“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” - Virgina Woolf

I am a singer, songwriter, poet, storyteller and actor. I am submitting a video of my performance as “Aphra Behn: A Woman of Ideas.” The solo performance brings together many “pieces of me” into a single performance. I wrote the script, based on my undergrad research at SFSU. I was also the producer and the sole performer. My talented friend Jessica Iris directed the production, and made my “Aphra” dress. The performance was recorded by Brattleboro Community Television (BCTV) during the "shelter in place" days of Covid through a collaboration with Vermont Theatre Company.

The video is approximately 10 minutes long. It toggles between me as a narrator, telling Aphra’s story using my own words; and me as Aphra, telling her own story using her own words. Aphra was a bad-a@@ feminist. In an age when most women could neither read nor write, Aphra was crafting a successful career as a playwright and poet.  At a time when women had but two options; the vows of marriage or the vows of a nun, Aphra chose to carve her own path speaking out against inequity and injustice.

Here’s a bit about Aphra, excerpted from my script:

In her novel “A Room of One’s Own” Virginia Woolf wrote, “For masterpieces are not single solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice”. 

But here’s the rub: when the single voice is always male, the whole tale isn’t being told.

I want to introduce you to the story of Aphra Behn who was the first English woman to earn a living as a writer.  

Aphra was prolific. She had 17 plays produced in 17 years in 17th century London.

Aphra was innovative. Her novel, “Oroonoko”  is considered to be the first argument for the abolition of slavery in English literature and was published nearly two decades before DeFoe penned “Robinson Crusoe”.

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I am also submitting my short story, "A Handful of Nettles."

I wrote this story for CRE-3600: Conflict Inside Organizations, taught by Angel Martinez. The lesson explored counter-narratives in addressing contradictions and conflict. Our assignment was to write a story or dialogue between people who share a common trait, revealing how divergent perspectives can still emerge. My story follows a group of women—servants responsible for tending kitchen gardens. It illustrates how oppression is not experienced uniformly, even among the oppressed, and how those differences shape one’s perception of the oppression itself.

At the time, the *Dobbs v. Jackson* decision weighed heavily on my mind. I had just read a statement from the Network for Public Health Law warning that 26 states had already banned or would soon ban abortion, leaving 33 million U.S. women without access. Twenty-two of those states are home to 45% of Black women under 55. When you consider that Black women are three to four times more likely to die in pregnancy, and five times more likely to die from pregnancy-related disorders than White women, it puts the impact of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision in an entirely different perspective. 

Email: ccain@antioch.edu