SISTERHOOD, INTERRUPTED

Ragtime, Liberation, and the
unfinished work of women’s equality

Even when we know better, most of us seem to think that history proceeds in a linear manner. Life in the present, while far from perfect, is an improvement over life in the past, isn’t it? Women as a whole today enjoy expanded educational options, improved health outcomes, and greater equality of opportunity than they did fifty years ago, though those benefits vary by race and class.

That, at least, is how the world seemed, especially for women in the United States, until recently. There’s a backlash against women’s rights, and it’s not just in the United States, where we have seen the overturning of legislation protecting reproductive freedom and other forms of healthcare. A UN report earlier this year noted increases in sexual violence, femicide, and in the gender gap of access to power and resources.

Given this context, it’s worth looking at the ways Broadway, that shaper of aspirations and of historical interpretation, is presenting women of the United States past in a couple of currently running, highly praised productions—Ragtime and Liberation. I highly recommend both productions if you are able to see them.

Both have been widely reviewed—it’s easy to find plot synopses and listing of cast members elsewhere. Here I simply consider what these two productions tell us about the situation of women in the United States today through their portrayals of women in the past.

Ragtime, beautifully staged and gorgeously sung and orchestrated, includes four significant female characters. Two of them—Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit–are based on historical figures. Like other historical figures in the musical, (such as Harry Houdini, J. P. Morgan, and Booker T. Washington), Goldman and Nesbit function less as characters with their own narrative arcs and more as features of the environment in which the fictional characters Mother, Sarah, Coalhouse Walker, Tateh, and Younger Brother function.

It might not be fair to look too closely at these historical figures, but since all is fair in criticism and commentary, I will say that while I have no problem with Goldman and the way she periodically steps onto the stage to bring an anarchist perspective to the situation and to inspire workers to rise up and demand their rights. She personifies the movements for radical change that grew out of the widespread injustices of the time.

Shaina Taub as Emma Goldman

Nesbit, however, set my teeth on edge. I suspect that if Terrence McNally and Lynn Ahrens were collaborating on the musical’s book and lyrics in our post #MeToo era, this character would have been portrayed quite differently.

The historical Evelyn Nesbit was drugged and raped at age 15 (or 16—Nesbit’s birth year is unclear) by Stanford White, a noted architect who was the Jeffrey Epstein of the Progressive Era. (Wealthy and well-connected; White was said to have kept a “little black book” listing the underage females he had seduced.) A couple of years later, Nesbit was sexually assaulted and physically abused by multi-millionaire Harry K. Thaw; a man she eventually married and who then murdered Stanford White. Yet in Ragtime, Nesbit is portrayed as a Betty Boop-type character, opportunistically childlike yet sexy, with no self-awareness or hint of the multiple abuses and tragedies she had suffered. Nesbit is incidental to the Ragtime story except as an image of society’s growing openness to discussing and acknowledging female sexuality and as a source of fascination to Younger Brother. Even so, she could have been portrayed with more depth.

Anna Grace Barlow as Evelyn Nesbit

The fictional women of Ragtime are far more multi-dimensional and complex than those based on historical figures. That’s partly because, as stated earlier, the celebrities are simply features of the environment in which the fictional characters live out their lives. Sarah, the lover of ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker and the mother of his child, is an active participant in the story, demanding dignity for herself and her baby. Coalhouse is the central figure of Ragtime (portrayed in this production by the acclaimed Joshua Henry, with a voice as gorgeous as the ragtime music that forms the backdrop of his singing). Sarah’s efforts to win justice for her fiancée and a better life for her son result in tragedy for her as well as for Coalhouse.

Nichelle Lewis and Joshua Henry as Sarah and Coalhouse Walker

The major fictional woman in Ragtime is Mother. A white woman married to a wealthy businessman, she’s not terribly likeable at first. She puts up with a lot of patronizing crap from her husband, but her sense of compassion for Sarah, and for Sarah’s limited options, pull her out of her limited life experience and lead her to take a series of increasingly courageous acts that set all the other events of the play in motion.

Caissie Levy and Brandon Uranowitz as Mother and Tateh

If Mother had not provided Sarah and her baby with shelter, Coalhouse would not have taken to visiting the New Rochelle house in his effort to woo Sarah. And if Coalhouse had not started visiting New Rochelle, he would not have encountered the racist humiliation that leads him to undertake an act of desperation. Mother embodies many of the social changes of the Progressive era; like the nation itself, which instituted multiple reforms to improve living and working conditions for children and working people at this time, she is transformed through her compassion. No longer a sheltered rich woman ignorant of the challenges faced by so many others, she finds shared humanity with Black people, immigrants, and working-class people.

Caissie Levy as Mother

Equally important, she finds herself and becomes a human being able to experience and enjoy the richness of life.  The deeply moving final moment of Ragtime, in which the child of Coalhouse and Sarah steps forth in quiet triumph, is the result of the combined efforts of Sarah and Mother to nurture him and to achieve the hopes of his father Coalhouse, who longed to carry his son “On the Wheels of a Dream.”

The terrifically performed and directed, funny, wise, and uplifting Liberation brings a group of six very different but completely believable women together for a consciousness-raising group in the early 1970s. Whitney White’s spot-on direction of Bess Wohl’s skillfully written script demonstrates the ways in which women in the United States have experienced progress toward gender equality and the ways in which they haven’t over the past fifty years.

Betsy Aidem, Kristolyn Lloyd, Adina Verson,
Audrey Corsa, Irene Sofia Lucio and Susannah Flood

It’s worth remembering that progress that has been made, because it is so easy to think that the conditions of today have always existed. In Liberation, we have women trapped by divorce laws, by lack of professional opportunities, by marital expectations, and by limited elder-care resources. Many married women in that time had neither bank accounts nor credit cards in their names.

Kristolyn Lloyd

Few would say that all these problems have been solved (any who did would be wrong), but hearing these women talk about their lives makes it clear that the obstacles they faced some fifty years ago were more significant and more widespread than those faced by women today. And it was through talking about their situations that women began to find the courage to demand change from bosses, husbands, and ultimately, one another.

Adina Verson, with Susannah Flood and Kristolyn Lloyd

The complex and yet quite accessible structure of Liberation, in which Suzannah Flood plays both a woman of the present day and her mother Lizzie (convener of the group) as she was in the 1970s, adds depth and complexity to the story. We meet Lizzie, determined and a bit naïve, but we also meet her daughter, trying to understand why her mother seemingly abandoned her goals and ideals.

Susannah Flood

Other performers (Betsy Aidem, Kayla Davion) also take on the role of Lizzie at times. This portrayal of Lizzie by different performers (who also fill other roles) gives a fluidity to the experiences of these women; a fluidity that suggests that while the situation of each woman is particular, it is universal as well. Most importantly, the conversations these women have and the resulting transformations epitomize the phrase “the personal is political,” a widely used byword of the era.

Kayla Davion and Kristolyn Lloyd

Liberation makes clear that the struggle is not over, not by any means. There has been backsliding, but that’s not to deny that ordinary women, coming together and talking honestly, effected change. That doesn’t mean the work is finished, but reality of this backlash need not be a sign of defeat—or despair. At the end of the play, Lizzie tells her daughter, “You can take it from here.” In other words, the women of Lizzie’s generation did what they could. It’s time for their daughters to take up the work. Like their mothers, they’ll have no guarantee that their efforts will be easy or even successful.

Even so, the work must be done.

Susannah Flood and Betsy Aidem

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Ragtime
Vivian Beaumont Theater, 150 West 65 St at Lincoln Center
2 hours 45 minutes
ends on June 14, 2026
for tickets, visit LCT

photos by Matthew Murphy

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Liberation
James Earl Jones Theatre, 138 West 48th Street
2 hours and 30 minutes, including intermission
limited engagement ends on February 1, 2026
for tickets, visit Liberation

photos by Little Fang

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Lynne Weiss is a member of the Boston Theater Critics Association. Her work has also appeared in Literary Ladies Guide and in The Common, Black Warrior Review, and the Ploughshares Blog. She has an MFA from UMass Amherst and has received residencies from Yaddo, the Millay Colony, and Vermont Studio Center and grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. A lifelong social justice activist, she is at work on a novel set in 1930s Cornwall. Her reviews, travel tales, and progressively optimistic opinions are on her substack.