Loosening the Stays: Victorian Shaw

ABSTRACT This article for the special edition “Victorian Shaw” focuses on the intersections across social issues in the mid- to late-Victorian era that influenced the writing and reception of plays by George Bernard Shaw and contemporaries Wilde and Pinero. Shaw was an advocate for workers’ rights, as well as women’s rights, and spoke out in writing and orally to abolish the Contagious Diseases Acts that went after women but not the men who transmitted the diseases. Shaw’s connections to women activists are also featured; key speeches/essays by women are included. Shaw’s role as a theater critic gave him the opportunity to show the impact of the social ills of the era. By the 1890s, he began to write plays; by the end of the Victorian era, he was an established playwright who gave women roles that went beyond the boundaries of nineteenth-century theater.