LEST WE FORGET ZONA GALE
(August 26, 1874 - December 27, 1938)

The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
in 1921 and a vigilant supporter of progressive causes.

She was an active member of the National Women's Party and she lobbied for the 1921 Wisconsin Equal Rights Law.  She attended the founding meeting (in New York) of the Lucy Stone League and became a member of its executive committee.

Her activism on behalf of women was her way to help solve "a problem she returned to repeatedly in her novels:  women's frustration at their lack of opportunities."

It is therefore fitting to pay tribute to Zona Gale on her birthday which in 2015 has been named Women's Equality Day to support the Equal Rights Amendment.

Born in Portage, Wisconsin, a small river town that remained her lifelong spiritual home, and was, under various fictitious names, the setting of many of her novels and plays. She was a descendant of a colonist who had settled in Watertown, MA in 1604 and her great-great-grandfather Henry Gale had fought in the Battle of Lexington in 1777.   Her father instilled in his sheltered, delicate child his homespun philosophy of human perfectibility and her well-read and overprotective mother was the dominant influence in her life.
      When she was eight, she decided to become a writer.  Her early sentimental stories, written during her Portage public school years (1891-1895) at the University of Wisconsin were never published. Upon graduation she moved to Milwaukee and became a reporter for the Evening Wisconsin and later for the Milwaukee Journal.  Among her more interesting assignments were her interviews of touring theatrical celebrities like Ellen Terry and Sir Henry Irving.

A graduate with an MA in literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1899, she was employed by the New York Evening World. But during the summer of 1902 she became Edward Clarence Stedman's
secretary.  The position gave her a chance to concentrate on free-lance and fiction writing and helped her to form important literary friendships.

Beginning in 1911 she lived in Portage and visited New York for two months each winter.  Her initial return to Wisconsin coincided with the beginning of her activism for social issues. She lectured often on behalf of women's suffrage, pacifism, better labor conditions, and Senator Robert M. La Follette's Progressive Party movement.

MISS LULU BETT

When her 1919 novel Miss Lulu Bett became a best seller, producer
Brock Pemberton encouraged her to dramatize it, which she did in ten days.   Pemberton responded to the adaptation by writing: "The play has the same direct, incisive quality the book had; it cuts to the quick, and lays bare the lines of the characters. In its simplicity, sincerity, and reality it strikes a new note in the theatre."

Critics and audiences welcomed the play with enthusiasm when it opened at the Belmont Theatre on December 27, 1920. However Zona decided a few weeks later to alter the play's ending from the ambiguous tableau of a newly liberated woman facing an uncertain future to a more conventional "happy ending."  She explained her revision in a statement to the
New York Tribune (1/21/1921) and the Miss Lulu Bett went on to a 600 performance run and won the Pulitzer Prize.

From the womenscivicleagueofportage.files.wordpress.com
"She was loyalty incarnate. With her, friendship was a holy thing like love or religion. But her ultimate loyalty was to truth, to justice, to sincerity..She was unmoved by considerations of place, power, or prestige. Her heart went out the the lowly, the underprivileged, and those to whom the community never gave the warmth of its attention."  Dr. Glen Frank, former president of UW Wisconsin-Madison and close friend.

Her contribution to American drama is best expressed in terms of her regionalism.  According to Robert Gard: "It is impossible to estimate the effect of Zona Gale's writings on the feeling of Wisconsin people for Wisconsin places.  Her accomplishments threw playwriting and theatre in general into a very favorable light on the stage and made subsequent drama development easier in Wisconsin."  (Grassroots Theater)

In broader terms, Ludwig Lewisohn wrote, "Now it is not too much to say that no other American dramatist has succeeded in so fully and richly transferring to the stage the exact moral atmosphere of a class, a section, and a period, as Miss Gale."
(The Nation, February 2, 1921)


Resources:  Notable Women in the American Theatre. 1989.
Felicia Hardison Londre

Derleth, August.  Still Small Voice. 1940, a thorough and affectionate biography of Ms. Gale.
Wikipedia