Event

Someone Must Wash the Dishes

Many women fought against the Vote. New Yorker Marie Jenney Howe fought them with humor. No one contested the Ballot with more charm, prettier clothesand less logicthan Howes fictional speaker: Woman suffrage is the reform against nature . . . Get what you want. Pound pillows. Make a scene. Make home a hell on earth, but do it in a womanly way.

Arguments laughable now were dire warnings a century ago. "Someone Must Wash the Dishes" dissects those in a lively lecture following Howes Monologue. Michèle LaRue leads us from Votes for Women to financial ruin, sex wars, and the degradation of humankind.

Michèle LaRue tours nationally with a repertoire of literature by Gilded Age and Progressive Era American writers. Metropolitan audiences have seen her in Dorothy Canfield Fishers The Bedquilt (1913), Edith Wyatts The Parents Assistant (1901), Elsie Singmasters Gettysburg: One Woman's War (1913), and Edith Whartons Roman Fever (1934).