Whatever Happened to the Cultural Feminists? Martha Boesing and At the Foot of the Mountain

Extract

In 1991, Martha Boesing, cofounder of At the Foot of the Mountain in Minneapolis, declared, “I'm not [just] a cultural feminist. I was a Marxist before these girls were even born!” The “girls” to whom she was referring were the critics whose negative response to the performance of the multicultural collaborative piece The Story of a Mother II at the Women and Theatre Program in Chicago in 1987 marked a decisive clash between competing notions of feminism in American theatre. Boesing later owned her own cultural feminism, as well as her Marxist evocation to action, but the conflict between cultural feminists (who sought performance as a means of building communities) and materialist feminists (who resisted being constructed as part of universalized womanhood) resulted in a divide that ultimately affected the reception and hence the historical impact of At the Foot of the Mountain. From their founding in 1974 to this performance in 1991, Boesing and At the Foot of the Mountain had been featured both in critical literature and at theatre conferences, hailed for their application of consciously articulated feminist politics in the creative process of their plays. After Chicago, they lost momentum as subjects of study in critical scholarship.