Growing up, Henrik Ibsen watched his mother suffer, bound by a sense of duty in a loveless marriage, trapped in the domestic world with no way of escape. Desperate to bring her plight, and that of all women, to light, led him to create some of his most famous heroines. Now, he sits with his psychotherapist, lamenting the traditional gender roles and cultural assumptions about marriage and motherhood that forced him to put Nora and Hedda Gabbler (among others) on the stage and into the public eye.