To understand history, it’s critical to understand the culture that made it. Politicians and journalists reflect on the events unfolding around them — but it is those who make those events in the public sphere who really shape the headlines and the contours of public discourse. Cultural forms like theater both directly and indirectly reflect a society’s priorities, and by analyzing them we can discern a more textured, three-dimensional view of a place and time.

The members of Caravan Theater, and by extension the company, reflected multiple aspects of 1960s and 1970s American society. Most importantly, they reflected the era’s impatient yearning — not just for gender equality, but for equality for all people — and fought to embody it in a more robust and enduring participatory democracy.

Along with all of its productions, Caravan’s 1967 original play How to Make a Woman was a gathering cultural force. It premiered at Harvard Square’s Club 47 and went on to influence discourse in Cambridge and far beyond — the theater’s most significant contribution to American culture and the emerging Second Wave of the feminist movement.

Theater historian Lynne Greeley wrote that Caravan’s way of conceptualizing and collaborating on plays “expressive of the politics of the period captures a composite of a specific moment that is rare in theatre history.” She described Bobbi Ausubel’s work as having “expressed the heartbeat of the women’s movement as it pulsed with a political consciousness that was growing for women nationwide,” bringing vibrancy to the slogan “the personal is political” — Ausubel was “first an activist and then an artist.”

It premiered a few years before the movement had a name, and it took audiences time to adjust to its unconventional style. But once a more concrete feminist movement took shape, the after-performance discussions clarified the work’s aims, and Caravan primed its increasingly receptive audiences to harness, refine, and amplify their own calls for change. Bobbi reflected that it was simply “the right play at the right time.”

Company member Peter Kovner was struck by how early Caravan embraced feminist activism: “If Caravan was not the leading edge, they were right there on the leading edge.” Bobbi, a former scientist, loved the word “radical” — but for her it meant “going down to the root of things,” analyzing injustice at its core, rather than tearing everything down.

The play’s originality inspired others to follow. From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, twenty to thirty new feminist theaters emerged, and Caravan helped inspire several of them — a surge of feminist art and activism.

Among them was the women’s improvisational group Earth Onion in Washington, D.C., and Martha Boesing, founding artistic director of Minneapolis’s At the Foot of the Mountain, one of the longest-running feminist theaters in the country. Boesing first saw How to Make a Woman with her husband, believing her “relationship to men, children, and marriage was ideal”; over time she came to view Ausubel as the single most important influence in her development as a feminist and director.

Caravan’s reach extended overseas. Inspired by the company, member Maggie Helmer — later known as Jehane Dyllan — moved to Australia and began teaching women Caravan’s consciousness-raising technique, using “stories from their own lives to make theatre.” That gave rise to the first feminist theater on the continent, the Carlton Women’s Liberation Group, and their radical 1970 play Betty Can Jump.

Caravan was groundbreaking in another way: it welcomed men into the company rather than building an all-female ensemble like many feminist theaters. Bobbi believed this may have been Caravan’s biggest hurdle to wider recognition within the movement. But she and Stan were convinced that including men in scripts and productions was crucial — men needed to know it was alright for them to be feminists too.

Barbara Fleischmann MacKenzie-Wood observed that How to Make a Woman “changed us, and it changed anybody who saw it.” Its audiences ranged from feminist leaders like Mary Daly to President Nixon’s daughter, Tricia Nixon Cox. For the company itself, the work expanded their consciousness on a personal level — a closer understanding of “how men and women were squashed into gender roles” that didn’t fit who they truly were. Kovner described Caravan as a “free agent” whose influence reached well beyond the theater, shaping members’ family lives, how they raised their children, and their belief systems.

That commitment to exploring social inequality — across all of its plays, including anti-war and anti-fascist work — eventually drew the government’s attention. The FBI took notice of Caravan’s leftist leanings; Barbara found her phone tapped, and Bobbi later learned through a Freedom of Information Act request that the company had been under investigation. Today she laughs: “It didn’t matter because we weren’t doing anything that was anti-government— they wasted a lot of money watching us.”

Caravan drew other forward-thinking artists into its orbit — Stan invited Howard Zinn and folk singers like Pete Seeger to share their ideas with the company.

Fittingly, Harvard Epworth Methodist Church was not just Caravan’s home base but a sanctuary where art and activism collided. The transformational experiences within its walls stayed with those who entered, shaping their lives long after they left — and the culture Caravan helped create laid the groundwork for a half-century of awareness, activism, and progress.