Who was Frances Power Cobbe?

Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904) was an acclaimed Anglo-Irish journalist who wrote for leading Victorian periodicals, a feminist activist, workhouse reformer, religious writer, and antivivisectionist. Best-known in her day as leader of the anti-vivisection movement and as a feminist writer, she was a prominent spokeswoman for the improvement of Victorian women’s educational and employment opportunities, a witty defender of so-called redundant women, an incisive critic of the Victorian idea of marriage, and an eloquent advocate for women’s suffrage and right to bodily integrity.  She wrote over twenty books on Victorian women, science and medicine, and religious duty, and published innumerable essays, pamphlets and tracts.  She had a successful career as a front-page leader writer for the daily London Echo, and was longtime editor of the Zoophilist, the weekly journal for the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection (known as the Victoria Street Society), which she had founded in 1875.  She was instrumental in the passage of the Cruelty to Animals Act (1876) and the Matrimonial Causes Act (1878). 

At the time of her death, Cobbe’s stature as a writer and reformer on matters ranging from theism and women’s education to domestic violence and animal welfare was well established.  Death notices praised her  ‘usual, daring style,’, and celebrated the rare combination of rhetorical, analytical, and political acumen undergirding her reforming politics. The Echo, her old employer, reminisced:  “her pen was incessantly active in connection with the leading questions of the day, which she dealt with in a bright, original, racy style that made her as effective as a journalist as she was on the platform.’ Cobbe was a true intellectual and presswoman. Her writing flowed through the periodical world, as essayist, leader writer and editor. She is now embraced as a writer whose distinctive, spirited style and compelling ideas are an integral part of our understanding of nineteenth-century feminism, journalism, and reform. Her distinctive range demonstrates how certain kinds of writing, so easily lost to changing intellectual trends, are immensely significant in understanding how women are part of the intellectual, political, and reform energies of their times, and so must be part of the histories we tell.