Although a number of women who wrote for the American stage before Lillian Hellman, including Susan Glaspell, Rachel Crothers, and Sophie Treadwell, have recently been receiving serious attention from theatre scholars and historians, Hellman was the first woman playwright to be admitted to the previously all-male space of the canon of American dramatic literature - and that on the basis of two major successes from the 1930s which remain to this day the best known of her eight original plays: The Children’s Hour (1934), which introduced Hellman to theatre audiences and provided the longest run (691 performances) of her thirty-year playwriting career; and The Little Foxes (1939), a perennial favorite with actresses that continues to be given star-studded Broadway revivals. While it may not seem particularly surprising that these same two works, sixty years or more after their New York premieres, continue to be the focus of critical commentary on Hellman, what is somewhat ironic, though perhaps not unexpected, is that they have become the center of contention among feminist scholars, for whom their canonized position is seen as deeply problematic.

The Children’s Hour concerns accusations of lesbianism involving two teachers at a girls’ boarding school; though the rumors are founded on the lies of a vicious child, without evidentiary proof, they fuel a campaign of vilification and hatred, leading ultimately to the broken engagement of one woman and the suicide of the other. Because the lesbian experience is described as socially disruptive, named by the community as “unnatural”- the designation most frequently appearing in the dialogue Hellman writes for her characters - and eventuates in the death of the abject sexual Other, recent criticism tends to regard the play as a “profoundly conservative text”whose adherence to realism’s codes inscribes lesbianism as an “enigma”that must be “purged,”and thus a play whose very canonization valorizes heterosexism and homophobia.