Frances Power Cobbe
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As one of the most prominent Victorian writers of non-fiction prose, and the only feminist of the period who wrote regularly in periodicals,
published prolifically in a range of genres from reportage and travel writing to social criticism, theology, and ethics. As a professional journalist she wrote more than a hundred periodical essays, and above a thousand anonymous newspaper leaders. She published, at a conservative estimate, eighteen books and innumerable tracts. A key figure in the Victorian women's movement, she produced ground-breakingly trenchant as well as frequently witty analyses of women's social and political disabilities, representing womanly duty as feminist praxis. All her social writings are grounded in her life-long effort to promulgate a nondenominational theistic system of ethics. In her later career she dedicated herself to fighting animal vivisection (a cause she characterized as an abolitionist crusade analogous to anti-slavery) and the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts. For the anti-vivisection campaign alone she produced considerable journalism and at least two hundred tracts. Her theology, ethics, feminism, and anti-vivisection converged in her argument that sympathy—beyond as well as within the human community—was an index of true civilisation.- BirthName: Frances Power Cobbe
- Nicknames: Fan; FannyShe was sometimes referred to thus in childhood.She was called this by close friends in adulthood, but did not call herself so.
- Pseudonyms: C.; F.; F. P. C.; Only a Woman; Merlin NostradamusMuch of's journalism was published anonymously, according to the conventions of the day for newspapers and other periodicals, but she also sometimes signed letters to the editor, in particular, with initials.