author
Mary P. Lowe
A journalist, editor, and activist in the women’s suffrage and Populist movements, she helped write one of the early feminist utopian novels in American science fiction. Her work blends political passion with imaginative adventure in a way that still feels bold.
1 Audiobook
Nequa; or, The Problem of the Ages
by Alcanoan O. Grigsby, Mary P. Lowe
About the author
Mary P. Lowe is best known as the co-author, with Alcanoan O. Grigsby, of NEQUA; or, The Problem of the Ages, a novel first published in 1900. The book is often noted for its mix of speculative fiction, social reform, and feminist ideas.
Available sources also describe her as an editor of The New Woman, a women’s suffrage newspaper, and as co-editor of Equity, a Populist paper, which helps place her writing in the middle of the reform politics of her time. That background gives NEQUA much of its energy: it is not just an adventure story, but a novel shaped by arguments about gender, power, and political change.
Little detailed biographical information was easy to confirm beyond her editorial and literary work. Even so, the record that does survive shows a writer closely connected to the reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a figure of real interest to readers curious about early feminist fiction and radical American print culture.