The Heidi Chronicles

The play takes place over the years between 1965 and 1989, which are roughly the years during which the second wave of feminism, or the women’s movement, rose and faded in the United States. The first wave, which occurred in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, was connected to the anti-slavery abolitionist movement and centered on procuring legal rights for women, the most significant of which was the right to vote. The second wave arose in the early 1960s after women who had taken over much of the workforce during World War II (1939-1945) were sent back to their domestic lives and subservience within the home so that the men returning from the war could go back to their previous jobs. It’s important to note that poor women and women of color have always been a part of the workforce in order to survive, but their roles and job opportunities were severely limited. A major inspiration for the movement was Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), which described “the problem that has no name,” or the general discontentment of women in the United States who were relegated to the domestic sphere, where they felt stripped of their senses of self and were at risk of rape and domestic abuse. Women protested and fought for more equity in education, the right to birth control and abortion, equality in employment, and other rights that gave them more personal agency and less forced dependence on their fathers or husbands. While the first wave of feminism was primarily led by white women, the second wave made more space for the voices of women of color and intersectionality, although the third wave would later critique its failure to sufficiently fight for the rights of lower-income women, non-white women, lesbians, and transwomen.

Second-wave feminism was hard-hit by the failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, but feminist ideology continued to grow and evolve. Heidi’s perspective, at least as voiced in the first scene of the play, represents liberal feminism, which seeks gender neutrality in the eyes of the legal system, as opposed to difference feminism, which seeks legal equality that still recognizes differences between the genders. Both ideas developed in the 1980s. In 1989, which is the present-day of The Heidi Chronicles and the year in which it opened on Broadway, Ronald Reagan had just completed his two terms as president (1981-1989), and George H. W. Bush was at the beginning of his one-term presidency. Republican leadership in the country meant an anti-feminist backlash and a rise of conservatism in the United States, even as feminist thinking became more normalized. Heidi represents a woman who has been able to take advantage of greater equality in education and the workplace, but, like all of the women in the play, she faces the common conundrum of choosing between career and family. Even with legal progress in terms of women’s self-sufficiency and career opportunities, much of the domestic work and child-rearing still fell to women. Heidi and Susan joke that they’ll seek Brazilian hormone treatment in their 60s and start having babies after their careers, and Denise insists that younger women have discovered the way to beat the system by having their children young and then starting their careers. The play asserts that women should have the right to choose what makes them happy, and Heidi’s decision to adopt a child transcends any limitations or attachments to men that might have complicated Judy’s conception, so that she is able to have both her career and the family she wants.