Frances Power Cobbe

-
As one of the most prominent Victorian writers of non-fiction prose, and the only feminist of the period who wrote regularly in periodicals, FPC 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.
Hamilton, Susan. “Locating Victorian Feminism: Frances Power Cobbe, Feminist Writing, and the Periodical Press”. Nineteenth-Century Feminisms, No. 2, 1 Mar. 2000– 2025, pp. 48-66.
48
Mitchell, Sally. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. University of Virginia Press, 2004.
2, 220
  • BirthName: Frances Power Cobbe
  • Nicknames: Fan
    She was sometimes referred to thus in childhood.
    ; Fanny
    She was called this by close friends in adulthood, but did not call herself so.

  • Pseudonyms: C.; F.; F. P. C.
    Much of FPC '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.
    ; Only a Woman; Merlin Nostradamus
    Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
    Mitchell, Sally. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. University of Virginia Press, 2004.
    8, 189, 249

Milestones

4 December 1822

FPC was born in Dublin, the youngest of five and the only girl in her family.
Cobbe, Frances Power. Life of Frances Power Cobbe. Houghton, Mifflin, 1894, 2 vols.
1: 2, 26
Mitchell, Sally. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. University of Virginia Press, 2004.
11, 20, 23

December 1868

FPC published in Fraser's Magazine her signed, landmark claim for women's civil and property rights: Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors.
Cobbe, Frances Power. “Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors”. Fraser’s Magazine, Vol.
78
, Dec. 1868, pp. 777-94.
prelims

May 1903

FPC published her last major essay, Woman Suffrage, in the Contemporary Review. It concluded: In short, in the lump, women are better than men.
Mitchell, Sally. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. University of Virginia Press, 2004.
420
Cobbe, Frances Power. “Woman Suffrage”. Contemporary Review, Vol.
84
, 1903, pp. 653-60.
660

5 April 1904

FPC died at Hengwrt near Dolgelley in Wales.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Biography

Birth and Family

4 December 1822

FPC was born in Dublin, the youngest of five and the only girl in her family.
Cobbe, Frances Power. Life of Frances Power Cobbe. Houghton, Mifflin, 1894, 2 vols.
1: 2, 26
Mitchell, Sally. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. University of Virginia Press, 2004.
11, 20, 23