Sophie Treadwell (1885–1970)

Sophie Treadwell was born to a pioneer family in Stockton, California. She was the only daughter of Alfred B. Treadwell, a judge, from whom she inherited a passion for all things Mexican and Spanish, and his wife Nellie Fairchild Treadwell. After her father deserted the family, Sophie and her mother moved to San Francisco, where she first learned about the theater. She attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she had to work several jobs to support herself; during this time, she also began to write one-act plays and short stories. After graduating with a degree in French in 1906, she worked for a year as a teacher in a one-room school in Yankee Jims, once a mining camp during the California Gold Rush/ She then moved to Los Angeles where she studied acting and worked for a brief time as a vaudeville singer. She returned to San Francisco to work as a reporter on the San Francisco Bulletin. She soon became a feature writer with her own byline.

In 1910. she married William O. McGeehan, a popular sports writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and later moved with him to New York City, where he got a job with the New York Herald Tribune. Sophie persuaded the newspaper to send her to Europe as a war correspondent during World War I.

In NYC, Sophie joined the Lucy Stone League of suffragists and was an associate editor for Equal Rights, a weekly publication for the National Woman’s Party. She befriended many modernist personalities and modern artists of the time, including Louise and Walter Arensberg and painter Marcel Duchamp. Sophia advocated for sexual independence, birth control rights, and increased sexual freedom for women. She traveled often with her husband across the USA, Europe, and Northern Africa, all the while continuing to write plays; by the end of her career, she had written 39. In 1921, she used her Mexican connections to secure the only American interview with Pancho Villa at his ranch near Durango, Mexico. This visit resulted in her first professionally produced play on Broadway, Gringo (1922). Her most successful play was the expressionist work Machinal (1928). It was staged in England and in many European cities, including two productions in Moscow.
It was adapted by BBC-TV and by several American television programs in the 1950s. When Machinal was revived at the off-Broadway Gate Theater in 1960, it won the Vernon Rice Award.

Throughout most of the 1950s, Sophie lived abroad, in Austria and in Spain, where she published a novel in 1959. At age 80, she was actively engaged in the production of her final work, Now He Doesn't Want to Play, at the University of Arizona.