, but Abe, Ben’s father, wants him to marry Helen,
whose father’s business is a success while his own has failed. Helen has gradu-
ated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in psychology, but when
asked about working, reports that her “father does not approve of careers for
women.” As he corroborates, “Is it right for a girl like Helen to slave away her
life taking care of other people’s children?” As a daughter, Helen presumably
cannot inherit or take over the business. So, rather than work in her field of
study or inherit her father’s successful business, she must marry someone to
keep the business going, and to receive its economic and social benefits. In the
last version of this play, she proposes to Arnold, Ben’s older brother home from
college, so that Ben and Louise may marry.
In A View From the Bridge (1955), upon the recommendation of her princi-
pal, Catherine has been offered a job as a stenographer, a position that could
lead to a secretarial one. She promises Eddie, her adoptive uncle, that she will
finish school first, but she is excited at the prospect of earning fifty dollars a
week, and buying “all new dishes,” fixing up the whole house, even buying a
new rug. Eddie does not want her working, especially near the Navy Yard, pre-
ferring that she wait until she can have a position in a lawyer’s office in one of
the nice buildings in New York City. Eddie’s restriction of Catherine ultimately
results in his betrayal of her, Rodolpho, Marco, and other neighbors’ illegal
immigrant family members, leading to his death and Marco’s demise.
In The Price, Walter reminds Victor that their mother had “said a hun-
dred times that her marriage destroyed her musical career.” The piano was
sold long ago for money that Victor and his father needed to live on, and
Victor recalls the harp music the boys heard in the attic from below. As
Victor tells Esther when they discuss the harp that becomes “the heart and

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 The Working Women in Arthur Miller’s Drama 21

the soul of the deal” with Solomon, “My mother’d play for hours down in
the library.” Her inability to pursue her career and subsequent financial fail-
ure of her husband during the stock market crash left the couple bereft and
disconnected.
In Clock, Rose had a scholarship to Hunter College but was married off
by her father and had to give up her opportunity for a college education.
Like the mother in The Price, after her husband has lost his business and
all of his and her money in poor investments during the Depression,
and echoing the treasured harp, in Clock, Rose claims, “But this piano is
not leaving this house. Jewelry, yes, but nobody hocks this dear, darling
piano.” Alas, shortly thereafter, the piano is repossessed from beneath
her playing hands.
In Broken Glass, Sylvia is inexplicably paralyzed, either due to her fright
and worry about those suffering during Kristallnacht or because she and
her husband have not had “relations” for twenty years. Building upon Rose
in Clock and the mother in The Price, here is another wife in a Miller play
prevented from working by her husband. She had been head bookkeeper
for Empire Steel in Long Island City, a position she loved, but once they
married, Phillip did not want her to work, so she quit. Trapped in his own
insecurities and worries, he later tells her, “You held it against me, having to
stay home.” Impotent, he adds that he began to feel, all those years ago, “[t]
hat you didn’t want me to be the man here.” His restriction backfires, trap-
ping both wife and husband, and leaving him impotent and her paralyzed,
unable to stand until he is dying of a heart attack.
Not all Miller husbands argue to keep their wives from working. In The
Price, Victor urges Esther to get a job, even something part-time, recogniz-
ing that it would get her out of the house—now an empty nest, their son
grown and gone.
In his later plays, Miller includes working women with greater indepen-
dence and status, reflecting changing times and greater opportunities for
women. Going back to 1964 in After the Fall, Holga is an archaeologist, but
little is said about her work. Quentin appears intrigued by her strength and
freedom, but is also sensitive to her needs, urging that they leave when he
recognizes her sadness during a visit to a concentration camp. She “wants
to run into the fields,” evidence of her desire for freedom.
In The Price, Walter reports that while his two sons are “investigating the
guitar,” his daughter is “a pretty fair designer,” a reversal of gender roles in

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22 Jane K. Dominik

the next generation in terms of who pursues and succeeds in the working
world.
Another daughter, the title character in Miller’s one-act play Clara, is a social
worker, but her career results in her murder when she mixes her professional
and personal lives. Kroll, her father, is faced with the guilt of the social idealism
with which he infused his daughter, as well as that he ignored that she was dating
a man convicted of murdering his former girlfriend, even allowing his daughter
to sleep with him in “her girlhood room” while visiting in Kroll’s own home.
In The American Clock, Edie has her own apartment and works as a dia-
logue writer for the Superman comic strip. When Lee asks her, “Look, now
that I’m on relief can I take you out to dinner? I’ll pay, I mean,” she responds,
“Why must you pay for me, just because I’m a woman?” She also has strong
socialist political ideals, pickets to protest Mussolini, and kicks Lee out of
her apartment because he has no idea what she believes in.
In his one-act Elegy for a Lady (1982), the Proprietress of a boutique of
clothing and jewelry shares the stage with a man trying to find the per-
fect gift for his dying lover. The Proprietress leads him through a series of
options, finding that while he and his lover have worked together as busi-
ness partners—an advisory service for town planners—and that he consid-
ers her to be “tremendously competent,” he oversees the business but knows
very little about her or her current condition. In this play, the two working
women appear to be stronger and of clearer minds than the men.
In The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, when she discovers that Lyman is still
married to Theo, Leah demands that he sign a quit claim for their house in
order to provide security for their young son, Benny, and for her life insur-
ance business she allowed him to join. He asserts that he helped to build the
business to what it is now, but she responds that she would have developed it
without him. She leaves him at the end of the play, portraying one of M ­ iller’s
strongest female characters, asserting not only her equal partnership with
him, but also her right to leave him and retain her professional career.
In Resurrection Blues (2002), Emily Shapiro works as a commercial film
director, Sarah as a sound woman. Once Emily realizes that she has flown
to the mountains to film a live execution, her command and determi-
nation develop from running a film set to challenging those responsible
in order to stop the execution, appealing to the accused, rejecting Felix’s
sexual advances, letting the accused go free, and telling him to stay away.
A woman focused on her work, she tells her mother on the telephone, “I am

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 The Working Women in Arthur Miller’s Drama 23

not interested in marrying anybody.” While Sarah is not as strong, she does
assert the skill and talent of women, asking Felix, “Why not! I assure you
women can film crucifixions as well as anybody else.”
A review of the dates of Miller’s plays provides a benchmark of his use and
portrayal of his female characters over the sixty-eight years of his playwrit-
ing career. While he includes women working in various roles, there is an
increase in respected positions and power, as well as more overt expressions
of frustration of those who do not have either. This development arguably is
due to both the changing roles and opportunities for women in America as
well as the effect of the women in Miller’s own life. While an autobiograph-
ical reading can be myopic, simplistic, and reductionist, Miller’s three wives
can be aligned with the development of the working women in many of his
plays: a wife as secretary supporting him early in his career; a second wife
lost in the entertainment field; a third wife a professional photographer and
by all accounts strong, worldly, educated, and independent; and a daughter
who is a writer, director, and producer.
Miller’s male characters struggle to make a living, in pursuit of the idea and
ideal of success of the American Dream with all of its pressures, the desire to
prove that they can support a family without their wives or daughters working,
and the intention to pass something of value socially and economically to their
sons. As Joe Keller justifies his actions to his son Chris, “A business for you,”
while Willy Loman encourages his own sons to pursue “the Loman Brothers.”
However, in following gender roles in the working world, even as Miller’s
male characters find themselves desperate to succeed and prove themselves
through bluster, several of them either use the women with whom they work
or bother them, as in Mondays, only really seeing them for romance or sex,
or otherwise do not engage with them. Threatened at home by the poten-
tial success of their wives and daughters, they do not want women to work,
insisting upon retaining their own roles as providers and rulers even as they
need the money and fail to recognize the women’s willingness to help sup-
port the household and gain personal fulfillment outside the home as well.
Miller uses some of the working women in his plays to deliver messages
and provide reports to other characters, a playwriting technique that might
be better abandoned. Other working women are those with whom men
must deal in their lives; the men lean on the women, argue with them, and
are urged by them although they, in turn, reprimand the very women who
encourage them. Gradually, however, just as Miller explores and reveals

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24 Jane K. Dominik

the challenges, trappings, and frustrations of the working men in his plays,
he also, to a lesser degree, presents the challenges, trappings, and frustra-
tions of the women who work or wish to. As the women become stronger
and more central characters in Miller’s work, so does the complexity of the
dynamics of the relationships between men and women increase.
Notably, while the male characters in his plays have complex relation-
ships not only with the women in their lives but also with one another, the
working women in the plays are isolated; those who do interact with one
another do so very little. While Agnes and Patricia have some interaction
with each other in the predominantly male automobile parts warehouse in
Monday, and Fania chastises Marianne in Playing for Time, Maya and Irina
in The Archbishop’s Ceiling have little to do or communicate with each other;
Emily and Sarah, although both professionals on a movie location set, do
not either; and Edna and Flora, although both attempting to help Kitty,
interact little. Thus, the working women lack the support of not only men
in their lives, but also of several women, including those who also work.
Limited by marriage, convention, social expectation, and traditional
roles, these working women, especially in later plays, realize their worth
and place in the workforce, and attempt to push against their restrictions.
For some female characters, in the patriarchal society, the conflict between
love and protection, and self-worth and independence results in mental
confusion and emotional stasis. Like the wives and mothers in his plays,
the women who work outside of the home often find themselves having to
remain subservient, and continue to provide moral and emotional support
to the very men who hold them down.
The ending of Broken Glass embodies this oppositional stance perfectly: Is
Sylvia suddenly able to stand from her wheelchair out of her desperate and sub-
conscious urge to help her husband from dying of a heart attack, or can she stand
because, at his death, she is now free from his repression and resentment? This
question continues to perplex and challenge readers, directors, and actresses.
With the exception of the last group of female characters—­archaeologist,
designer, social worker, proprietress of a shop, co-owner of an insurance
company, film director, and sound woman—the working women in Mill-
er’s drama are stifled, staid, and suspect. Several are not permitted to work
by the men in their lives, and remain stifled and frustrated, even bitter.
Others whose jobs fulfill traditional and often minimal roles, in terms of
both their work environments and their serving as flat characters with

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 The Working Women in Arthur Miller’s Drama 25

no development during the plays, are staid: they are the servants, maids,
­secretaries, assistants, and nurses. One demonstrating hair preparation
products fairs little better. Perhaps Petra does until she is fired, and perhaps
the flight attendants do as well. And, those who work at various levels of
prostitution or as entertainers—dancers, singer, and actress—are suspect,
the latter not always viewed as having respectable professions, often con-
tinuing their objectification while dependent upon the men who manage
their careers or who want to sleep with them. Even those forced to work
do so out of economic necessity and against the wishes of the men in their
lives, and, as in Playing for Time, are under constant watch and suspicion.
Had Miller lived even longer than his eighty-nine years and continued
to write—as he surely would have—it would have been interesting to trace
any further development of the working women in his plays. While not
central to the action in most plays, the working women complement both
wives and mothers in their struggles, frustrations, and fears, and echo their
husbands and fathers who face the alien world of work in order to survive
and succeed themselves.

jane k. dominik is Professor of English at San Joaquin Delta College in

Stockton, California. Her work on Miller includes a newly edited ver-
sion of The Price, published by Methuen; “Empty Chairs, Pools of Light:
Absent Characters in Arthur Miller’s Drama” in Arthur Miller’s Century:
Essays Celebrating the 100th Birthday of America’s Great Playwright, edited
by Stephen A. Marino; “The Critical Reception of Arthur Miller’s Work” in
Critical Insights: Arthur Miller, edited by Brenda Murphy; “A View through
Death of a Salesman” in The Salesman Has a Birthday, edited by Stephen A.
Marino; and “Music in Miller,” “Before and After the Fall,” and “­ Prequels
and Sequels: A Creative Assignment That Extends Students’ Reading of
Arthur Miller’s Drama” in The Arthur Miller Journal, as well as reviews for
the Arthur Miller Newsletter and The Arthur Miller Journal. She was the
founding editor of the newsletter, has served as President of the Arthur
Miller Society, and currently serves on the Board.

work cited

Bigsby, Christopher. Arthur Miller: 1962–1005. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011.

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