Os dereitos das mulleres no teatro (de homes) das Irmandades da Fala

Resumo

To contextualize this topic, this article begins by showing the situation of women in Galician theatre during the first decades of the 20th Century, paying attention to their work as playwrights, translators, actresses and also, from a topic-oriented perspective, as protagonists of those plays from this period written in the sub genres of social theatre and problem plays. There were very few female playwrights at that time, and the women who wanted to work as actresses had to overcome strong social prejudices. In problem plays the female characters from lower social classes appeared as scapegoats for the rich and powerful. Between 1920 and 1926 there was only one Galician female playwright, Herminia Fariña Cobián (1904-1966), whose work has been lost, while there were four Galician male playwrights who wrote and staged plays that defended equal rights for women. Three of those four were members of the generation group Irmandades da Fala and the fourth one belonged to the avant-garde generation. The main body of this article analyses the plays Donosiña (1920), by Xaime Quintanilla; Entre dous abismos (1920), by Antón Vilar Ponte Ponte (1881-1936); A tola de Sobrán (1920), by Francisco Porto Rey (1876-1941); María Rosa (1921), by Gonzalo López Abente (1878-1963) and Branca (1934), by Luís Manteiga (1903-1949) and the response they got from the most conservative groups of the Galician society.