How would you compare The Glass Menagerie and A Doll's House?

Both of these plays deal with questions of women's rights, the ability of women to express themselves, and the fact of their being dominated and controlled by other family members and by situations in which their independence is limited by the social strictures of the time.
Nora, in A Doll's House, is presumably living in a happy marriage, and by the standards of the nineteenth century, her husband is a good, decent man who is in love with her and is a good provider. The appearance of Krogstad, a man to whom she is repaying a loan which she had taken out under false pretenses, by forging her father's signature, throws her domestic situation into disarray. As the story progresses the husband, Torvald, shows himself as increasingly insensitive and domineering, and when it is revealed that Krogstad is planning to blackmail her, Torvald pours out a stream of abuse at Nora, allowing her to see how she's trapped, essentially in a position where as a woman she has no rights in her marriage. Her only choice is to leave her husband and somehow make good on her own.
In The Glass Menagerie Laura is dominated and trapped not by a husband but by an overprotective mother. Though the mother, Amanda, apparently wishes to find a match between her daughter and the "gentleman caller," one senses that it is her domineering nature, partly encouraged by Laura's handicaps, that has partly caused and perpetuated Laura's isolation.
The contrasts between Nora's and Laura's situations, however, are perhaps more striking than the similarities. Nora, though constricted by nineteenth-century social conventions, has actually attempted to act independently, even before the action of the play has begun. Her "crime" in forging her father's signature, which leads ultimately to the destruction of her marriage, is something she has done on her own, asserting her independence, ironically, in order to help her husband, since the loan was needed for his medical treatment. However, the misguided way in which she did this was the only route open to her, given those social strictures. Laura, on the other hand, has retreated into an imaginary world of isolation in which the figurines of her glass menagerie are more real to her than the outside world from which she has been excluded. Though this is the result of what we would now potentially diagnose as social anxiety disorder, one can understand that in the more enlightened time in which we now live, more options would be available to Laura and that she probably would not be living such a secluded life.
Both Ibsen and Williams deal with the issues that restricted and victimized women in their respective periods. But in each of these plays, there are purely human factors, apart from social conventions, which result in the problems and the pathos in which both Nora and Laura are enveloped.