Actress or Activist? Dr Renata Kobetts Miller talks about Elizabeth Robins

Famous People You've Never Heard Of

Renata Kobetts Miller is Professor of English and Deputy Dean of Humanities and the Arts at the City College of New York.
Her book, "The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage" begins in the 1830s and ends in the 1910s. It looks at how Victorian novels and plays used the actress, who was a significant figure for the relationship between women and the public sphere, to define their own place within and among genres and in relation to audiences. It traces a cultural history of the actress that led actresses to appropriate the pen themselves by becoming suffragette playwrights and writing new social roles for women, and Elizabeth Robins was one of the women who did that.
Elizabeth Robins was a problem solver. Someone who developed new abilities and worked in different modes to bring about change. An American who felt a strong attraction to London and its culture.

Guest's Fantasy Dinner Party Guests:

Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

George Eliot, her favorite 19th-century novelist and a figure of great import to women writers who followed after her

Frances E. W. Harper, 19th-century American suffragist and abolitionist
Heidi Schreck, playwright of the current play What the Constitution Means to Me, which follows on Robins’s Votes for Women in it’s focus on the act of women speaking and in it’s use of the drama to emphasize the concerns of women’s bodies

Following the recent election in the United States and the election of the first women to serve as Vice President: Kamala Harris. Women who came before her would be interested in speaking with her and she could also benefit from the wisdom of women who had struggled before her.

Follow Renata on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/renatakmiller

Further Reading:

2 biographies of Robins:

Angela V. John, Elizabeth Robins, Staging a Life 1862-1952

Joanne E. Gates’s Elizabeth Robins, 1862-1952: Actress, Novelist, Feminist.

Naomi Paxton’s book Stage Rights!: The Actresses’ Franchise League, activism, and politics 1908-58
Episode edited and produced by: Jacob Taylor
Music :
The Woman's Party Song. With thanks to Jane Scolieri (performer) and The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley for the copy of the music written for piano by Anita Pollitzer.
1908 Sugffragette rally speech, with thanks to the British Library.
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