Frances Power Cobbe

Frances Power Cobbe (born December 4, 1822 near Dublin , † April 5, 1904 in Hengwrt , Wales ) was an Irish writer, social reformer, suffragette and pioneer in the fight against animal testing . She spent most of her adult life in England and Wales, where she also died.

Frances Power Cobbe (around 1894)

Life

Cobbe grew up near Dublin in what is now Donabate on the Newbridge Estate , the ancestral home of the branching Cobbe family. It was there that she largely received her education tailored to the classic role of women. While she ran the household between 1838 and 1857, she conducted natural science and humanities studies on her own. Relations with her parents clouded as Cobbe's religious doubts grew. Her mother, who had been ill for a long time, died in 1847, the father 10 years later. Her father was shocked by her Essay on the Theory of Intuitive Morals , published in 1855 .

A small inheritance enabled Cobbe to travel the Mediterranean and then go to Bristol (southern England), where she lived for almost a year with the Unitarian social reformer Mary Carpenter and worked in their school for "difficult to educate" children. This activity overwhelmed Cobbe's health. Since she also disliked Carpenter's asceticism (also erotic), she soon moved on to London , where she was able to gain a foothold as a journalist. She had already reported from Italy for the London Daily News . Through articles on women's rights issues, she made the acquaintance of leading feminists such as Barbara Bodichon and Lydia Becker in 1861 . The liberal economist John Stuart Mill encouraged her to write. She became a member of the Married Women's Property Committee and in 1867 also of the London Society for Women's Suffrage , which campaigned for the introduction of women's suffrage. Cobbe articles like Truth on Wifes Tortur (1878) helped pass new divorce laws that were more favorable to women.

Lifestyle

As Olive Banks showed on the basis of essays from Cobbe's pen Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors from 1869 and The Duties of Women from 1881, Cobbe's attitude to the role of the sexes was ambivalent: On the one hand, Cobbe condemned the economic dependency and emotional bondage of women by men , on the other hand, she insisted on the marriage and motherhood duties of the woman, once she got involved. She even denounced the "loose" way of life of certain "progressive" women, although she never made anything of men herself, but rather lived with women - from 1860 with Mary Lloyd.

Fight Against Vivisection

Another area of ​​activity that was important to her opened up for Cobbe around 1870: She turned against animal experiments (then: vivisection ) and demanded corresponding laws. In 1875 she founded the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection (SPALV) , the world's first association of its kind, and in 1898 the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) . She was one of the leading figures of the new movement, which during Cobbe's lifetime achieved at least legally mandated restrictions on the cruelty permitted on laboratory animals. One of her adversaries was Charles Darwin , who repeatedly warned in the London Times against certain “too kind” women who throw sticks between the legs of science and progress. Even so, Cobbe was appreciated by Emma and Charles Darwin from numerous visits to Down , the Darwin's estate, and from letters.

Cobbe remained true to the Unitarian / philosophical theism advocated by “my pastor” and “captain” James Martineau , a London theologian and brother of the social reformer Harriet Martineau . That included a belief in personal immortality, as justified in The Peak in Darien in 1882 .

Another inheritance enabled Cobbe to return to Wales with her partner Lloyd in 1884. There she died 20 years later. Her autobiography was first published in 1894 and was reprinted the year she died.

Fonts

• Broken Lights: an Inquiry into the Present Condition and Future Prospects of Religious Faith , 1864
• Dawning Lights: an Inquiry Concerning the Secular Results of the New Reformation , 1867
• Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors , 1869
• Alone to the Alone: ​​Prayers for Theists , 1871
• Darwinism in Morals, and Other Essays , 1872
• The Hopes of the Human Race , 1874
• The Moral Aspects of Vivisection , 1875
• The Age of Science: A Newspaper of the Twenthies Century , 1877
• The Duties of Women , 1881
• The Peak in Darien , 1882
• Life of Frances Power Cobbe as told by herself , 1894

literature

• Frances Power Cobbe: Life of Frances Power Cobbe as told by herself , London 1894 ( full text )
• Alfred H. Miles (Ed.): The Sacred Poets of the Nineteenth Century , London and New York 1907
• Olive Banks: The Biographical Dictionary of British Feminists , New York 1985
• Barbara Caine: Victorian feminists , Oxford 1992
• Barbara Caine: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford 2004
• Sally Mitchell: Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer , Charlottesville, Virginia and London 2004
• Lori Williamson: Power and Protest: Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Society , London 2005
• Susan Hamilton: Frances Power Cobbe at Victorian Feminism , London 2006

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Phillip Hewett: Frances Power Cobbe. Unitarian Universalist History & Heritage Society, March 3, 2003, accessed September 4, 2018 . 
2. ^ Spartacus , accessed September 1, 2011
3. ↑ Here in a letter to the Spectator 1884  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed September 1, 2011  
4. ^ Adrian Desmond / James Moore: Darwin , Hamburg 1994 edition, pages 692, 698, 730
5. ↑ On the economic situation of married women