Pioneers on stage: the Pioneer Club and British theatre of the 1890s

Abstract

Women’s clubs of the 1890s heavily relied on the performing arts for the dissemination of their ideas and contributed to the cultural texture which promoted the birth of the New Drama. This is a history which, nonetheless, has been systematically erased from the map of entertainment of the period. The aim of this article, therefore, is to bring to light the presence of drama in London’s Women’s Clubs of the late nineteenth century from a threefold perspective: as centers for entertainment and education, as cultural spaces to promote unknown female playwrights, and as sites for ideological contestation. For the latter, I shall rely on the Pioneer Club to prove how it nurtured the progressive narrative of the Ibsenites and movements of independent theatre that will encourage the flourishing of a New Drama by the turn of the century.