Badass Women: Neith Boyce, forgotten playwright and feminist

   I first read about Neith Boyce while reading Kate Bolick’s “Spinster,” and soon discovered that she is all but forgotten in the modern age. Thanks to Bolick and Neith researcher Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, we know a little bit more about her life and career, but not much.

   Boyce was born in the late 1800s and was a free spirit. Called “America’s first bachelor girl” by Bolick, Boyce wrote from an early age. She had pieces published in cultural and literary magazines, and soon began to write her own column for Vogue about single life in new York, a taboo topic at the time.

   She not only wrote about many issues that had never been written about before in relation to single women living and working in New York, she also praised them. Marriage had, up until now, seemed the only course for women, but Boyce was adamant that single life was possible and preferable. Calling herself a “bachelor girl,” she promoted independence and feminism.

   Boyce did eventually marry, and although their marriage was an open one (another novelty for the time), Boyce’s husband certainly enjoyed the privilege of an open marriage more than she, as he often left her to take care of their four children and household. How ironic it is that the very person who at first denounced marriage, then married with the idea that it could and would be different for her, found that the world wasn’t ready for the kind of egalitarian marriages we espouse today.

   She did, however, keep writing and working. She published four critically acclaimed novels, dozens of short stories, and some plays. With her husband and other literary agents of the time, they created the Provincetown Players, a collective of artists and authors who produced plays first in Provincetown, MA and later in New York City.

   By the time of her death in 1951, she was all but forgotten, but that too is changing.

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