In 1999, writer Leora Tanenbaum argued that “despite three decades of feminism,” young women in the US were still largely “defined by their sexuality.” To be sure, she acknowledged, “some of the rules ha[d] changed” but “the playing field” was “startlingly similar to that of the 1950s.” Almost twenty years later, comedian Hannah Gadsby addressed that “playing field” in her searing live comedy performance Nanette (2018). Standing before an audience at the Sydney Opera House, Gadsby joked that studying art history in college taught her that “there's only ever been two types of women: a virgin or a whore.” “Most people think that Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift invented that binary,” she continued, “but it's been going on thousands of years.” Like Tanenbaum, Gadsby argued that the paradigm of the virgin or the whore was alive and well in the twenty-first century. But what about within the world of American opera? As one might expect, over the latter half of the twentieth century, the landscape for American opera continued to change and the repertory to develop in new ways. Yet some of the old ways persisted. Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally's Dead Man Walking (2000) serves as a case in point. An oft-performed American opera with clear ties to the canon established in the 1950s, Dead Man Walking draws on but eventually departs from the paradigm of the virgin or the whore that is so central to The Tender Land, Susannah, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Lizzie Borden.

Heggie (b. 1961) and McNally (1938–2020) began talking about writing an opera together in 1996. According to Heggie, McNally arrived in San Francisco the following year with “a list of ten ideas, only one of which he really wanted to do.” McNally started to read the list, beginning with Dead Man Walking, a 1993 book by the Roman Catholic nun Sister Helen Prejean (b. 1939) about her work counseling men awaiting the death penalty. 7 As Heggie recalled: