Neith Boyce

Neith Boyce (March 21, 1872 – December 2, 1951) was an American script writer and theatre manager. Much of Boyce's earlier work was published with help from her parents, Mary and Henry Harrison Boyce. Neith Boyce later co-founded the Provincetown Players alongside Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, her own husband Hutchins Hapgood, and others. Boyce worked with the Provincetown Players in several capacities that included directing, performing, hosting productions in her home, and having all four of her plays produced. Boyce's plays featured plots that focused on women's sexuality, personal relationships, and agency.

Early life

Neith Boyce was born in Franklin, Indiana, the second of five children to Henry Harrison Boyce and Mary Boyce. Henry Harrison Boyce had a wife and child before his relationship with Mary Boyce. This first marriage ended in a complicated divorce. In 1880, the diphtheria epidemic resulted in the death of all the Boyce children, except for Neith. The now family of three traveled from Milwaukee to Indiana and finally settled in Los Angeles.

Neith Boyce was self-educated in her family homes in California She did this by reading the books in her parents' library. She later attended a Los Angeles college that was overseen by an "old melancholy clerical gentleman." Like most women at the time, Boyce also received music lessons.

Early writing and journalism

Neith began publishing pieces as a teenager in the 1880s in the Los Angeles Times, which her father co-founded. By the mid-1880s the Boyces were leading citizens in Los Angeles. The family later moved to Boston in 1891, where Mary Boyce became an associate editor for The Cycle, which was a publication oriented towards women's rights issues. Mary Boyce helped publish a great deal of Neith Boyce's editorial work and poetry. The first of Neith Boyce's works to be published with the help of her mother was a segment titled "women's nature poetry." After her family moved to New York in 1896, Boyce began publishing articles and short stories successfully in Vogue magazine.