In histories of British theatre, the 1920s and 1930s are traditionally presented as being unfruitful for women playwrights. However, the critical framing of their work by their own contemporaries leads us to see them as more prolific and significant than at first assumed - interwar women playwrights were clearly breaking into the male-dominated market. Rare acknowledgements of women writing for the theatre of the time, made by our own contemporaries, are often underpinned by comment on their seeming lack of a feminist perspective or innovative strategy: they were largely middle-class, writing for a commercially oriented theatre and so the assumption is that their work does not warrant serious examination. Women writing for the variety of theatres which produced plays during the 1920s and 1930s have in common their gender and more of a general leaning towards the conservative than modern feminist scholars would perhaps like.