Abstract

Sarah Daniels’s emphasis on the consciousness raising of women and women’s relationships with each other in most of her plays reflects the contemporary women’s movement of the 1980s. The exploration of female relationships in her play The Devil’s Gateway offers the study of the mother-daughter relationship that is usually neglected in plays written by men. The findings clearly show that Daniels seems to favour a radical approach to patriarchal power which exists in the structures of male dominance in family as well as society as a whole. Daniels has chosen to magnify female characters at the expense of the male ones. The female characters reject the patriarchal structure that has oppressed and ignored them: they form a new model of female unity: matriarchal association. This association, enhanced by the image of the women’s imminent unity with the protesters at Greenham Common, shows that the needs for feminist equity can be satisfied.