One of the questions Caryl Churchill put to her fellow-feminists in Top Girls … was this. What have you, or indeed anyone, to offer the woman who hasn't the mental wherewithal ever to overtake the men on the promotion ladder, run her own office, jet off to New York for meetings and California for holidays, and do all the greater and lesser things associated with 'making it' in our sabre-toothed society? By way of illustrating the problem, she introduced a podgy, dim Ipswich schoolgirl, Angie, the unwanted daughter of her high-achieving protagonist, Marlene; and, by way of expanding and expatiating upon it, she now takes us [in Fen] to the opposite end of the East Anglian peninsular, to a fen village where Angies are to be found over every other sink, and thwarted and sometimes embittered Marlenes in every second potato patch….
The village girls may, and do, sing little ditties about becoming hairdressers and nurses, but their likely destination is always out there in the wind and rough weather, toiling for the farmers as their grandmothers did and their granddaughters presumably will. Since the five-woman, one-man cast doubles, trebles, even quadruples its roles, we meet a fair spread of such victims, most resigned to being half-buried by the local sod ('what you after, bluebird of happiness?') and one or two putting up some fragile show of resistance ('don't start on me, just because you had nothing yourself').
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