The sociopolitical climate of Shaw's England appears to have offered
             the playwright the subject of his conflict. In his 1895 essay on the
             problem play, Shaw states the primacy of social issues in modern drama,
             expressing himself in dramatic rather than directly sociopolitical terms.
             One critical point is that a good problem play is good chiefly because of
             the emotional content of the human condition portrayed in the text.
             Social questions are produced by the conflict of human institutions
             with human feeling. . . . Now the material of the dramatist is always
             some conflict of human feeling with circumstances; so that, since
             institutions are circumstances, every social question furnishes
             material for drama. The institutions assumed that it was natural to a
             woman to allow her husband to own her property and person, and to
             represent her in politics as a father represents his infant child. The
             moment that seemed no longer natural to some women, it became
             grievously oppressive. Immediately there was a woman Question, which
             has produced Married Women's Property Acts, Divorce Acts, [and]
             Woman's Suffrage in local elections (Shaw 444).
             In this essay, which appeared three years before Candida was
             published, Shaw dwells at some length on the marriage of the Helmers in
             Ibsen's A Doll House, alluding to the theme as "spoiled womanhood" (447), a
             reference to the comment that millions of women negate their entire being
             in the marriage arrangement. That play treats with great seriousness the
             unequal-partner status of women in standard marriages and the consequences
             that follow from the realization on the part of the unequal partner that no
             benefit attaches to that denying one's fundamental humanity. Shaw's
             analysis of Ibsen's thesis takes the form of social commentary in essay
             form: "When we have achieved reforms enough to b...