Frances Cobbe

“Ours is the old, old story of every uprising race or class or order. The work of elevation must be wrought by ourselves or not at all.” –The Duties of Women, Preface.

“No attempt seems to have been made by Frances Power Cobbe to avoid the epithet of 'strong-minded’; she was obviously not concerned with men’s evaluation of her suitability as a servant for them. She was far more concerned with their unsuitability as leaders and lawmakers…”– Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them .

Frances Power Cobbe, born in Dublin in December 1822, left behind a rich legacy as a journalist, women’s rights activist, and social reformer when she passed away in April 1904. Frances Power Cobbe was in many ways a remarkable woman. Living in the Victorian age when women had limited access to gainful employment and women writers were still something to be scorned, Cobbe was a prolific author and earned a living as a journalist for such reputable newspapers as The Economist , The Spectator , The Contemporary Review , and Fraser’s Magazine . For a time, she was also the second leader writer for The Echo . Cobbe’s role as a contributor to these newspapers afforded her a unique stage from which to campaign on behalf of women’s suffrage, better educational opportunities for women and the poor, and the anti-vivisection movement.

Frances Power Cobbe began exercising her philanthropic spirit at an early age. The only daughter of Frances Conway Cobbe and Charles Cobbe, she was born into a landowning Anglo-Irish family of some wealth and distinction. Cobbe therefore had a comfortable middle-class upbringing, and it provided her with opportunities to help those in need. On her father’s Newberry estate, for example, lived poor Irish tenants whose children the young Frances taught and cared for. Deidre Rafferty, in a short biography of Cobbe, grounds Cobbe's early philanthropic spirit on a strong sense of noblesse oblige. That is, for the privileged Cobbe there was a sense of duty and obligation towards the less fortunate. It was possibly this same sense of duty and obligation that influenced and compelled her interest in reform movements. In her autobiography Life of Frances Power Cobbe, she suggests such a motivation in regards to her interest in the campaign against domestic violence: “in 1878 I was by chance reading a newspaper in which a series of frightful cases of this kind were recorded…I got up out of my armchair, half dazed, and said to myself: ‘I will never rest till I have tried what I can do to stop this'” (535). By 1881, Cobbe had articulated this driving sense of duty in a new way. She explains in Duties of Women that “it is quite possible to erect a general scheme of duty on the sole ground of the inherent necessary rightfulness of one class of actions and sentiments, and wrongfulness of another…” (29).

As the only daughter in a family of five children, Cobbe also experienced another kind of duty and obligation—one generally expected from the women of her time. As a result of her mother’s grave illness, Cobbe returned home from her school in Brighton to take over the household chores. After her mother, Frances Cobbe Conway, died in 1847, when Cobbe was twenty-five, the task of running the household was left to her, and in the end she became her father’s caretaker and companion until his death in 1857. While Cobbe was aware of the gender implications of her domestic duty to her father, she nevertheless asserts in her 1865 work “The Limits of Obedience in Daughters” that while parents have a right to demand self-sacrifice from their children, the filial duty should be shared equally by male and female children (Women, 105).

While Cobbe’s reform activities may have been compelled by a sense of obligation and duty, her feminist beliefs were greatly influenced by the works of the transcendentalist Theodore Parker, and particularly his Discourse of True Religion. Parker’s book “supported her belief in a rational God whose moral law was revealed through human intuition” (Women, 98). Parker also articulated that “in God, the parent of Good, we have both parents in one” (Frances Power Cobbe, 64); that is, God is both father and mother. Parker’s beliefs contrasted sharply with deeply patriarchal Victorian England, and equally contrasted with Cobbe’s household, which was headed by a dominating father.

Frances Cobbe’s experiences with her father, Charles Cobbe, whom she described as having a “fiery temper and despotic will” (Life, 207), equally influenced her opinions about patriarchy and the vulnerable position of women in Victorian society. Cobbe had a distant and sometimes tense relationship with her father. In raising his children, Charles Cobbe had exhibited a great deal of concern in regards to the welfare and education of his four sons, but spared little attention for Frances. His diary, begun shortly after her birth and continued till his death in 1857, contained only twenty-five mentions of his only daughter (Frances Power Cobbe, 35). Father and daughter were further estranged when Frances confessed her belief in theism shortly after her mother’s death. From an early age Cobbe had been grappling with her belief in Christianity, and had turned to Theodore Parker’s Discourse of True Religion. But in a devoutly evangelical family that had produced five arch-bishops and that regularly shared morning prayers, Frances's theism was not well received. In 1853 Charles Cobbe responded by sending his daughter to live with an older brother at a farm in Donegal, an isolated and lonely county. Frances resided in Donegal for a year until she was recalled by her father to resume her domestic duties at the Cobbe household. Cobbe later developed a form of deism, and actually campaigned against atheism and Darwinian ethics later in her life. In 1855 and 1857, Cobbe published the two parts of her first book, The Theory of Intuitive Morals. Fearing her father's reaction, she had the book published anonymously.

Cobbe’s father passed away in 1857 and though his death may have freed Cobbe from his severity, it also left her nearly impoverished. She received £200 per annum and lost her father’s house to her brother. Biographer Deidre Rafferty suggests that the minimal inheritance “indicated that her father had not wished that she would live independently.” Rather he “had expected that Frances would remain at Newbridge as the guest of her brother and sister-in-law following his death” (Women, 100). Cobbe however never fulfilled this expectation. Shortly after her father’s death she departed on a tour of Europe and the Middle East. To prepare for her journey, Cobbe actually cut off all her hair so that she would not need to bring a lady’s maid with her. During this trip, she made the acquaintance of a group of feminists in Rome, including Mary Somerville and Harriet Hosmer.

Upon her return to England in 1858, Cobbe moved to Bristol and began living with Mary Carpenter, a reformer. During this time she assisted Carpenter with her work at the Red Lodge Reformatory for delinquent girls, where she was exposed to the plight of the lower classes. Cobbe believed this experience was integral to the development of her political and social passions. However, by the end of 1859 she had ended her working and living relationship with Carpenter. Cobbe had found Carpenter’s austere lifestyle too demanding and unenriching. Cobbe later found a more pleasant living environment in London with the Welsh sculptor Mary Lloyd, whom she met in Rome in 1858. In the Life of Frances Power Cobbe, Cobbe admits that with Lloyd she “had once more a home and a most happy one” (Life, 32). The two women began their life-long co-habitation and relationship in 1860. The nature of the relationship is not exactly clear, as Cobbe was very protective of her private life and her autobiography sheds minimal light on it.

During the 1860s, Cobbe campaigned extensively for women’s rights and against vivisection, the practice of performing surgery on living animals for scientific purposes. In her influential article “Celibacy vs. Marriage” which appeared in Fraser’s Magazine in 1862, Cobbe argued that the single life for females is preferable to marriage until the two sexes are truly equal and marriage can be an institution based solely on love. In 1863, Cobbe began her campaign against vivisection. Cobbe saw feminism and the anti-vivisection movement as inextricably linked. Both movements sought to protect vulnerable beings from exploitation. Cobbe believed adamantly in the autonomy of women, but also believed in innate differences between the sexes. Though she campaigned for rights for women, she also upheld the traditional view of feminine traits like purity and tenderness. This might appear to be a contradiction today, and even at the time of Cobbe’s death her breed of feminism was somewhat old-fashioned. Even though her writing extols conventionally feminine characteristics, Cobbe herself, as an obstinate and zealous reformer, was known to be anything but docile and ladylike. Cobbe was a free-thinker, an individual, and a rebel in many ways. She stuck to her convictions and persistently pursued her goals. Her obituary, published in The London Times, took notice of this: “Yet to a masculine vigor and to what was, in many respects, a decidedly masculine turn of mind she joined an intensely womanly sympathy, which made her a practical and most active philanthropist, whose chief mission in life it was to show a tender solicitude alike for her own sex and for the dumb creation” (London Times, 8). Cobbe thought that in an equal society, women would naturally use their abilities for philanthropic causes.

In 1875, Cobbe established the Victoria Street Society, which was initially known as the Society for Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection and later known as the National Anti-Vivisection Society. In 1876, the Cruelty to Animals Act was passed. Cobbe was outraged, as she felt the Act actually facilitated the practice of vivisection. She would campaign for the repeal of this act until her retirement in 1884.

In 1878, Cobbe wrote the revolutionary and influential “Wife Torture in England.” This article examined the prevalence of domestic violence and called for the right of a wife to separate from an abusive husband and to retain child custody. At the time, a husband convicted of assault was punished, but no one thought about the position of the abused wife. Many see this article as the impetus for the enactment of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1878 which allowed wives to separate from abusive husbands while also claiming custody of their children. In her autobiography Cobbe confesses that “the part of my work for women, however, to which I look back upon with most satisfaction was that in which I labored to obtain protection for unhappy wives, beaten, mangled, mutilated, or trampled upon by brutal husbands” (Life, 534).

In 1884, Cobbe retired and moved to Hengwrt in Wales with Mary Lloyd. Money left to Cobbe upon the death of the widow of a staunch anti-vivisectionist allowed her and Lloyd to live a comfortable life in their retirement. Cobbe wrote her autobiography in 1894, and The New York Times advertised it as containing “reminiscences of many distinguished persons, including Tennyson, Browning, Gladstone, Bright, Matthew Arnold, Theodore Parker, Lord Shaftesbury, Jowett, Walter Savage Landor, Lady Byron, Adolphus Trollope, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Mrs. Somerville, Fanny Kemble, Darwin, and Sir Charles Lyell” (New York Times, 23).

Mary Lloyd died in 1896, leaving Cobbe alone and distraught. By her death on April 5, 1904, Cobbe’s life had spanned the entire Victorian era. The Reverend Frederic Rowland Marvin wrote in the New York Times, “literature has lost an ornament and the world a true friend” (Marvin). Cobbe was terrified of being buried alive, so she requested that her windpipe and arteries in her neck be severed prior to burial. The Washington Post snidely called this “an astonishing illogicality from one who was so bitterly opposed to vivisection” (Washington Post, B3). Cobbe was buried next to her beloved life partner in Hengwrt.

“The woman who is the slave of her own passions is everywhere the slave of man: the woman whose moral nature is supreme over her passions everywhere obtains a certain modicum of freedom”– The Duties of Women, 21.

Works Cited