Scorn of Women: A Play in Three Acts

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Jack London's 1906 Klondike melodrama — based on his own short story — follows a dance-hall woman in the Gold Rush Yukon who has accumulated a fortune and wants respectability, and the social forces that frustrate her aspiration. London brings his characteristic energy and socialist sympathies to a story that is partly melodrama and partly social critique of the class barriers that make 'respectability' impossible for women of certain histories. It is a more theatrically conventional work than Theft but has an authenticity of setting that London's Yukon experience provided.