What a Young Wife Ought to Know

Hannah Moscovitch

• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781770919860
• eBook ISBN: 9781770919884
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Drama
• Index: Literature

Just don't lie down and no child will come. It's Ottawa in the 1920s, pre-legalized birth control. Sophie, a young working-class girl, falls madly in love with and marries a stable-hand named Jonny. After two difficult childbirths, doctors tell Sophie she shouldn't have any more children, but don't tell her how to prevent it. When Sophie inevitably becomes pregnant again, she faces a grim dilemma. In an unflinching look at love, sex, and fertility, and inspired by real stories of mothers during the Canadian birth-control movement of the early twentieth century, one of Canada's most celebrated playwrights vividly recreates a couple's struggles with reproduction.

We are in a 1920s Ottawa working-class tenement house. Patches of newspaper on the walls. None of the furniture matches (any chairs should be mismatched). There is darkness on stage, around the edges, so that characters can emerge and disappear.

We see a glimpse of Alma at the top of the play as she holds Sophie.

Alma whispers in Sophie’s ear.

Then Alma is gone.

Sophie: My sister’s taken to talking to me. She’s dead. If I’m going mad, my one consolation is the asylum’s just up the road, at least I won’t have far to go. I might be mad, just warning you.

Sophie smiles.

The health visitor seemed disgusted with me when I asked her to tell me how to come by it. She said, “It’s wicked to use unnatural means to stop life for what if it’s the child of God wanting to be born?” I said, “In Ottawa?” I said, “Even the Virgin Mary would use the prevention if she had children eleven pounds and with a prolapsed womb.” She’s never been near me since.

Sophie regards the audience.

You all look . . . very . . . I can tell just looking at the ladies that you don’t have more than one or two children apiece and it’s not for want of . . . union, is it? For the gentlemen, God forgive me, don’t look as though they’re thwarted in the sex urge.

Beat.

Ladies, you’ve come by it, have you? Can I ask, do you tell your husbands . . . that you’ve come by it, or . . . do you . . . keep it from them . . . ?

Beat.

Perhaps you won’t answer with your husbands beside you . . . ?

Beat.

Well we’re the real working class and need it more than others. My husband Jonny, he’s what they call “a machinist” up the paper mill and gets seventeen dollars and twenty-five weekly, and rent is eight, and coal is two, and that leaves seven dollars and twenty-five to feed and clothe man, wife and child, so you see I don’t want more children for their own little sakes to practically starve or be a burden to the taxpayers, but no matter how careful I try, I seem to fall wrong.*

Beat.

I married a poor man, so there was my first mistake. But Jonny, I don’t mind telling you, was — is still — a handsome man. If he was standing before you this minute, the ladies would cross their legs and many would pass a restless half-hour, that’s how handsome he was.

Beat.

I first laid eyes on him when he worked as a stable hand up at the hotel: I saw him standing outside the stable, and I stopped walking to . . . where I was going, and I just . . . stood there, looking at him.

Shift.

Sophie turns and we have the sense that she’s just stopped dead.

We see...

Table of contents

• punctuation
• production history
• characters
• what a young wife ought to know
• acknowledgements
• about the author