Literary historians maintain that women have never contributed significantly to the German drama. Facts, however, point clearly to the opposite. Indeed, the first known German dramatist (10th century) was a woman! Two major causes for the lack of historic recognition are: (a) prejudice that women are incapable of good dramatic production, (b) underrating of plays because professional critics—traditionally men—have used male psychology as the criterion for judging female characters in plays by women. A revaluation of women’s contributions to drama is imperative.
(Scholtz Novak 1972, 47)

When the German-born American scholar of German literature Sigrid Scholtz Novak issued her call for greater recognition of women playwrights in the early 1970s, she was responding to a literary historiography that had either largely overlooked women’s extensive dramatic production or fundamentally questioned its aesthetic and historical significance. More than five decades later, scholarly engagement with women playwrights has expanded considerably. Nevertheless, the problem of accessibility identified by Scholtz Novak remains unresolved. Many plays by women are still available only in historical print editions, are dispersed across libraries and archives, or are absent from the digital text collections that increasingly underpin literary-historical scholarship and computational research.

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