Caryl Churchill is arguably the most successful and best-known socialist-feminist playwright to have emerged from Second Wave feminism. Her plays have been performed all over the world, from the UK and the United States to Korea and Japan. She is routinely included in anthologies of contemporary drama and her plays regularly appear on student reading lists. Within theatre studies, her work has provided the basis for five books and numerous articles. Often linked to theoretical debates about representation in feminist performance, Churchill has stimulated and provoked some of the most important feminist thinking about the theatre since coming to critical attention in the mid-1970s. She came to prominence concurrently with the development of Second Wave feminism in Britain, both its activism and its academic thrust; and at the time when Marxism was being re-thought in the academy in light of Althusser and Lacan, and challenged by feminists for ignoring gender and, later, sexuality. She is still writing in the so-called 'postfeminist', 'postsocialist' nineties; while not abandoning her commitments, she has reflected the historical transformations of the eighties and nineties in plays which stage the central preoccupations and contradictions of these movements as they have shifted and changed.

Her theatre practice similarly mirrors a series of challenges and changes in hegemonic producing modes over this period. She began as a solitary writer who only came to consider herself a woman writer belatedly: 'For years and years I thought of myself as a writer before I thought of myself as a woman, but recently [1977] I've found that I would say I was a feminist writer as opposed to other people saying I was.' She started writing radio plays in the 1960s [see Chronology] while she was house-bound with young children.