The Strand was first published in 1891. The magazine was well known for its discussion of politics, fashion, and law updates. The magazine was also famous for its puzzles and the short stories that were published within. Many of the short stories included in the magazine focused on female characters who fit the "damsel in distress" stereotype. One of these short stories was "A Deadly Dilemma" by Grant Allen. In the story, Netta Mayne fell and injured herself on the train tracks. Her savior, Ughtred Carnegie, “risked his own life to save her.” Other stories in other editions had similar themes, many stories involved women crying or “breaking down” at a loss of how to help themselves. Though the Strand discussed issues that women faced at the time, the magazine presented these ideas in a conservative way, also seen in many Doyle works.

      Lisa Surridge, author of Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction suggested, “The Strand and the Sherlock Holmes stories of the early 1890s similarly register material violence as a threat to marriage and late-Victorian manliness- indeed, one might argue that rather than the vague criminal threat of Moriarty, one of the main specters that stalks Sherlock Holmes is violence against women. However, these texts seek ultimately not to undercut marriage but to restore it” (169). Like many of the stories in the Strand magazine, Doyle’s works presented common themes of women’s rights. “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” “Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Hounds of the Baskervilles,” and “The Solitary Cyclist” were a few of Doyle’s works that discussed women’s rights. Though many of these stories presented women in modern ways, the stories were usually presented in ways that were stereotypical. The concept of marriage is a strong theme throughout “The Solitary Cyclist.” Though the story presented marriage as a ceremonial bondage of women, Violet, the female protagonist of the story, was married by the end. Jina Moon, author of Domestic Violence in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction argued “Doyle advocates conventional love and family ideology, on the one hand, and is antagonistic towards domestic violence and divorce laws, on the other hand. Doyle also interrogates the ineffectiveness of law to address ongoing domestic abuse, especially violence that affected married women’s and widows’ options outside of matrimony” (191). Though Doyle presented issues such as the ineffective laws women were subject to in marriage, and domestic violence, he did so in a conservative way that displayed female characters in marriage.

      The Strand also discussed spousal abuse in many of its editions. One such example of this discussion was Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box.” This story was not published until 1893 due to the graphic content of the story. The story centered around Miss Susan Cushing who sought out Holmes to help her solve the mystery of the package she received, two severed human ears in a box. Holmes soon discovered that one of the ears belonged to Susan’s sister, Mary, whose husband killed her. Holmes’s words throughout the story suggested the horrific truth of events behind the story. According to Surridge, “Holmes may have worked out who killed Mary Browner and why, but his questions serve notice that he is powerless to solve the ‘perennial problem’ of marital violence, a problem that he represents as circular, recurring, and unfathomable by human reason”  (168). Doyle gave the public an insight on women's rights issues in his writings.