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Hammett, Dashiell

Hellman, Lillian

Homosexuality and gay rights

Odets, Clifford

The 1930s in America

Children’s Hour, The

by Carl Rollyson

Identification Play about two young teachers accused of lesbianism

Author Lillian Hellman

Date First produced in 1934

Neither the Depression nor the word “lesbian” is mentioned in the play, but both are in the subtext of Lillian Hellman’s play, which is concerned with the ruin of two teachers struggling to make a living by running a successful private school. The playwright demonstrates the dire consequences of assumption, as a community is provoked into believing the teachers have corrupted their children’s innocence by setting an immoral example.

Hellman’s first play produced on Broadway was a tremendous success. It ran for more than seven hundred performances and was acclaimed by critics, who regarded Hellman as a groundbreaking playwright exploring social issues and women’s psychology in the context of the 1930’s, a time when many writers were portraying previously taboo subjects on stage or challenging the political status quo. Like Clifford Odets’s play Waiting for Lefty (1935), which dramatized a strike and explored the impact of economic injustice, The Children’s Hour explored women’s lives and careers with a candor that caused the play to be banned in Boston. The play was so controversial that Hellman had to change its plot when it was released as a film in 1936; it was retitled These Three, and the teachers are accused of engaging in a love triangle with the fiancé of one of the characters.

Karen Wright and Martha Dobie are in charge of a private school they have built on their own. Although the play does not explicitly say so, these two women have had trouble finding employment during the Depression and therefore have resorted to creating their own successful enterprise. However, their problem student, Mary, rebelling against the teachers’ efforts to discipline her, tells her wealthy aunt that something unnatural has occurred between Karen and Mary. The outraged aunt promptly withdraws Mary from the school and makes sure that other parents in the community do so as well. Karen loses her fiancé, and a guilty Martha, wondering if perhaps she did have a romantic attachment to Karen, kills herself.

Impact

Based on an actual case in nineteenth century Scotland, Hellman’s play shifts the setting to the United States during the 1930’s, a time of great anxiety because of the Depression and an unsettled society rife with calls for economic, political, and social change. Martha’s self-doubt shows the influence of Freudian psychology, especially of the idea of the unconscious. At the same time, the play is protesting the structure of a society that permits the teachers no viable defense as soon as the rumors of their lesbianism are spread. Hellman intensified the Depression-era setting of the play in her film version of the play, showing an opening sequence clearly establishing that these two women are going to have trouble finding employment unless they start their own school.

Further Reading

1 

Griffin, Alice, and Geralding Thorston. Understanding Lillian Hellman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.

2 

Rollyson, Carl. Lillian Hellman: Her Life and Legend. New York: iUniverse, 2008.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Rollyson, Carl. "Children’s Hour, The." The 1930s in America, edited by Thomas Tandy Lewis, Salem Press, 2011. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=1930_110740801107.
APA 7th
Rollyson, C. (2011). Children’s Hour, The. In T. T. Lewis (Ed.), The 1930s in America. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Rollyson, Carl. "Children’s Hour, The." Edited by Thomas Tandy Lewis. The 1930s in America. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2011. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.