Top Girls

In Act I, men routinely assert their dominance over women by taking away their children. Pregnancy and motherhood are permitted only under tightly controlled circumstances—circumstances that invariably entail total submission to patriarchal power structures. Dull Gret lost two of her ten children in gruesome ways when they were murdered by demons. When Lady Nijo tells about birthing her four children, one of whom died and three of whom were stolen, she seems accepting and claims that she stopped having feelings about them at all. But at the end of the act, with Griselda’s story, Nijo starts to cry because unlike Griselda, no one ever returned her children. And Griselda may have had her children returned, but the years of their childhood were stolen from her, and they were reunited with her as strangers she didn’t recognize. For Pope Joan, pregnancy was the undeniable sign of the womanhood that she had tried to suppress. The Catholic Church’s attitudes on abortion made it such an impossible moral conundrum that Joan simply ignored her pregnancy until it became evident to every Catholic in Rome. There was no question of motherhood for Joan, as she and her baby were killed. In the present day, Jeanine, who is simply engaged to a man, has her dreams and prospects clipped because Marlene presumes that children are inevitable. For all these women, pregnancy is, in one way or another, a curse. It means pain, death, and blood. When the women in the first act talk about their child losses, Marlene notably doesn’t include herself in the conversation. Marlene may have given Angie to her sister, but it’s not clear that she ever felt she had a choice. She understood that it would be impossible, especially for someone as young as she was, to have both a career and a family. The mutually exclusive relationship between motherhood and professional ambition—a rule she continues to enforce in her own work—shows how a patriarchal world uses motherhood to keep women in their place.

One of the major issues addressed by second-wave feminism was the right to reproductive autonomy. The birth control pill hit the market in the early 1960s, and in the UK, the 1967 Abortion Act made abortion more available than it had ever been before. For millions of women, motherhood became a choice rather than an inescapable fate. But as Churchill knew from her own experience, social pressures and structural barriers continued to make it nearly impossible for many women to choose both motherhood and career ambitions. Marlene’s pregnancy is an echo of Pope Joan’s. Both women understood that pregnancy and childbirth would destroy what they were trying to build, and both found themselves unable to act until there was no choice but to have the baby. Joyce sees Marlene’s absence from her biological daughter’s life as an act of selfishness, but it also speaks to the trauma of separation. At the time, Joyce was still hoping to have biological children, and since her miscarriage may have been caused by the stress of caring for Marlene’s child, she sees Marlene as having stolen her chance of bearing a child, just as Marlene felt that her dream of a career would have been stolen by the burden of parenthood. But after six years away, Marlene’s reunion with Angie is a reiteration of Griselda’s story. Marlene fights with her sister about taking Angie and offers to take her now, as if she has regrets. At the same time, she denies those regrets, and she talks about her two subsequent abortions both flippantly and in language that suggests trauma. Marlene mentions the high-powered executive who breastfeeds two babies in the boardroom as proof that she could have taken Angie in the first place, but Joyce scoffs that 17-year-old Marlene certainly didn’t have the privilege to be the exception that proves the rule.

Angie, at age 16, is an odd child who, from the moment the audience meets her, is angry, violent, and difficult to like. Her threats to murder her mother are unsettling, especially when she picks up a brick, even though she loses her nerve. She has figured out that Marlene is her biological mother. She has no father. The scene from a year earlier shows Angie trying desperately to elicit from Marlene the motherly love she wants and needs. At times, Joyce seems to regard both her adopted daughter and her mother simply as obligations: She cares for them because she must, because they were left in her care, and if she doesn’t do it, no one else will. There’s a nobility in that steadfastness, but it’s not the motherly love Angie craves. A child like Kit, who is smart and loyal, and who will probably make her mother proud one day, would have been an easier child to mother than Angie, who was failing remedial classes before she dropped out of school, is aggressive, needy, and has emotional problems, and who doesn’t seem like she’ll ever be able to care for herself. Neither Joyce nor Marlene sees Angie as having any future or potential, nor do they seem to like her very much. But Angie is simply a child who needs a mother, like all little girls need to be taught how to be women, especially in a patriarchal world.