‘The Woman Question’ was a constant theme in the theatre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it was a question rarely being asked or indeed answered by women. As Virginia Woolf discovered in the Reading Room of the British Museum, it was men who pronounced on women at the time. Modernism was complex, introspective, questioning. Plenty of room for conflict, fundamental to the theatre, but not for clear answers, certainly not for resolution. Modernist literature, esoteric, self-reflexive, dense, didn’t lend itself to a form which needed to move an audience directly and powerfully. But there were women writing plays. Before the First World War, there were the New Women actresses turned playwrights, like Cecily Hamilton and Elizabeth Robins. Some modernist women writers wrote the occasional play, as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Virginia Woolf all did, though these weren’t always aimed at the theatre—Woolf’s play Freshwater, for example, was a jeu d’esprit to be performed by the family, and included a part for Leonard’s marmoset. The one woman on this side of the Atlantic to make a significant contribution to drama was Lady Augusta Gregory, who wrote over 19 plays in Hiberno-English, though some would argue that her founding and support for the Abbey Theatre was a more significant contribution to the Celtic Revival than her own plays. Among the Americans there were women for whom playwriting was also their central concern, like the expressionists Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell, whose impressive achievements need rediscovering. Playwriting too had a central place for Harlem Renaissance women, as it did for the men, and I want to end by looking at the place of black women in the modern theatre, especially through the very varied contributions of Zora Neale Hurston and Josephine Baker.