L. S. Phibbs

L.S. Phibbs (Dates unknown) No information has been traced about L.S. Phibbs though she may well be the same person as Mrs Harlow Phibbs, who wrote another AFL piece, The Mothers’ Meeting. This play too is a monologue about a workingclass woman, spoken by Mrs Puckle who, in search of the mothers’ meeting of the title, stumbles instead on an anti-suffrage meeting. There, she becomes so outraged by the absurdities of Lady Clementina Pettigrew’s speech that she stands up and tells her that she’s talking nonsense and fills her in on the realities of life – the hardship and suffering women undergo equally with men and she finds herself condemning the iniquities of taxation without representation. The working-class woman who trounces the upper-class anti-suffrage woman was a favourite device of AFL plays (see also Glover) though it is probable that Phibbs, like most other AFL playwrights, was herself middle-class. A further one-act play by Mrs Phibbs, The Rack, was presented at the Rehearsal Theatre in 1912 with Madeleine Lucette Ryley[1] in the cast. [1]Ryley was a Vice-President of the AFL, prominent actress and playwright with a career in both Britain and the US. See Engle 2007 for reprinted interview with Ryley from The Vote.