George Bernard Shaw wrote Freedom for Women (1891). Unless a woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself. It is false to say that a woman is now directly the slave of a man; she is the immediate slave of duty, and as man’s path to freedom is strewn with the wreckage of the duties and ideals he has trampled on, so must hers be.

In 1881, Shaw fell in love with Alice Lockett and his wooing of her lasted for three years. This was the beginning of a series of "philanders" as he called them.

Shaw married Charlotte Payne Townshend, a wealthy Irish woman and fellow Fabian in 1898. They both were in their forties. Neither wished to marry, but Shaw, under the misapprehension that he was to die, proposed to her. It was an unorthodox, but happy-probably celibate-marriage that lasted until Charlotte’s death in 1943.

He came to believe from his own experience that imagining love played a more important part in life than real love, for the imagination beggared reality and personal contact was a poor substitute for the dreams women could so easily evoke. Annie Beasant who was the strong supporter of India’s freedom movement and founder of ‘The Theosophical Society of India was not a woman to be neglected or trifled with. Shaw insisted on their relations being put on a serious footing.

But her husband was alive and she could not marry him, she made a contract setting on which they were to live together as husband and wife. He read it and said, "this is worse than all the vows of all the Churches on the earth. I had rather be legally married to you ten times over".