Frances Power Cobbe was an Irish writer, social reformer, anti-vivisection activist, and leading women's suffrage campaigner. She founded a number of animal advocacy groups, including the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) in 1875, and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) in 1898, and was a member of the executive council of the London National Society for Women's Suffrage.
Background
Frances Power Cobbe was born on December 4, 1822, in Dublin on the family estate of Newbridge House, the only daughter in a house full of boys. Her family was wealthy, with Evangelical religious ideals and conservative notions of familial roles.
Cobbe was not educated in the manner of her brothers and was expected to spend most of her life “visiting” and caring for sick family members. Much of her early life was spent caring for her mother. Despite Cobbe’s passionate love of her mother, however, her early life of nursing family members came to feel increasingly restrictive to her.
When Cobbe’s mother died in the late 1840s, Cobbe’s familial role shifted and constricted. Her father attempted to marry her off to some suitable Dublin man, but found his efforts of little use. Moreover, Cobbe worsened relations with her father by renouncing the Evangelical faith of her parents. Accordingly, Cobbe’s father packed her off to her brother’s farm in Donegal for ten months. He then required her to tend him in ill health until his death in 1857. In his will, her father left her an annuity of two hundred pounds; he left her brother the estate, with an annuity of five thousand pounds.
Though Cobbe apparently bore no ill will toward her father, she clearly felt freed by his death. Though she had written Essay on Intuitive Morals, Being an Attempt to Popularise Ethical Science (1858) while caring for her aging father, she published her work anonymously so as not to cause him undue embarrassment.
Education
Cobbe was tutored privately before attending a boarding school in Brighton, England.
Career
Once her father could no longer disapprove, Cobbe chopped her hair off and went on a tour of Lebanon, Palestine, and Italy. There, Cobbe met a group of artsy women who seemed to encourage her dreams of freedom: the actress Charlotte Cushman, the seulptors Harriet Hosmer, Emma Stebbins, and Mary Lloyd, and the painter Rosa Bonheur. Cobbe returned from her trip invigorated and willing to supplement her small annuity with a small income from her writing. She began to write for the Daily News and for the Echo in the 1860s, bringing her favorite causes to public attention.
Cobbe also began to address those causes through philanthropic and social work. In 1858, just after her return, she began to work with Mary Carpenter in reformatory and Ragged School development. In The Duties of Women (1881), Cobbe describes this time as the birth of her social conscience.
Cobbe began to agitate for equivalent educational and voter rights for women, though she maintained that women were not the same as men. She argued for “difference feminism,” such as that espoused by Josephine Butler. Her arguments tended to prove that women could achieve outside the home, but only if they did not choose to take on familial duties. By publishing her arguments, Cobbe was able to make a square living and advance her beliefs at once.
As Cobbe developed a career for herself, she also developed a close relationship with her partner, the sculptor Mary Lloyd. The two moved to South Kensington, where Cobbe continued to agitate for reform.
But ultimately Cobbe moved away from agitating solely on behalf of women’s rights, and began to speak out for animal rights as well. As she did so, she lost many of her ties to the feminist community, but developed a prominent position among speakers against animal mistreatment in the Victorian era.
Eventually, Cobbe and Lloyd were able to retire in comfort based on Cobbe’s anti-vivisection work. Her witty, carefully argued treatises engendered much dis-cussion, and much social change. She died in 1904.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Lori Williamson noted in Feminist Writers: “Cobbe produced some of the most witty, original, and powerful feminist treatises of her day. She condemned patriarchal society and supported the rights of women to lead productive, and if they chose, public lives, free from husbands and children.”