Vivie Warren, a proper, Cambridge-educated, thoroughly modern young woman, makes a startling discovery when her mother, Kitty Warren, visits her at a rural villa. Vivie learns that her mother, born into poverty and faced with a life of constant toil for pitiful pay, took the only upwardly mobile profession available to her--prostitution. Though scandalized, Kitty soon brings Vivie to see her point of view: that Victorian women have only two methods for procuring wealth, either by marrying into money or by selling sex. Vivie even comes to regard her mother more highly for the sacrifices she made to improve her social stature. But when Vivie realizes that her mother now runs and operates a series of brothels from Brussels to Vienna--effectively shifting from being the oppressed to being the oppressor--Vivie recoils, and becomes determined to find some other way to survive as a woman in a severely restricted society.

George Bernard Shaw's play, written in 1894, first appeared on the London stage in 1902, but after its highly anticipated and sold-out premiere, it was closed and banned by the authorities scandalized by its frank discussion of prostitution and its direct assault on society's hypocritical treatment of women.