Abstract
The paper traces the unprecedented emergence of women playwrights after the Women’s Liberation Movement in British Theatre. The Movement gave them an opportunity to pin down women-centric issues as focal points in plays, which previously had been overlooked by male playwrights. Distinct from the principles of liberal and radical feminists, the paper focuses on the views of social feminists, for such ideologies became the main area of concern for British women playwrights of the seventies and eighties. One of the seminal plays of the time, Top Girls (1982), is a blatant attack on the excessive zeal of career-oriented women who ignored motherhood and family relationships. Hankering after power, career and security, these non-traditional women, worse still, overlooked their traditional, deprived sisters who could not make it to the top. Thus Top Girls is not a mere assessment of patriarchy but also a brilliant critique of the first decades of the feminist movement for its failure to improve the lives of women in general.