The Mothers (play)

{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}}

{{Orphan|date=May 2021}}

{{Infobox play

| name = The Mothers

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| writer = Edith Ellis

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| setting = Cornwall

| premiere = 1915

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| orig_lang = English

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The Mothers is a 1915 one-act written by the English women's rights activist Edith Ellis and is set in Cornwall. The play premiered at the Little Theatre in Chicago and it is one of only three plays that she has written.{{cite book|author=Alan Sinfield|author-link = Alan Sinfield|title=Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0I2T5TQPDVoC&pg=PA58|year=1999|publisher=Yale University Press|isbn=978-0-300-08102-2|page=58}}{{cite book |last=France |first=Rachel |date=1979 |title=A Century Of Plays By American Women |publisher=Richards Rosen Press, Inc. |page=[https://archive.org/details/centuryofplaysby0000unse/page/42 42] |isbn=0823904725 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/centuryofplaysby0000unse/page/42 }} It is the first British play that clearly features female homoeroticism.{{cite book|author=Martin Banham|title=The Cambridge Paperback Guide to Theatre|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Ubr35UeE-UQC&pg=PA213|date=7 March 1996|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-44654-9|page=213}}

Jill Davis, in a 1991 article published in Women: A Cultural Review, stated that it is the earliest play that she has come across that has a lesbian representation of a lesbian experience.{{cite journal |last=Davis |first=Jill |date=1991 |title='This be different'—the lesbian drama of Mrs Havelock Ellis |journal=Women: A Cultural Review |volume=2 |issue=2 |pages=134–148 |doi=10.1080/09574049108578074 }}