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Women for votes

Chapter 3: A Farce in Three Acts
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About This Book

The play is a three-act farce set in an urbane household, where a father and his wife manipulate their daughter’s public involvement in the women's suffrage movement to delay or prevent her marriage and thereby protect control of an inheritance. Scenes among household staff, suffrage activists, and social acquaintances produce comic misunderstandings, satirize domestic ambition, and create tensions between principle and convenience. The piece exposes the self-interest behind reform rhetoric through witty dialogue and improbable situations, using eccentric touches such as a pet pig to accentuate the humor while driving a sequence of reversals that underscore hypocrisy and eventual reconciliation.

A Farce in Three Acts

    Persons of the Play:    
George Tilsbury.    
Josephine Tilsbury, his wife.    
Mildred Tilsbury, his daughter by a former marriage.    
Imogene Brown,
Edward Melvin,
Horace Van Tousel,
Theodore Becker,
} Friends of the Tilsburys.
Mary Henrietta Thom, a leader of the Women Suffragists.    
Sophie Slavinsky, a minor partisan.    
Katy, the parlormaid at the Tilsburys’.    
Helma, the cook at the Tilsburys’.    
Cochon, Mrs. Brown’s pet pig with his ears trimmed and wearing an elaborate blanket.    

Time: the present. The action of the play takes place in the City of New York during a week in November.