HOW DO TOP GIRLS TURN INTO HITLERINAS?: A FEMINIST-SOCIALIST ANALYSIS OF CARYL CHURCHILL’S PLAY TOP GIRLS (1982)

Résumé

The play Top Girls (1982) is certainly one of the most significant, most performed and most studied plays of modern British theatre. Generally, the interpretations of this piece are based on feminist theory and refer to such issues as the conflict between radical and liberal feminism, which is also mentioned and commented on in this paper. However, our focus lies on the interrelations between patriarchy and capitalism, as well as limited options for women within these two oppressive systems. In order to achieve our goal and present the ways in which, in the words of Zillah Eisenstein, the capitalist patriarchy work, apart from her study, we will refer to the works of Linda Gordon, Nancy Chodorow, Heidi Hartmann and Eva Figes. Our purpose is to show that women’s social status and their life standard cannot and should not be identified with the relatively rare success of individual women - such as Marlen who is the protagonist of the play or Margaret Thatcher who is presented as her role model – who had to embrace traditional male and capitalist values of competitiveness and selfishness in order to achieve their suspicious success. In this paper, we wanted to point out that unless women in power show understanding and empathy to other, less privileged, women, their leading positions and their top girls status do not imply female empowerment and cannot be taken as a feminist victory.