Top Girls In Caryl Churchill's 1982 play Top Girls, a young woman named Marlene has determined that she is going to become a successful businesswoman at any cost, even to the point where she abandons her illegitimate child with her sister Joyce in order to fulfill her ambitions. At the center of the plot is the disagreement between these two women about what in life is of most important and where a person's priorities should be. Although the two characters do not appear together in the whole of the play, the arguments that the two women have are represented in the conflict that serves as the difficulty throughout: Marlene represented the new women who is determined to succeed at all costs and Joyce the traditional, maternal position that society would rather the woman fulfill.

As the play begins, Marlene is having a dinner party and she is surrounding by some of history's most successful women, many of whom are long dead. The obvious connection becomes then that Marlene is among colleagues; she has achieved a level of success that puts her on the same plane as these...

This is made even clearer later on in the play when Marlene is confronted by a woman, Mrs. Kidd. The woman's husband Howard was up for a promotion that Marlene ultimately received and Mrs. Kidd asks and then insists that Marlene step down in order to allow the male to take that position. By refusing Mrs. Kidd's request that she stop performing "man's work" Marlene makes a very strong statement about herself, that she believes herself more than capable of performing the job satisfactorily. She belongs with these women because, like them, she is unafraid to perform tasks which are seen as masculine and unladylike because they are necessary to satisfy her sense of ambition.
In the first scene, the women at the table all discuss how they lost their children. For example, Lady Nijo had been raped by the former Emperor of Japan and gave birth to a child of royal blood whom she was never able to see. She sacrificed herself in order to give her child a better future. For her, the…