I attended the play performed by the HPU Theatre department “Borrowed Babies”, the play was based in the years 1952 and 1982 and displayed the lives of a female professor, Mrs. L, 4 female students, and an orphan child named Katherine that they cared for as a part of their home economics course credit during the 1950’s. Later in life, when the orphan child is an adult herself, and the professor is being forced to leave the office she has had for all these years, the two meet again after Katherine searched for Mrs. L for years after seeing her name on a letter she found in her belongings at the foster care center. Eventually the two meet under what seem to be unwelcome circumstances from Mrs. L until she realizes that the woman that barged into her office is Katherine. For the duration of the play, we see the students caring for Katherine as a baby and learning new and valuable information about domestic life and the harsh reality of the oppression of women in the 1950’s, while at the same time we are hearing about the memories the family of women shared all those years ago when Katherine and Mrs. L met again in 1982. I wish I could say that the play ended on a positive note, but Katherine held a grudge against Mrs. L for not ensuring that she had made it into a loving home one leaving her care, and because of that she bounced around from home to home until she finally ran away. However, Mrs. L had a very old fashioned way of thinking, she hated the idea that women are no longer interested in learning to be a “domesticated housewife”, and would rather be a lawyer or scientist. At the end of the play we see the harsh reality that Mrs. L gave up her whole life to educating women on how to be women when now, in her eyes, no one cares about having those skill sets anymore. Katherine and Mrs. L clearly had very different opinions on this subject and at the end of the play the both of them are what they have been all along yet again, alone.
A few moments during the play that particularly caught my attention were the cultural differences in the way the 4 students acted during the 1950’s versus how Katherine and some of Mrs. L’s “current” students of the 80’s acted in terms of the way they talked about relationships, responsibilities, the clothes they wore, and even the way they thought and spoke about women’s rights. It was also interesting to see how Katherine thought what they did with her as a child was similar to a class project or just a grade, and Mrs. L saw it as much more of a family considering she had no one else in her life at the time. I can definitely see how some of the aspects of the play relate to what we have been doing in class relating to women’s rights around the world versus women’s rights in the west. This is a great example about how women in America were fighting for things like equality in the school system, gender roles, and domestic oppression from fathers and husbands, where as in class we have been learning about many different form of women’s oppression such as the right to choose who you love, or if you are allowed to get an education or not. Mrs. L reminded me a lot of the women in the short story “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” by Jhumpa Lahiri that were only teaching Bibi how to a good woman, not all the other necessary things a person might need to learn, only the womanly things. I feel that the big picture that this play is trying to get at are the many different aspects of a woman’s lives and the different views and struggles that different women faced back then and how they are changing over time. Something that will stick with me from the play is the hard, oppressive decisions the young, female students from the 50’s had to make to please their families and the social norms of the times.
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