Frances power cobbe biography examples
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Death notices praised her ‘usual, daring style,’, and celebrated the rare combination of rhetorical, analytical, and political acumen undergirding her reforming politics. She had a successful career as a front-page leader writer for the daily London Echo, and was longtime editor of the Zoophilist, the weekly journal for the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection (known as the Victoria Street Society), which she had founded in 1875.
Her distinctive range demonstrates how certain kinds of writing, so easily lost to changing intellectual trends, are immensely significant in understanding how women are part of the intellectual, political, and reform energies of their times, and so must be part of the histories we tell. The Echo, her old employer, reminisced: “her pen was incessantly active in connection with the leading questions of the day, which she dealt with in a bright, original, racy style that made her as effective as a journalist as she was on the platform.’ Cobbe was a true intellectual and presswoman.
She is now embraced as a writer whose distinctive, spirited style and compelling ideas are an integral part of our understanding of nineteenth-century feminism, journalism, and reform. She wrote over twenty books on Victorian women, science and medicine, and religious duty, and published innumerable essays, pamphlets and tracts.
At the time of her death, Cobbe’s stature as a writer and reformer on matters ranging from theism and women’s education to domestic violence and animal welfare was well established. Mary and Frances networked with like minded women in Italy in the period, both being noncomformist, with a feminist outlook. But Cobbe believed emphatically in the importance of sexual difference.
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Who was Frances Power Cobbe?
Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904) was an acclaimed Anglo-Irish journalist who wrote for leading Victorian periodicals, a feminist activist, workhouse reformer, religious writer, and antivivisectionist.
In 1853 she was working in the studio of Welsh sculptor John Gibson in Rome, along with American sculptor Harriet Hosmer.
Mary met Frances Power Cobbe in the winter of 1861-2, in Rome. She and Frances Power Cobbe retired to Hengwrt from London in April 1884.
Mary died in 1896 from heart disease and was buried together with Frances Power Cobbe in Saint Illtud Church Cemetery, Llanelltyd.
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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. Moreover, it was women's economic dependence which made it possible for men to go on ill-treating their wives....
In 1863, they settled together in London.
In 1858 Lloyd inherited a share in the Welsh landed estate of Hengwrt. 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.
Mary Lloyd (sculptor)
Mary Lloyd was born in Denbighshire, Wales, the eighth of seventeen children, and the first of six girls, to Edward Lloyd of Rhagatt and his wife Frances Maddocks.
Her father was a substantial squire over many counties, owning 4,300 acres of land, and Mary inherited money from a maiden aunt, Margaret, as well as gifts from Eleanor Charlotte Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the Ladies of Llangollen. Both of her parents died in 1858.
Mary studied and worked with French artist Rosa Bonheur.
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.
This allowed Lloyd to refer to herself as a landed proprietor when signing petitions supporting women's suffrage, and also gave her some local political rights, such as the ability to appoint a vicar. 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.
She was instrumental in the passage of the Cruelty to Animals Act (1876) and the Matrimonial Causes Act (1878). At the same time some of her views were decidedly conservative. 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.