The Actresses’ Franchise League
Founded in 1908 the Actresses’ Franchise Pageants League was founded to support the suffrage movement. It staged suffrage events
and readings and its members wrote and produced plays in support of the cause. These included Cicely Hamilton, Ellen Terry, Elizabeth
Robins, Edith Craig and Sybil Thorndike . By 1914 membership
numbered 900 and there were groups in all major UK cities. Plays included Cecily Hamilton and Christopher St John’s How the Vote Was Won (1909), and Hamilton’s
most famous work Diana of Dobson’s. Members later supported the war effort with the Women's Theatre Camps Entertainments group which toured military bases
throughout the country.
The Pioneer Players
The Pioneer Players were founded by Edith Craig, daughter of Ellen Terry. The company aimed to present plays of ‘interest and ideas’ and particularly those
which dealt with current social, political and moral issues. The Pioneer Players was a feminist company but not specifically a suffrage company; indeed some of the plays
they produced were written by men.
The Pioneer Players performed at the Little Theatre which operated as a club theatre to avoid the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain. Productions included In the Workhouse,
by Margaret Wynn Nevinson; The First Actress (about Restoration actresses) by Christopher St John, and American playwright Susan Gaskill’s The Verge whose
heroine rejects social convention in a passionate pursuit of creativity.
Introduction
Granville Barker
