The Worlds of the 1930s by Clifford Odets and Tennessee Williams portray assertive, domineering women as the center of Depression-era families. Women in plays always fight poverty in every way possible. Mothers often dominate their children's lives and attempt to dictate rich futures to both their sons and daughters. Clifford Odets shows the almost impoverished wife Edna and the brilliant young Florence in the play Waiting for Lefty, written in 1934 but not produced until 1935. In Awake and Sing!, written in 1933 and produced in 1935, Odets shows Bessie as the breadwinner . Tennessee Williams places the intricate character of Amanda as the head of a broken family in his 1944 production of The Glass Menagerie. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Both Odets and Williams have strong women fighting against the onset of poverty. Edna, in Waiting for Lefty, threatens to leave her husband if he doesn't do something. After explaining to Joe why there is no furniture in the house, she asks, "Who's the man of the family, you or me?" (Odes 9). Edna tells her husband to do something or else she will run back into the arms of her old boyfriend Bud Haas because "He makes a living" (11). Edna is a wife who has been exposed by depression and is ready to react in any way possible to survive. The other women in the plays are not pushed as far by poverty, but all try to maintain a lifestyle that has become impossible. Once again, in Waiting for Lefty, Florence demands an answer from Sid regarding their three-year engagement and "The answer is no: a big electric sign looking down on Broadway!" (20). Sid then tells Florence that she deserves a better standard of living and that if they ran away together now, "in a year, two years, you'd curse the day" (21). Florence turns away from love, to survive, because it would only lead to poverty. Amanda in Williams' The Glass Menagerie was not so lucky. In the first scene Amanda again tells the story of how she received seventeen gentlemen one afternoon in Blue Mountain. It tells of how they became rich and left fortunes to their widows. Amanda's story ends with the observation, "And I could have been Mrs. Duncan J. Fitzhugh, mind you! But... I chose your father!" (Williams 9). His observation seems very subtle given that Mr. Wingfield was “a telephone man who fell in love with long distances” (5). Amanda raised two children alone, always trying to recapture the lifestyle she left behind in Blue Mountain. Tom tells Jim O'Connor that Mr. Wingfield "has been absent for sixteen years!" (62). This would have made Tom and Laura both children when he left. Amanda, a single mother, continued to impose mannerisms on her children in an attempt to civilize them. Early in the play, she nags Tom about food when the entrance to their apartment is via a fire escape: "Darling, don't push with your fingers. If you have to push with something, the thing to push with is a crust of bread. And chew-chew! Animals have secretions in their stomachs that allow them to digest food without chewing, but humans should chew their food before swallowing it. Eat your food calmly, son, and really enjoy it many subtle flavors that need to be held in your mouth to be appreciated. So chew your food and give your salivary glands a chance to work!” (Williams 6). The strange quote better illustrates the concerns Amanda expressed at the dinner table and in other aspects of her children's lives. He pushes his children not to be on the brink of.