Note: all times are in Eastern Standard Time.
The Woman's social class is never determined in the play, but these images and sketches illustrate the fashion of the day in the early 1900s. Might she have been dressed in something similar when she was found on an iceberg?
More information regarding fashion in or around 1912 is located under the History of the Titanic page of this LibGuide.
All images credited to VintageDancer.com.
Scotland Road is the name given to the central passageway that ran the length of the ship allowing crew members to pass from First Class to steerage.
According to a recent article by Mr. Hatcher, the play's reason for being stems from having read a biography and a tabloid headline within days of each other. The biography was of the Godwin and Shelley families which related how Mary Shelley's father, a respected writer and rationalist, became absorbed by a newspaper story about the frozen body of a man that had been recovered in the Alps. When "defrosted" this man declared that he had been caught in an avalanche in 1660. Godwin tried to set up an interview with this 200-year-old ice man only to find the story that had shaken his rationalism was indeed a hoax. The day after reading this book, Hatcher came across a headline in a tabloid which read "Titanic Survivor Found on Iceberg." His playwriting instinct immediately clicked into overdrive as his imagination strung together the elements that were to become Scotland Road or as he sums up the elements that set him off:
"A mysterious woman with a secret. A rational man desperate to believe. A shared obsession. A locked Room. Some twists, some turns. An iceberg. The Titanic."
- Elyse Sommer for Curtain Up, January 1998
Social justice advocate and anarchist Emma Goldman was known for her strong opinions, and her thoughts about the behavior of—and around—women on the ill-fated Titanic were intense as well, as seen in her commentary first published in the Denver Post back in 1912.
"With all the claims the present-day woman makes for her equality with man, her great intellectual and emancipatory achievements, she continues to be as weak and dependent, as ready to accept man's tribute in time of safety and his sacrifice in time of danger, as if she were still in her baby age."
When the Titanic sank, tradition meant women and children were first into the lifeboats. But that aspect of the tragedy threatened to take the suffragette movement down with the ship, hears Dani Garavelli.
Digital images of The New York Times' cover page on Sunday, April 28, 1912, headlining the Titanic's sinking. Includes details of the disaster, drawings, and a map of the tragedy's location in the Atlantic. Above image is the Times' publication on April 14, 1912.
