In 1977 Ann McFerran conducted an interview for Time Out with nine British women playwrights, and headed the commentaries with the statement ‘the male-dominated theatre is giving way (somewhat)’.1 In retrospect, our ‘male-dominated theatre’ hardly seems to have given way at all, but those women in touch with the Second Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s were, in the climate of feminism, able to view the possibility of a more equitable future with a degree of optimism. Gillian Hanna, a founding company member of Monstrous Regiment, with whom Churchill worked on Vinegar Tom (1976) and the Floorshoiv cabaret (1977), recollects:

If change was not immediate, then feminism at least enabled women to express their discontents, or, as Churchill argued in McFerran's interview, ‘one of the things the Women's Movement has done is to show the way the traps work’. The ‘traps’ specific to theatre, which the women playwrights discussed in McFerran's interview, included male bias of their profession, the paucity of roles for women, the ways in which their voices had not been heard in the theatre, and the difficulties of combining a playwriting career with motherhood.

When questioned about her writing and feminism, Churchill observed: