World of the Play
When We Were Young and Unafraid takes place in 1972, in the midst of the Women’s Right’s Movement. Women’s rights activists in the 60’s through the 70’s were considered to be part of the “second wave” of feminism. However, this wave has hardly reached the coasts of Whidbey Island, a small island off the coast of Washington state with a bay too shallow for ships to pass through. This is where Agnes runs her bed and breakfast. What appears to be a cozy getaway to tourists also moonlights as a shelter for battered women. Despite having devoted her entire life to helping women, Agnes does not view herself as a feminist. On this small island, and throughout most of the country, feminist is still a dirty word.
Aside from Agnes, who has never had time for a man in her life, all of the women in this play struggle to view themselves outside of the context of men. Penny is the young and impressionable teen daughter of Agnes. Although she is intrigued by the women’s lib movement and wants to go to Yale, a college that became co-ed only four years prior, she still desperately wants to understand boys. Mary Anne enters the scene and teaches Penny how to win the attention of the captain of the football team. Penny is all too quick to throw her ambition out the window in the hopes of impressing a man. The lessons that Mary Anne teaches reflect the way women are expected to behave in this time period. She tells Penny that a man will never want her unless he thinks she needs him. She can’t be stronger or smarter than him. The only way to appear attractive is by appearing helpless.
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Mary Anne comes with her own brand of internalized misogyny. She cannot imagine her life without a man to take care of her. This was the reality for many women in this time period. They had very few opportunities to make their own money or own their own property, and most women did not even realize they could be anything other than a housewife. After escaping her abusive relationship, she quickly attaches herself to the next available man. Paul is a guest at the bed and breakfast, taking some time away after being left by his wife. He claims that all he wants is the love of a good woman, but no matter how kind Paul may appear, he still shows just how pervasive toxic masculinity was in the 70s. Paul is your typical “nice guy.” He cannot imagine that he played any role in the falling apart of his marriage. Behind his façade of being kind-hearted and charming, he still feels that he is entitled to a relationship with Mary Anne, and shows his darker side when she does not immediately reciprocate his advances. Mary Anne gives in, later telling Agnes, “What else could I do?” In this world, consent is not something that is taught. Men do not assume they need to ask for consent, and women have never been told that they have the power to give it or take it away.
Hannah is the exact opposite of Mary Anne, and she is representative of the views of “radical feminists” of this time period. Despite being attracted to men, Hannah calls herself a lesbian. She explains that to be a true feminist one must be a political lesbian, or a lesbian in practice, even if they are not really attracted to women. Hannah is seeking an all female colony of other radical feminists, which she refers to as the Gorgons. However, their brand of feminism does not seem to be too concerned with the helping of other women. Hannah views Mary Anne as a weak character, even going so far as to say that she got herself into her situation, essentially victim-blaming. Hannah believes the only way for women to be liberated is to cut all ties with men. However, after spending some time with the Gorgons, she realizes that they are not actually doing anything to help anyone. While she once judged Agnes for taking in “weak” women, she comes to realize that what Agnes is doing is making actual change and helping real women, and that is what feminism should be about.
Cultural and Historical Context
Domestic Violence
It is virtually impossible to find statistics about domestic violence against women from the time period that this play takes place. In the 1970s, spousal abuse was not something that was spoken about. Most psychiatric journals of the time claimed that spousal abuse was extremely rare, and some even asserted the dangerous viewpoint that women provoked their own abuse. Even though most people did recognize that spousal abuse was something that was happening, it was culturally considered to be a "private matter," that law enforcement need not get involved with. The general attitude around domestic violence was extremely flippant, as women were still fighting to not be seen as objects. There was still a deadly cultural consensus that wives were a husband's property. This attitude led to sexist advertisements such as the one pictured here. This ad ran in 1971for a bowling alley. The attitude surrounding domestic violence was not the only obstacle to women being able to recognize abuse and escape their abuser. Pay gaps between men and women often prevented women from being capable of achieving any kind of financial independence. In the play, Mary Anne is shocked that Agnes could have earned enough money to have her own property.
This shock is not at all unfounded, as most banks in the 70's would refuse loans to women without a male co-signer, and women were not allowed to apply for a credit card until 1974, with the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Another factor preventing women from escaping abusive relationships was a lack of assistance. Even today it can be almost impossible for women to flee domestic violence without some form of temporary safe housing. In the 70's government run battered women's shelters did not exist, and homeless shelters offered an extremely disproportionate amount of beds to men and women. For example, shelters in LA in 1973 offered around 1000 beds for men and only 30 beds for women. This led to women's shelters in the 70's being offered primarily by grassroots organizers, often in an underground railroad style. Since women fleeing violence could expect very little help from law enforcement, where they were staying had to be kept as secret as possible for their own protection. Of course, this necessary secrecy also became an obstacle to victims of domestic abuse. Mary Anne says she was sent to Agnes by a woman she knows, but Mary Anne had not had that connection it would have been very unlikely that she would have found the help she needed.
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Despite the Battered Women's Movement that took place along with the Women's Rights Movement in the 1970's, domestic violence continues to be a major problem in the United States. Due to both movements, marital rape was finally recognized in the mid-70s. However, it was not criminalized in all fifty states until 1993, and some states still have exemptions in their sexual offense codes that prevent marital rape from being prosecuted in the same way as a regular rape trial. In 1994, the Violence Against Women Act was passed, which provides funding for services for victims of rape and domestic violence, allows women to seek civil rights remedies for gender-related crimes, as well as funds a national 24-hour hotline for battered women. The act also was intended to provide training to increase police and court officials’ sensitivity, however, the effectiveness of that training has been highly disputed. The majority of women who choose not to go forward with domestic violence or rape charges today say that they made that decision primarily because of treatment by law enforcement or the legal system. The news is constantly filled with horror stories, such as the rape trial of a 17-year-old girl whose 27-year-old rapist was acquitted after his defense attorney submitted the child's underwear as evidence to the court. There may not have been statistics on domestic violence in the 70's, but we now have reliable information from the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and the CDC. The reality is that 1 in 4 women over the age of 18 have been the victim of severe violence by an intimate partner and 1 in 3 women have experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. Even scarier is how young the abuse can start. According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline 1 in 10 high school student have experienced violence from a partner. Despite the many advances that have been made towards ending domestic violence, there is still a need for more awareness and action.
Abortion
Towards the beginning of the play, Mary Anne admits to having an illegal abortion performed by the ex-nurse who led her to Agnes' shelter. At this time, in early 1972, abortion is not legal. However, history has proven that abortions will always be performed, whether they are legal or not. The legality of abortion is only a factor in whether or not abortions can be performed safely. Prior to legal abortions, women have used all sorts of methods to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Prior to legal abortions, women would have to rely on backdoor doctors and nurses, who may or may not know what they are doing. If they were unable to find someone who could perform the procedure or unable to pay the cost, usually well over $500, women would have to find other methods.
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Some women took unsafe abortion inducing drugs while others would perform the extremely risky "coat hanger abortion." Lack of access to safe abortion was responsible for the deaths of so many women. Even today women can be killed or left infertile from illegal abortions gone wrong. However, when abortion is legalized, there is absolutely no change in the number of women who have abortions, but the number of women who die from abortion decreases drastically. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that legalized abortion was decided in 1973, right at the end of this play. The Center for Disease Control examined national abortion data from the three years surrounding the rulings and estimated that the number of illegal procedures in the country plummeted from around 130,000 to 17,000 between 1972 and 1974. The number of deaths from abortion decreased from 39% to 5% in that same time period.
Despite the fact that abortion is a necessary aspect of healthcare for women, there is a very large "pro-life" movement in the United States. This movement is heavily populated by Catholics, Evangelists, and radical Christians. This group of people has no real argument for criminalizing abortion other than that it is against their religious beliefs. As we all know, a key component of the Constitution is the separation of church and state, but this has not stopped pro-life advocates from doing real damage to a woman's right to choose. Forced birth is something that has long contributed to women being kept from financial independence. Pro-lifers will scream for the protection of an unborn fetus, but will provide absolutely no help to mothers once that child is born. Lack of access to affordable abortions keeps women in poverty, particularly minorities or those in low income areas. Lack of access to abortion can also contribute to domestic violence by preventing women from being financially capable of escaping their abusers.​
When Sarah Treem published this play in 2014, she could have no way of knowing just how much damage the pro-life movement would do in the next few years. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president. A very large part of his platform was criminalizing abortion, which gained him almost all of the pro-life vote. The day after election day, "abortion" was the number one search on Google, followed closely by "Donald Trump abortion." Since then, Republican law makers have continued to pass abortion laws as strict as they can manage. In 2017, nineteen states passed 63 new restrictions on abortions. Since being elected, Trump has also managed to appoint two decidedly anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court with the goal of overturning Roe v. Wade.
Perhaps the most dangerous of these two judges is Amy Coney Barrett, a member of the religious group that inspired popular dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. Despite explicitly stating that her religious beliefs would prevent her from making an unbiased decision on abortion cases, Coney Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court in late 2020. With her confirmation, women in the United States now have to live in fear that our basic rights to bodily autonomy will be taken away.