Mrs. Warren's Profession

About

Shaw wrote Mrs. Warren's Profession in 1893, but it was banned by the Lord Chamberlain and not publicly performed in Britain until 1926 — over thirty years after its composition. The subject: Mrs. Warren manages a network of Continental brothels and has used the income to give her daughter Vivie a Cambridge education; the play traces the daughter's gradual discovery of her mother's profession and her moral reckoning with it. Shaw's argument is not about prostitution per se but about the economic conditions that make it rational — a feminist-socialist analysis that is still capable of provoking. Its suppression is itself a measure of how accurately it struck.