Rachel Crothers

Biography

Born the same December week the nation ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, Rachel Crothers (December 12, 1870 – July 5, 1958) stormed onto stages that had never seen a woman both write and direct her own work. Scene after scene, she dissected marriage, money, and double standards—staging comedies that laughed audiences into discomfort. Between 1900 and her last curtain call in the late 1930s, more than thirty of her plays reached Broadway, a tally unmatched by any female dramatist of the era. Scholars still single her out as the busiest, sharpest voice American theater had from the gaslight glow of 1906’s The Three of Us to the dusk of 1937’s Susan and God.