Guest Blog: 'Is It Time We Killed The ‘Strong Woman’?': Playwright Maureen Lennon on MARY AND THE HYENAS

Is it time we killed the ‘strong woman’?

But Maureen, haven't you just written a show about Mary Wollstonecraft? ‘Mother of feminism’ and some would argue all round ‘strong woman’? Aren’t you meant to be a feminist yourself? Why are you going around calling for the murder of a term that has become synonymous with female empowerment?

The answer is yes to lots of these things. And I’d obviously like to point out that I’m not advocating for genuine violence to any real-life ‘strong women’- hey the world does enough violence towards women on its own it doesn’t need me getting involved. Clearly, I’m talking about what has, at this point, become one of the leading tropes of our time, the trope of the ‘strong woman’.

It’s a trope I’ve had to wrestle with a lot in writing this show. Mary & The Hyenas is a new play about the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, using music and theatre to tell her story in a way which hopefully feels relevant to female experience now. It’s been about seven years in the making and during that time I’ve been mainlining all things Mary. What a woman.

Mary Wollstonecraft grew up in Beverley, round the corner from my city Hull, fought of an abusive father, an indifferent mother, a childhood lacking any formal education, a lot of debt and a society that told her that as a woman she was incapable of any kind of independence or rational thought. Her determination led her to refuse to marry (for a long time anyway), make her way as a writer, become a famous philosopher, travel to France during the French revolution and write one of the founding texts of feminism, A Vindication of The Rights of Woman.

Wow, yep, she’s the original strong woman.

BUT. She also kept falling in love with horrible men who treated her awfully, she tried in fact to kill herself twice after their rejection, she wrote hundreds of letters begging one of them to come back, she spent quite a lot of time criticising women and the things they cared about, she wanted validation and adoration, she got the hump easily and quickly and needed to be humoured, she was jealous and possessive and prone to a little taste of melodrama.

To which I say THANK GOD. Because otherwise, what a boring play I would be writing. We pretend we want our heroes infallible, but really, we want them twisted and complicated and full of the foibles of humanity. Isn’t it time we let our heroines be the same?

And this here is my real problem with the phrase ‘strong woman’. Or ‘strong female character’. It’s that I think it has become devoid of meaning. I think in fact it’s become another way of flattening out our understanding or interest in women as people. It’s become its own prison, a way to refuse to engage with women and their full range of humanity.

Princess or ‘strong’ woman, or you know, ‘strong princess’, our new favourite archetype. They all start to feel a bit suffocating after a while. What if we just allowed women to be people? Flawed and empowered and trapped and hopeless and brave and ultimately human.

I think it does more than just reduce the characters we are talking about, I think it bleeds into how we talk and think about theatre led by women and how we encourage audiences to do the same. Men are allowed to be people. They are allowed to speak for humanity not just for maleness. They are allowed to carry stories which are seen as universal and have things to say about the world. So, what if we gave that same space to female led work. What if we said hey, this is talking about the experience of being a woman, but also, the experience of the human condition.  

So, I hope when you come and see Mary & The Hyenas you will find (in the spirit of one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s critics) ‘a clan of mischievous, desperate, wicked, and mischievously ingenious women’ (what a gang to be part of) belting out some tunes and telling Mary’s story. And I don’t think there’ll be a strong woman in sight. But come along for yourself and find out.

Mary and the Hyenas opens at Hull Truck Theatre from 7 February - 1 March and then heads to London's Wilton's Music Hall from 18-29 March.

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