Top Girls by Caryl Churchill

At first I didn't know what to make of this play, Top Girls by Caryl Churchill, and was disturbed by the scene between Kit and Angie. I had to read it a couple of times to grasp the concepts. I believe Top Girls is a play about the roles of women in society and the workplace, using a career orientated women compared to the typical homemaker type of women to show how far a woman's place in society can and will come.
I think the intent of the author was to say that the women who want to succeed in the business world must think like a man and not give up their careers to just be a housewife. It is very reminiscent of the times and shows how much women have to struggle for independence and the right to work.
I think Marlene talks to Isabella, Nijo, Griselda, and Joan the Pope, because they are her examples of the past of women have been and what they have become, and she needs to believe that she can continue their legacy and rise above society's pressures on women. I think Churchill adds this opening to remind us why Marlene has to fight and how far women have come.
Compared to the women Marlene works with, we can tell her ambitions are higher than her co-workers. There is Win, who seems content with "living" with her boyfriend while his wife is away and there's Jeanine, a clear opposite who only wants a job to save money "to get married" and have kids Marlene asks Jeanine, "Does that mean you don't want a long term job?," and offers that she sells lampshades, because it probably boggles her mind to think of someone not wanting to be independent. The one co-worker exception is Louise, who seems similar to Marlene and has "seen young men who I trained go on" and feels like "Nobody notices" her.
When Marlene gets the promotion over Howard, we can tell that this a controversial decision for the time period. Even the man's abused wife even comes in to tell Marlene to let him have the job since, "What's it going to do to him working for a woman? . . He's got a family to support. He's got three children. It's only fair." It is not fair for him to have the job just because he is a family man and Marlene is a single woman. Her co-worker Nell even says, "Our Marlene's got far more balls than Howard and that's that."
In comparison, her sister Joyce is a divorced single mother, trying to make it on her own with "four different cleaning jobs." Joyce doesn't seem interested in men anymore and says, "Mind you, the minute you're on your own, you'd be amazes how your friends' husbands drop by. I'd sooner do without." Little is said about Marlene and her social life outside of work. She only says the men are "waiting for me to turn into the little woman" and admits "she does need them, but I need adventures more." In the first act, Isabella says to Marlene, "When I was forty, I thought my life was over," referring to a time when women of this age were considered washed up and old maids if they weren't married. Nowadays, women like Isabella and Marlene get married after forty and have babies after they have settled into their careers. While Marlene lives to work and to be successful, Joyce works to live because she has to take care of Angie.
We later learn that Marlene gave her infant daughter to her sister Joyce, so she could work and not have to raise her. Angie is very unhappy and hates Joyce, wants to be "American," wanting to work and to get away from the "working class" like Marlene. I don't know if Angie would have been happier being raised by her real mother, but I'm sure Marlene would have been more miserable.