A Liberal Feminist Analysis of George Bernard Shaw’s "Mrs Warren’s Profession"

Abstract

The patriarchal society gives legal rights, economic power, and proper education only to men so that women are financially dependent on men for a living. When women demand freedom and legal rights, the basis of feminism appears. This study applies liberal feminist approach to George Bernard Shaw’s "Mrs. Warren’s Profession" (1893) to analyse the gender roles in terms of patriarchal ideology of separate spheres. Not receiving proper education to acquire a profession in the patriarchal society, the main character, Mrs. Kitty Warren, becomes a prostitute and then a brothel mistress to gain economic power in a public sphere. She is conventional at heart, like women in a private sphere because she wants her young daughter, Vivie, not to work in the public sphere but to marry the rich, middle-aged Crofts, who is her business-partner of brothels. Being grown up in boarding schools, Vivie Warren, representing the ‘New Woman’ type, shakes hands with men, smokes cigarettes, has knowledge of mathematics, graduates from Cambridge, and has the physical strength and intelligence to work in the public sphere. Therefore, she refuses her mother’s money and marriage proposals. This study asserts that women and men have no innate difference in terms of mental capacity, but women face prejudices imposed by the patriarchal society. Women are not allowed to take the same education as men to acquire a profession in the public sphere, and by this way, they are imprisoned in the private sphere.