Grant Allen & The Woman Question
Picture of Grant Allen. Photo credit: wiki
STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
Grant Allen (1848-1899) was a Canadian author and essayist of the fin de siécle who contributed to the New Woman literary genre most prominently in his 1895 novel The Woman Who Did. While this novel was a bestseller, it was notorious for offering controversial views on marriage and the struggles of independent women.
The Woman Who Did cemented Allen’s reputation as a controversial, yet prominent, thinker on the Woman Question. However, Allen’s earlier essay “Plain Words on the Woman Question,” published in 1889 in The Fortnightly Review, was another noteworthy contribution to the debate surrounding The Woman Question. In this essay, Allen argues that women who do not marry are traitors to not only other members of their sex, but also to the British Empire as a whole, since the Empire requires that nearly every woman marries and has multiple children to maintain its power. Although Allen’s utilitarian take on The Woman Question appears highly questionable to modern readers, “Plain Words on the Woman Question” offers substantial insights into the imbalanced gender attitudes of Victorian England, as well as the role imperialism played in the The Woman Question.
In this project, I analyze “Plain Words on the Woman Question” with annotations that offer parallels to primary sources by other contemporary thinkers on The Woman Question who either inform, agree with, or challenge Allen’s perspectives. In addition, I employ annotations that offer insights from modern secondary sources that contain scholarly research on Allen, his work, and The Woman Question as a whole. Through these annotations, I hope to encourage readers who would often overlook Allen’s controversial contribution to The Woman Question debate to consider how this essay offers insights into the varying gender attitudes of Victorian England. Readers who reflect on Allen’s arguments might be able to notice utilitarian arguments that inhibit social justice efforts in the modern world.
The Annotated Grant Allen 