Rachel Crothers (1878-1958) was the leading woman playwright in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.

She did not make it into the Index of M,SU.  You will find her at 128n12, where I cite a 1909 Saturday Evening Post article that mentions one of her plays, "The Coming of Mrs. Patrick."  The character who gives her name to the play mixes a cocktail.  "What cocktail was she mixing?" I asked, because one could not tell from the article.  I had tried, and failed, to locate the play itself.

I hoped, of course, that it was a Martini, but the situation was of great interest in any case, because here was a woman mixing a cocktail in 1909 or earlier.

The play was, I have since learned, opened on Nov. 6, 1907 at the Madison Square Theater in New York and had only thirteen performances. It was one of Crothers' few flops, and was never published. The manuscript is in the Archives of Illinois State University, and, thanks to Dr. Jo A. Rayfield, University Archivist, I have been able to obtain a photocopy of the relevant scene.

First, I have to tell you that the cocktail is not a Martini.  In fact, it is an unnamed, ad hoc farrago that Mrs. Pat, as she is called in the play, uses to make young Billy even drunker than he already is and so to prevent him from eloping with the unworthy Chrissy.  Billy is the son of the family for which Mrs. Pat works as a nurse.  Billy's mother has been bed-ridden for three years.  Everyone is either depressed or in love.  Mrs. Pat, who seems to be the social equal of the family, takes the whole situation in hand.

I focus on the cocktail.  It is served after dinner (I think).  Billy is about to depart.  "If you will do it," Mrs. Pat says, i.e., if you will elope, "let's drink to the bride."  Billy accepts.  Mrs. Pat then suggests a cocktail.  "You've never had one of my cocktails, have you, Billy?  Will you drink it?"  His reply: "I'll drink it if it kills me."  I infer that, in 1907, in the perspective of the New York audience, a woman might know how to make a cocktail; and that men did not expect a woman to be good at it.  For corroboration of the first inference, note the cocktail section in the 1906 edition of Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management (cf. M,SU 16).

The play proceeds to justify the sexist expectation.  The stage directions describe Mrs. Pat as "rushing to the sideboard and pouring some of everything into the glass."   She says, "Perhaps you think I don't know how to make one, but I do."  Billy replies: "I wouldn't have thought it," etc.  I doubt that the audience believed that Mrs. Pat really did know how to make a cocktail but, in the circumstances, could not or would not follow a recipe. Rather, as a woman, she does not in fact know how to make a cocktail, but, as the take-charge woman that she is, she pretends to know how in order to save Billy.

So Billy's "if it kills me" defines the situation, as far as the cocktail is concerned.  Even though he is the morally inferior one in this scene, he still retains, and the play actually justifies, his male superiority in the domain of cocktails.

Mrs. Pat finishes making the drink.  The stage directions: "Mrs. Patrick drops an olive in the glass and holds it up to him."  She takes a glass of wine.  The olive, by the way, does not mean Martini or would-be Martini.  In those days, the olive was not yet the standard garnish of this drink.  They toast the bride.  Mrs. Pat's ruse succeeds, though Billy's drunken attentions soon turn to her, and she is compromised when other characters enter the room.

For a synopsis of the plot and a digest of reviews, see Colette Lindroth and James Lindroth, Rachel Crothers: A Research and Production Sourcebook (Westport, CT, 1995), 16-18.

Two further points.  First, Mrs. Pat's cocktail is an early, awkward instance of a momentous change in social drinking in the United States.  Catherine Gilbert Murdock, in Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870-1940 (Baltimore, 1998), argues that "Victorian women's moderate, at-home drinking formed the foundation of alcohol consumption patterns in the twentieth century" (52).  And it was to be the cocktail that, in the 1920s, "legitimized as no other beverage could alcohol consumption within the home" (105).  (I reviewed Murdock in Social History of Alcohol Review 36-37 [1998)] 17-26.)  Second, the cocktail could play this role, I maintain, only because it came to be sanctioned as middle or upper-middle class, or as a high-status drink.  Again, Mrs. Pat is an example.  (She is a nurse but she is hardly a domestic.)  And her highly respectable employers have the makings of cocktails on their sideboard.  I have already said a few words about gender in the play.  I add that, whenever gender and alcohol get together, as they do each time that a drink is consumed, they bring social class to the occasion with them.

© 2001, Lowell Edmunds