Almost forgotten today, Cobbe, the daughter of Frances Conway and Charles Cobbe, a Dublin landowner and magistrate, was raised in a privileged Anglo-Irish family distinguished by service in the British military and the Anglican church. Educated by a series of governess, Cobbe received a classical education, including French history and literature, from her father's library. Finally, to her chagrin, she was sent to a Brighton boarding school to learn "accomplishments."

      Her childhood was filled with family stories of adventures abroad, especially to India. Devoutly religious, her family departed from strict Calvinism to a small degree by disbelieving in absolute predestination. While in her teens, Cobbe began to question her received religion. In her twenties, Cobbe eventually denied immortality, the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, and the divine inspiration and authority of the Bible. After her mother died, Cobbe confided her ideas to her father who banished her from his house. A year later, he bade her to return to be his housekeeper.

      Cobbe persisted in her religious studies through the works of Theodore Parker, specifically A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion. She again became convinced of God, morality, and immortality. After Parker's death, she edited a fourteen volume edition of his collected works. Parker's theology presented God, not as a conquering King, but as a Father-Mother, infinite in power, wisdom, and love. Shortly thereafter, Cobbe wrote her first book, Essay on Intuitive Morals (1855 and1857).

      Upon her father's death in 1857, Cobbe received a small annual annuity. The first year she went to the continent on that small inheritance. There her horizons were broadened when she met numerous independent and independent-minded women: Elizabeth Barret Browning, Mary Somerville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Hosmer, Charolette Cushman, Rosa Bohneur, and Mary Lloyd. Returning to England, Cobbe, now thirty-five years of age, realized that she would have to work for a living. She moved to Bristol and began to teach in Mary Carpenter's school, working with girls released from prison, inmates of work houses, prostitutes, and other unfortunates. Never married, Cobbe lived with Mary Lloyd in Bristol for 34 years, until Lloyd's death in 1896.

      Active in several social reform movements, Cobbe placed women and the unfortunate at the center of her analysis. Today she is best known for her anti-vivisection work, campaigning energetically against the use of live animals in scientific research.. Yet she had devoted much of her energy to the nineteenth century British women's movement. An early British suffragist, she also supported higher education for women and the reform of poor laws. Her strongest efforts were directed to alleviating violence against women, especially violence by men against their wives. Why is it that the women who fight "within the belly of the beast" are the first women to be forgotten?

      One of the most incisive feminist theorists of the late nineteenth century, Cobbe linked the issues of women's economic dependence on men with domestic violence concluding that men want women to be economically dependent on them because men understand that women's economic dependence on men gives men complete control over women. According to Cobbe's analysis, men do not want women to understand that marriage is designed to deprive women of their resources, because if women do understand their bondage upon marriage, they would not willingly enter into marriage. Instead, men hypocritically insist that marriage is in the best interests of women. By middle-age, Cobbe was extolling the advantages of the single life for women.

      A tireless campaigner for women, Spender writes of Cobbe, "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, and made many caustic and challenging comments about the limitations of male logic, the tyranny and injustice of male rules, and the flagrantly self-interested way men had organized society to make women available to them. The custom of marriage, and its enslavement of women, particularly attracted her attention and she was adamant in her assertion that men had deliberately and systematically arranged marriage so that women were deprived of all resources and that men could 'do with them what they will' -- and this frequently meant they could use violence against women-- with impunity." (p. 430)

      Since Christine de Pizan began the discussion of the "Woman Question" in 1405, the focus of the woman's rights movement shifted from place to place at various times. Wherever and whenever it was safe for women to speak out in their own defense and to work to better the condition, they did. So you find the woman question being actively debated in Italy, then France, then England, and later Germany and America. Whenever the movement became too dangerous for women in one place, it was kept alive for a time in another place. When the danger disappeared, the women's rights movement was imported from its place of refuge. So, from the beginning, international feminism has played an important role in the feminist movement.

      In her book Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism, Maggie McFadden describes a nineteenth-century international network of women, women's rights activists, and social reformers. The most influential women in this international network she refers to as "Mothers of the Matrix." This international network fostered the growth and spread of the women's movement in several ways.

1. By serving as a conduit for activists' experiences, activists could compare techniques, talking about which techniques worked and which techniques didn't work, saving much fruitless and unnecessary experimentation.

2. By focusing international activists' attention on particular women's rights "trouble spots," the network could shame a particular government into dealing with the problem.

3. By providing intellectual, moral, emotional, and financial resources in time of need, the network could keep the women's movement alive and thriving in times of repression and backlash.

4. By finding safe-havens for women activists in time of serious trouble, women's rights activists could protect their own from the worst features of the patriarchal backlash.

5. By stimulating new ways of thinking about women and by creating new theoretical frameworks in which to discuss the relations between men and women and women in relation to medicine, science, religion, history, and law, new aspects of patriarchal control could be detected.

6. By giving entrée into the existing women's rights network, new programs tackling new problems could be started much more easily.

      Cobbe corresponded with many people throughout the world, so much so, in fact, that McFadden lists her as one of the "Mothers of the Matrix"

      For being a "Mother of the Matrix," an influential defender of women and animals, Frances Power Cobbe, an almost forgotten nineteenth-century heroine, is given a place on Sunny's list of the 30 most influential women of the millennium.

References

      Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism, University of Kentucky Press, 1999

      Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, Pandora, 1982, pp. 429-439

      "The Final Cause of Woman" from Woman's Work and Woman's Culture (1869), edited by Josephine Butler

      Our Policy: An Address to Women Concerning the Suffrage (1870?), Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904)

      Why women desire the Franchise (1874) by Frances Power Cobbe (This reference is now restricted access. The site has been left in as a reference, but the link has been disabled. Sunny, Oct. 14, 2001)

      Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors: A Discussion on the Laws Concerning the Property of Married Women (1869) (HTML at Indiana) (1869), Cobbe, Frances Power (1822-1904)

      Vivisection in America by Frances Power Cobbe (illustrated HTML at Indiana)

      Wife Torture in England (excerpt only) from Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing by Jill Radford and Diana E.H. Russell, Twayne Publishers, NY 1992

      Wife-Torture in England (another extract)

      The Life of Frances Power Cobbe: As Told By Herself (extract)

Reviews of books by FPC.

      The Peak in Darien by Frances Power Cobbe (1 pages, MOA Cornell, review of book by same name by Cobbe)

      Hours of Work and Play By Frances Power Cobbe (1 page, MOA Cornell)

      Religious Duty by Frances Power Cobbe (1 page, MOA Cornell)

Return to Women's History Month 2001 Table of Contents

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