Frances power cobbe biography for kids

Primary Sources

(1) Olive Banks, The Biographical Dictionary of British Feminists (1985)

Her (Frances Power Cobbe) feminism was in many respects aggressive in its attitude to men. In another of her pamphlets, Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors published in 1869, she argued that men made women economically dependent so that their authority would go unchallenged. Moreover, it was women's economic dependence which made it possible for men to go on ill-treating their wives.... At the same time some of her views were decidedly conservative. In a later pamphlet, The Duties of Women (1881), she stressed that once a woman was a wife and mother these duties were of paramount importance and other interests must be subordinate. She was also firmly conventional in her attitude to sexual morality and in the same pamphlet, condemned the loose living indulged in by advanced women."

(2) Barbara Caine, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)

Cobbe was a somewhat difficult colleague. One of the few mid-Victorian feminists who came from the Anglo-Irish landed gentry, she carried from childhood a commitment to the Conservative Party, a belief that it was better to work through influential individuals rather than with popular support, and a particular sense of decorum. She was unhappy with committees which did not entirely endorse her views, and ended her association with a number of feminist colleagues when they refused to give wholehearted support to her anti-vivisection campaign.

Cobbe's greatest contribution to the women's movement came from her writing. She published in almost every major periodical, writing on the problems of marriage and the virtues of celibacy; the need for women to have independent activities; and on the persistent ill health of women, which resulted from fashions which constricted their bodies, from a medical profession which defined women as invalids, and from the fact that, unlike men, women lacked the services of a wife....

The core of Cobbe's feminism lay in her belief in the moral autonomy of women on the one hand, and in her strong sense of sexual difference on the other. Women were rational beings with a primary duty to themselves and to their God, she argued, hence they could not submit themselves absolutely to the demands of either husband or parents. But Cobbe believed emphatically in the importance of sexual difference.