They are a cosmopolitan pair with careers, a child, and a happy marriage. Tom supports women's rights and is pleased that his wife has demonstrated talent in his own field, sculpture. But when he loses an important sculptural commission to Ann, the family's beliefs are put to the test: Can Tom live with his wife's public success and his own very visible failure? Can Ann live with Tom's embarrassment and the effect it may have on their relationship? Will Ann's professional commitments now take her even further from her maternal duties to a teenaged daughter who is already feeling neglected because of her parents' busy work lives? Other characters include Tom's assistant, who is honest about expecting his fiancée to give up her career as a journalist and become a homemaker when they marry (not an agreeable prospect to the young woman); Ann's father, who is dismayed that his daughter would even consider jeopardizing her marriage in this way; and Tom's unmarried sister, who is self-supporting but has achieved this status by not having a husband and children, a loss she regrets. The play ends with Ann arguing that the decision to have children, for a woman, changes everything; motherhood must take precedence over a career. Yet "He and She" manages not to feel like a reactionary or anti-feminist tract. The inherent unfairness of the dilemma the Herfords confront has been well-established, leaving audiences food for thought. Ann's capacities and largeness of spirit have been ably displayed (she is one of the great female characters in American drama circa 1920). Most importantly, Crothers has situated her story in a real world of good intentions and hard facts: true equality is still a pretense, even among liberal men and women, and someone has to take care of the children. The values of the older generation for whom there is nothing to debate (represented by Ann's father) and the values of the New Woman (represented by the fiancée of Tom's assistant who has no intention of giving up her job when she marries) are also effectively noted. "He and She" was performed on Broadway in 1920 to critical approval (though not a strong box-office run) and was revived in New York, in a well-received production, in 1980 and again in 2005. Crothers worked in a context that was both timely and, in some ways, strikingly against the grain. In the years immediately before World War I, for instance, Broadway saw a vogue for plays about white slavery, sexually-transmitted disease, and brothels.