Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism

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Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism

Susan Hamilton

Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism

Also by Susan Hamilton ANIMAL WELFARE AND ANTI-VIVISECTION, 1870–1910: Nineteenth-Century British Woman’s Mission (editor) CRIMINALS, IDIOTS, WOMEN AND MINORS: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing by Women on Women (editor, second edition)

Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism Susan Hamilton

© Susan Hamilton 2006 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–9995–5 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–9995–3 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hamilton, Susan. Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian feminism / by Susan Hamilton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–9995–3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Cobbe, Frances Power, 1822–1904. 2. Feminists–Great Britain– Biography. 3. Journalists–Great Britain–Biography. 4. Feminism–Great Britain–History–19th century. 5. Journalism–Great Britain–History– 19th century. I. Title. HQ1595.C63H36 2006 305.42092–dc22 [B] 2005045608 10 15

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For my daughter MaryClare, ‘Then along came Emily Murphy!’, and in memory of my son, Finlay

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Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Chapter 1

Victorian Feminism and the Periodical Press

Chapter 2

‘She and I have Lived Together’: women’s celibacy and signature in Cobbe’s early writing

25

The ‘force’ of sentiment: Married Women’s Property and the ideal of marriage in Fraser’s Magazine

61

‘Speaking in Fleet Street’: the feminist politics of the editorial in the London Echo, 1868–1875

95

Making History with Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian feminism, domestic violence and the language of imperialism

125

‘A Crisis in Woman’s History’: Duties of Women and the practice of everyday feminism

145

Chapter 3

Chapter 4 Chapter 5

Chapter 6

1

Notes

173

Bibliography

189

Index

199

vii


Acknowledgements My debts are many, but my pleasures in acknowledging them even more. For support, my deepest thanks and love to Susan L. Smith, dear friend. Without her unflagging confidence in my work, constant urging, and institutional know-how, this book would remain forever in process. To Teresa Zackodnik, whose formidable acuity, intellectual engagement, tender heart, and sheer delight in writing and talking about writing, has kept me more buoyed than she would ever know. To Glenn Burger, friend of a lifetime, who always thinks I have something to say and is willing to listen. To the other members of my writing group, whose careful attention and gastronomic treats have made this a better book: Lesley Cormack, Judy Garber, Lois Harder and Daphne Read. The University of Alberta has been a most congenial address for my research and teaching. Amongst the many, past and present, who make the Department of English and Film Studies a good place to head for each day: Jo-Ann Wallace, friend and past chair; Peter Sinnema, fellow Victorianist and talented carouser; Cecily Devereux, who keeps me on my toes imperialistically; Monica Flegel for spirited conversation and pet-care. My thanks, too, to the McCalla Research Professorship committee, whose award of one year’s writing time finally brought this ship to berth, and to the University of Alberta’s Humanities, Fine Arts and Social Sciences Research Fund for support of a research trip at a critical time. Thanks too to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for support of a research project that, long ago, led me to Frances Power Cobbe. More far-flung, Janice Schroeder, whose work on the Victorian feminist periodical press I have been privileged to learn from; Sally Mitchell for sharing her incomparable knowledge on matters Cobbe; to Steven Kruger, for inspiration; to Geraldine Brennan and Neil Littman for giving me a London home whenever I need one; to Joseph and Dorothy Hamilton, parents extraordinaire; and to David Doughan who guided a session of ‘Suffrage City’ conference-goers in song, and who, though he doesn’t know it, helped me to know how committed I was to the history of feminism. ix

x Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism

And finally, to the two people most important in my life. To Paul Brennan, my heart, for years of loving support, tea and sweet colloquy; and to MaryClare, my delight, who continues to wonder why her school once had separate entrances for boys and girls. Earlier versions of Chapter 4, ‘The Practice of Everyday Feminism,’ Chapter 5, ‘Making History with Frances Power Cobbe,’ and Chapter 6, ‘“Crisis in Woman’s History”,’ first appeared, respectively, in Victorian Periodicals Review, Victorian Studies, and Women’s History Review. My thanks to Indiana University Press and Andrew H. Miller at Victorian Studies, Ann Heilmann, and the editors of Women’s History Review and Victorian Periodicals Review.

1 Victorian Feminism and the Periodical Press

One day in 1878 I was by chance reading a newspaper in which a whole series of frightful cases [of domestic violence] were recorded, here and there, among the ordinary news of the time. I got up out of my armchair, half dazed, and said to myself: ‘I will never rest till I have tried what I can do to stop this.’1 Frances Power Cobbe was a mid-Victorian feminist journalist and one of a handful of women to make a steady living writing for the mid-nineteenth century established press. She was involved in the national women’s suffrage campaign, argued for women’s increased educational and employment opportunities, and was a vocal critic of marriage. She worked to improve education for ‘ragged’ or homeless children and the condition of workhouses. She was instrumental in the passage of the 1878 Matrimonial Causes Act, which made domestic violence grounds for legal separation. She also agitated on behalf of, and helped to write, the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act, which sought to limit the use of live animals in scientific experiments. She was one of the best-known feminist thinkers of her day. As the lines from her autobiography tell us, Frances Power Cobbe believed in the power of the press. The ‘what I can do’ of this passage is the statement of a writer, a journalist who used the press for decades to mount appeals, make arguments, decry abuses. Despite her prodigious accomplishments and the strong sustained interest in histories of feminisms, her writings have been overlooked by historians and literary scholars. Cobbe felt the particular force of 1

2 Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism

the press, and worked to yoke its power to feminist causes, yet writings of the kind that she excelled in – newspaper editorials and journal articles – have not been at the centre of sustained research in Victorian feminisms. Drawing on historical and literary approaches, this book sets Cobbe’s writing into the larger frameworks defining the history of English feminism and the study of Victorian periodical and newspaper presses. Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism asks a defining question that neither history nor literary studies has addressed: What did it mean to have a Victorian feminist write regularly for an established newspaper or periodical? To answer this question, my work challenges the easy division of feminist from non-feminist writing, audiences, and presses by examining the strategies of the only English woman who earned her living by writing regularly as a feminist in the Victorian established press. In particular, these chapters examine Cobbe’s use of the contemporary debate on ‘excess’ women to carve out a distinctive space for feminist journalism; her intervention into the agitation for reform of laws affecting married women; her use of the editorial in the established newspaper press to forward a feminist analysis of divorce; her use of imperialist language to analyse domestic violence at a time when feminism did not readily claim an imperialist role; her use of the conduct book to redefine feminism as a part of everyday life at a time when the vote seemed an unachievable goal. In each instance, I examine Cobbe’s writing for diverse publics as a form of effective political practice that is distinct from the more overtly political genres of committee structures, platform speeches, and political petitions that have shaped our knowledge of Victorian feminism. My examination of the links between Victorian feminism and the established press opens up our understanding of Victorian feminism and its political workings and urges us to reconsider what feminism looked like in the nineteenth century. Within the broad category of ‘feminist writing,’ non-fiction prose, generally, and writing in the established and newspaper press, in particular, have been either overlooked or mined simply for ‘content’ and statements of feminist objectives, rather than understood as forms of writing shaped by location and address. In other words, feminism has been understood as having a stake in periodical writing only insofar as it was one way amongst many for a feminist to articulate her position on a range of issues. Indeed, identifying a

Victorian Feminism and the Periodical Press 3

periodical’s orientation to feminist issues is one way in which we can understand the political affiliations of the press. But writing in the established press has not been understood as a specific site for Victorian feminist struggle, a defining arena in which Victorian feminism presented itself to the world. The absence of such a consideration of the press raises vital questions about its place within histories of feminism and literary studies. The differing investments of these fields has led to a framing of explicitly feminist writing – such as pamphlets, committee reports and specialist journals – that obscures the important differences between such writing, both as form and site of political intervention. Victorian feminist writing tends to be taken up as evidence of specific feminist campaigns, and so understood almost solely as the ‘articulation’ of that campaign, but that many of the women we now know primarily as leaders of feminist campaigns – Millicent Fawcett and suffrage, Josephine Butler and Contagious Diseases acts – had writing careers that extended beyond their explicitly feminist concerns is frequently ignored. Millicent Fawcett was well-known as a writer on political economy, as well as head of the liberal feminist push for the vote; Josephine Butler wrote regularly on liberalism and religions, as well as heading the women’s charge against the Contagious Diseases Acts.2 The relations between these modes of activism, and what they might tell us about the workings of Victorian feminism, remain unexamined. We have been so successful, it would seem, in claiming these women as leaders of feminist campaigns that their feminism has been defined almost exclusively through campaign work. And in the process, the particular significance of writing as a feminist activity has been dimmed. Yet, if we assess all feminist writing as if it appeared everywhere and nowhere – as always and only articulating feminist critique in some kind of ‘pure form’ – we miss a considerable opportunity. Part of our task must be to determine the locations of feminism and to explore the impact of location on feminism’s circulation in the world. At the centre of this book is the need to explore the intersection of Victorian feminism and the established periodical and newspaper press, asking how different Victorian feminisms look when we consider them from the larger perspective of Victorian women’s work in the periodical press, their rhetorical strategies and


their writing signature. Some of that work has begun. Important studies, including Judith Johnston’s work on Anna Jameson and Nicola Diane Thompson’s edited collection of essays on Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, are proof that such questions are beginning to be asked. But there is room for much further consideration of Victorian conceptions of what it meant for women to write about feminism or the ‘Woman Question’, and the spaces available for them to do so. This project also asks us to imagine women’s writing differently, to open our critical attention beyond the novels and poems and plays that ordinarily constitute the canon, to include texts which are explicitly political or propagandist in a way that we tend to think literary texts are not. For all that we recognise that literature does ideological work, those non-fiction texts – periodical essays, newspaper editorials, published lectures – which also do political work, and stake a political claim and voice, tend to be taken up less frequently. Moreover, literary scholars tend also to appraise such writings primarily for content rather than form. It would seem that the explicitly political matter of such writing blocks analyses that proceed from within anything other than a non-literary framework. Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism demonstrates that non-fiction prose writing, like platform speeches and memorialising, was a critical site of feminist definition and intervention in the Victorian period. Cobbe wrote for titles, like Macmillan’s Magazine and Fraser’s Magazine, that marked the emergence of a new kind of periodical: political, but not overly partisan, a periodical meant to be, as Stefan Collini puts it, ‘more than the literary form of the party struggle.’3 Cobbe’s career as a periodical writer and journalist in the 1860s and 1870s spans the period that Collini identifies as the heyday of periodicals of general culture, a general culture that importantly included feminist perspectives.4 Cobbe wrote on a wide variety of topics for such periodicals, topics which she saw as specifically feminist or as women’s concerns: ethics, anti-vivisection, travel, the Poor Law, children’s education. I focus my attentions here on those writings that took up explicitly feminist campaigns – marriage, redundant women, domestic violence – precisely in order to explore as fully as possible what such writing can tell us about Victorian feminism and Victorian women’s involvement in public debate. The full range of Cobbe’s feminism and the ways in which


she brought a feminist perspective to bear on such topics as theology, anti-vivisection and the question of poverty, remains to be explored.5 Many factors shape the ways in which Victorian feminist periodical prose has been situated. The increased scholarly interest in Victorian feminism has yielded a focus on the separate journals and periodicals, the separate campaigns and institutions, which Victorian feminists established to promote and debate their concerns. Barbara Caine is right to remind us that such journals were not required reading for a nineteenth-century audience interested in Victorian feminism. As she notes, ‘[t]hese specific journals were neither the only nor the most significant avenue for nineteenth-century debate.’6 It was more than possible for an interested audience to keep informed about feminist views, policy, and analysis by reading such established journals as the Westminster Review, Contemporary Review, Fraser’s Magazine, and others – precisely the kind of journals for which Cobbe wrote. Nevertheless, the separate journals and periodicals of Victorian feminism have been the mainstay of scholarly investigations into its workings. How might we account for this? Why hasn’t Victorian feminist writing in established periodicals and journals been part of our work? What are the concerns that mold our view of Victorian feminist writing now? The answer is in part a matter of numbers, investigative tools, and the specific workings of the periodical press itself. The political sympathies of many established Victorian periodicals were part of their signature, part of the way they circulated, and a significant part of the way they made sense to readers. Though not necessarily tied to official political parties, the political orientations of titles – the position a periodical might take on Irish Home Rule, reform of the Poor Law, or the working men’s franchise – were well-known. Blackwood’s Magazine was conservative in its agenda, the Westminster Review liberal, and Fraser’s Magazine socially progressive. Such ‘facts’ were well-known, if not a matter of public record. The big quarterlies, monthlies, and weeklies appealed, however intentionally or unevenly, to the political sympathies of their audiences. Importantly, most writers in the established periodical press were men. Indeed, the periodical press has been seen as one part of a larger process which saw the consolidation of a new professional class, sometimes termed the ‘man of letters,’ comprising essayists,


reviewers, historians, social critics and others.7 Writing for the periodical press was to produce and to participate in what Walter Bagehot, writing in the National Review in 1855, called ‘the talk of the man of the world.’8 Unsurprisingly, women writers in the established periodical press are few in number. As Carol Christ has discovered, the eleven thousand plus writers listed in the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, the standard reference tool for the Victorian periodical press, are overwhelmingly male. Only 13 per cent – approximately 1200 – are women. Out of those 1200 women, only eleven women have fifty or more entries attached to their names, indicating that they may have written regularly enough to make a living writing for the press. I list those eleven women here, along with the term by which the Wellesley identifies their writing. The eleven women are: Agnes Mary Clerke (historian of astronomy and miscellaneous writer); Frances Power Cobbe (miscellaneous writer); Marie Louise de la Ramee or Ouida ( novelist); Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (art historian); Catherine Gore (novelist); Eliza Lynn Linton (novelist); Hannah Lawrance (novelist and miscellaneous writer); Margaret Oliphant (novelist and historical writer); Violet Paget or Vernon Lee (critic); Lady Anne Isabella Ritchie (novelist and essayist); and Ellen Wood (novelist).9 Christ’s analysis of the Wellesley Index is necessarily contoured by the limitations of that indispensable tool in recording the full range of writing opportunities for men and women. Focusing on the ‘big’ quarterlies and monthlies, the Wellesley Index can offer only a partial snapshot of women’s writing in the press. It does not capture, for example, Harriet Martineau’s writing for the Daily News, Eliza Lynn Linton’s extensive collaboration with the Saturday Review, or George Eliot’s unpaid work as assistant editor at the Westminster Review.10 Nevertheless, the Wellesley numbers, as invested and lopsided as they are, register fully the fact that few women could claim the social and political authority to write regularly for the established periodical press.11 Six of the eleven women Christ identifies – Ouida, Gore, Linton, Oliphant, Ritchie and Wood – were also novelists. And, as we might anticipate, a good portion of their work in the established press appears in the form of literary reviews or literary pieces for reviews. The other five women, who wrote frequently enough for the periodical press to be assumed to be making their living at it, were not novelists and are variously


defined in the Wellesley as historians, critics, and miscellaneous writers. These categories themselves further hamper our understanding of the ways in which women writers inhabit the established press; they are products of Victorian studies scholarship and its always changing relationship with the world of ‘non-fiction prose,’ rather than categories that a nineteenth-century reader might recognise or deem valuable.12 Lawrance, for example, is listed in the Wellesley Index as a novelist and miscellaneous writer, yet she wrote Historical Memoirs of the Queens of England (1838; 1840), a text of great interest to those studying histories of women. Similarly, the theological writings of Frances Power Cobbe brought her great acclaim, yet ‘miscellaneous writer’ cannot begin to capture the importance and high profile of that writing. The paucity of these descriptions of women’s political writing can be best discerned in comparison to the impressively, almost bewilderingly, detailed descriptors available for male writers. A quick flip through the Wellesley Index yields the expected range of masculine professions: barrister, army officer, civil servant, publisher, politician. But also available are such descriptors as French controversialist, educational reformer, cattle breeder, traveller, and advocate. The unevenness of detail borders on the absurd. Cobbe is not described as a journalist, critic, essayist or advocate – all of which are both available descriptors in the Index and highly appropriate. Yet, Humphrey Price, responsible for two items in the Wellesley, is listed as ‘divine, curate of Needwood, near Litchfield’ (Vol. 5, 634). My point is not to belabour the idiosyncrasies of this crucial bibliographic tool – though they do exist – nor to suggest that it is anything other than useful. Rather it is to point to the critical investments that such unevenness exposes, including those of the nineteenth-century biographical and bibliographical sources upon which the Wellesley depends. The difficulty of tracking, let alone assessing, women’s participation in public debate in such venues is made startlingly clear. But again, though the brush stroke is large, Christ’s discussion of the Wellesley Index captures something important about the ways in which women participated in the press. Only two women out of over eleven thousand contributors – Frances Power Cobbe and Agnes Mary Clerke – did not write on literary matters on a regular basis. And only Frances Power Cobbe derived a substantial portion


of her writing income by writing regularly as a feminist on women’s issues. That she did so, and that Victorian feminism claimed such a representative, means that the established periodical and newspaper press is a crucial site in the articulation and representation of Victorian feminism. Cobbe’s work in the periodical press then remains relatively obscure to scholars today. Its specific value to our understanding of Victorian feminism remains unexamined because of the circumscribed role of women in the periodical press and the investigative difficulties this presents. Investigative difficulties, too, are paired with the difficulties of working with the periodical and newspaper press as a form.13 As Margaret Beetham and Kay Boardman write in their work on women’s domestic magazines, the diversity of forms involved in the press (from broadsheet to quarterly), the relation between seriality and the forms of the press, as well as other concerns, have meant that there is not a typology of the press, no agreed upon way to represent the diversity within and across periodical forms.14 Indeed, Collini has shown the extent to which the seriality of the periodical form has been hidden in much critical work. As he suggests, ‘that the intellectual historian mostly works with that most readily accessible and reassuringly recognisable form, the published book, means that the peculiar properties of the sources as such rarely receive explicit scrutiny.’15 As Collini shows, work on such seminal Victorian texts as John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy and Walter Bagehot’s English Constitution, among others, is seemingly unaware that much of this oeuvre was first published in serial form. And so, for my purposes, there is no already established way to assess the importance to Victorian feminism of writing in the myriad space that is the periodical press. One solution, and the route I have chosen, is to focus on the writing of the one feminist writer who regularly wrote across a significant portion of the periodical forms of writing in the course of her writing career – essays, newspaper leaders and notes, letters to the editor. The seemingly ambiguous ‘literary’ or textual value of periodical prose, the pragmatic difficulties of grappling with periodicals, and the investigative perplexities of finding women writers in the established press, then, all play key roles in shaping the place of the press in literary studies and within histories of feminism. Yet, it is also


history of feminism’s focus on feminism’s ‘separate’ institutions and presses which accounts substantially for that place. The emphasis on ‘separate’ institutions itself has a history worth charting. Writing in 1864, Bessie Raynor Parkes, then editor of the first feminist journal, Englishwoman’s Review, commented on the strength of what she called the ‘separate’ or specialised press: Had it from the first any hope, any expectation, any wish to come forward in the same field with the able monthlies, which contained the best writing of the day? To this question an emphatic no must be given. [….] If it had been wished to start a brilliant and successful magazine, some eminent publisher should have been secured and persuaded to undertake active pecuniary interest and risk; and all the best female writers should have been engaged, ‘regardless of expense’, and then – good-bye to the advocacy of any subject which would have entailed a breath of ridicule; good-bye […] to the results which have sprung up around the small office where so many workers collected together, because the purpose and the plan were honestly conceived and carried out.16 Later that same year as editor of the new Alexandria Magazine, Parkes reiterated her contention that a special interest periodical was crucial to the success of organised feminism: [T]here is something in a reiterated effort which far outweighs the effect of the separate thoughts. It is not this or that number of a magazine, this or that article from a given pen, which does the work: it is partly the effect of repetition – line upon line – and partly the knowledge that there is in the world a distinct embodiment of certain principles. [….] Even if this embodiment be in itself far from mighty, it serves to sustain a great amount of scattered energy, and may be a rallying point of much value to the whole of the field.17 For Parkes, the established press meant diluted politics. Only a separate press permitted the uncompromised statement of feminist analysis that the movement demanded and required. Parkes’ remarks, offered as part of a retrospective assessing the success and failures of EWR, insist on the purity of policy and of vision that only a separate,


specialised press can guarantee. Without such a space, the argument insists, feminist organisation, activism and analysis risks a watering down, a dilution of effect and purpose in the all-encompassing waters of the established press. Parkes sees the potential for ridicule by the established press as vexatious obstacles to feminist work and thought. The established press is, by her estimation in 1864, neither a site of fully voiced, uncompromised feminism nor a positive resource and tool in the feminist political toolbox. Implicit in her comments, too, is a homogeneity of Victorian feminist thinking, those ‘certain principles’ she can publish in her periodical, which belies what we know about the differences, tensions, and divisions within the Victorian feminist community. Parkes’ remarks, reprinted in Candida Ann Lacey’s Barbara Leigh Smith and the Langham Place Group as part of Routledge’s Women’s Source Library series, have become almost canonical in assessments of the Victorian feminist press, offering a singularly influential template for the way in which scholarship of that press has produced and understood its terms of reference. Parkes’ comments have an ahistorical appeal to feminist scholarship committed to a recuperation of lost and undervalued voices in the nineteenth century, finding in Parkes’ comments a raison d’etre and a justificatory eloquence for approaching such texts as ‘separate.’ The resulting scholarship is rich, informative, and persuasive. It is also scholarship formed in a specific historiographic moment, emerging in tandem with a modern women’s movement that viewed separatism as a viable and necessary political strategy. The influence of this historiographical moment on the ways in which the Victorian feminist press has been assessed is staggering. Feminist interest in the cultural work of the nineteenth-century press has tended to focus primarily on the separate or specialised feminist press or the representation of Victorian femininities within the larger, established press’ pages.18 Certainly, critics have seen much to commend in Parkes’ sense that a dedicated space is crucial to feminist identity and organisation. Sheila Herstein, Philippa Levine, Pauline Nestor and other scholars of the Victorian feminist press, for example, have argued eloquently for the importance of such vehicles to the production of a shared feminist culture – a ‘distinct embodiment’ of community and collectivity – in this period. This critical tendency produces a historical record that leans towards


the exemplary leaders of specific, heroic campaigns: Josephine Butler and the Contagious Diseases Act; Barbara Bodichon and the Married Women’s Property Committee; Emily Davies and women’s university education; later, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and the fight for the vote. Networks of outstanding activists and committed workers in specific causes, like the Ladies of Langham Place and the Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women, the Female Emigration Society, also figure prominently. Similarly, Philippa Levine’s influential early work argued that creation of a feminist press was a ‘distinctive move, asserting both the importance of women’s issues and an understanding of the need for a women’s voice.’19 More specifically, she argued that ‘Feminist journalism was […] a means of strengthening women’s collective identity and common grounds of action.’20 Quoting Parkes, Levine argues that the principles of Victorian feminist journalism – implicitly defined in her text as writing for separate or special periodicals – ‘allowed women an actively separate literary space,’ ‘offer[ed] a subtle challenge to canonic literary and journalistic assumptions,’ and created not just a literature of their own – the phrase is Josephine Butler’s – ‘but a language of their own, … a piercing, critical redefinition of political culture.’21 For Levine, it is this separateness that defines the ‘identifiably feminist nature’ of Victorian feminist periodicals.22 Sheila Herstein, too, asserts that the evolution of the central feminist periodical, from the English Woman’s Journal, to the Victoria and then the Englishwomen’s Review, is analogous to the changing nature of feminist reform, using the periodical to chart the evolution of feminist community. Quoting Bessie Parkes’ remarks on special periodicals once more, Herstein argues that the feminist periodical is a ‘print platform’ 23 for the Victorian women’s movement, and that these women saw themselves primarily as reformers not as journalists. As reformers, Herstein’s Victorian feminists wrote and edited journals that produced community, rather than mere commentary, ‘solidify[ing] the infant feminist network.’ 24 The opposition between reform and journalism articulated here serves partly to generate a sense of the separateness and so purity of the Victorian women’s movement. More recently, Solveig Robinson has argued for the importance of a separate feminist press to the emergence of a distinctly feminist literary criticism.25


Cobbe’s political and cultural authority as a feminist journalist working for the non-feminist press seemingly has no place in such assessments. Her efforts to locate feminist thought at the centre of Victorian culture, by introducing its terms to a wider, non-feminist identified audience, has been lost through the distorting power of these categories, the sources they identify as indispensable, and the narratives of women’s movement they generate. Yet, as Collini asserts, ‘political arguments … must, if they are to have any persuasiveness, deploy, re-work, or otherwise make use of the shared evaluative language of those to whom they are addressed.’26 The loss of the specificity of Cobbe’s voice is, then, considerable. If analysis of the work of the established periodical press in the production and circulation of Victorian feminisms remains largely unexamined, histories of feminism have nonetheless opened the field to a consideration of the profound pressure that the critical emphasis on feminist identity and culture – signifying unity, commonality, and harmony – exerts on the stories we choose to tell and how we tell them. Sandra Stanley Holton’s recent work, for example, explores the ways in which early models of suffrage history (written from about the 1880s on), which she terms the constitutionalist and the militant, have been reworked in new feminist scholarship since about the late 1960s.27 The former, constitutionalist strand, presented the demand for women’s suffrage as part of the larger progressive movement of history, but also drew upon the rhetoric of British radicalism to present women’s suffrage as the restitution to British freewomen of a lost right. This school of history stressed, too, the constitutionalist practices of committee meetings, the establishment of societies, petitions to parliament and public meetings. We can see here one of the first articulations of a defining interest in women’s separate institutions and political organisations presented as a particular story to be told about suffrage. In contrast, the militant model of suffrage history presented the demand for women’s suffrage quite differently, as a radical break with the feminist past, marked by such new forms of political protest as window smashing and hunger strikes. The focus shifts, too, in such accounts to the leaders of militancy, away from the rank-and-file activities of committees and societies. In this model, past and continuing constitutionalist activity is written out of the story; the committees and organisations that characterise nine-


teenth-century feminist activity are presented as distant and unconnected to militant activity now. The distinctiveness of women’s suffrage movements is presented here through the leaders and their shockingly new protest tactics. This is political narrative, as Holton argues, shaped by a Romantic conception of historical change in which heroic individuals, the militant suffragette leaders, risk all to wrest change from the established order.28 Holton argues further that suffrage histories from the late 1960s on have drawn from and adapted these models. Radical-feminist historians shaped their stories in ways that evoke militant suffrage history, celebrating, for example, women’s separate political organisations and activities, whilst tempering the emphasis on heroic individuals in favour of women’s shared relationships as the basis of political values. Socialist-feminist histories are, Holton suggests, more of a hybrid, ‘draw[ing] on both the militant and the constitutionalist historical legacy to construct a further fresh narrative … situat[ing] women’s suffrage as part of the long class struggle for more fully democratic forms of government in Britain, and recognis[ing] a social movement rather than heroic individuals as the motor for change.’29 In her book-length exploration of how different suffrage history can look, Suffrage Days, Sandra Stanley Holton espouses a kaleidoscopic view of history making, bringing to the long story of suffrage a new configuration of networks, values and loyalties that comes from looking suffrage less squarely in the face. Her suffrage stories are, as she claims, partial – moving the neglected, the overlooked, but the still significant figures of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, Jessie Craigen and others to the foreground. Other work in the new feminist scholarship on feminism continues to explore the shaping narratives of histories of feminism. Recently, Joan Scott has identified two central fantasies that have worked to consolidate feminist identity in Western feminist movements since the late eighteenth century: the female orator and the woman as mother. The fantasies are enmeshed and mutually reinforcing, yet also opposed and contradictory. The fantasy of the female orator, ‘projects women into masculine public space where they experience the pleasures and dangers of transgressing social and sexual boundaries.’30 In this fantasy, the lone woman stands at a podium, her ‘arm is raised, she’s talking to a crowd, their response


is tempestuous, things might be out of control.’31 As Scott reads it, this fantasy scene might ‘be read as a trope for feminism more generally: an exciting – in all the senses of that word – intervention in the (masculine) public, political realm.’32 This fantasy seems to me to be striking, accounting for many of the patterns I see shaping the writing of Victorian feminism. The women who strode to the lectern – Josephine Butler, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst – braving jeering crowds, physical threats and mayhem, have been at the core of historical representations of English feminisms’ past.33 Yet it is the less immediately prominent element in this description that intrigues; the woman at the podium has been kept centrestage in our histories. But the audience Scott swiftly evokes here – male? female? – is also important and it is through the question of audience and matters of address that Cobbe slowly resolves into focus. Interestingly, for all the reassessment of the political meaning of committee work, militant strategies, heroic individuals, and social movements, in neither strand of the early suffrage histories nor in any of their inheritors – radical-feminist, socialist or otherwise – is the question of writing (minutes, speeches, pamphlets, periodical writing) raised at all. Holton, for example, does not explicitly take up the question of the very different audiences for the early suffrage histories she examines, noting rather that all such histories are ‘polemics.’ Different sources, however, can tell very different stories. Cobbe’s writings on feminist topics in periodicals like Fraser’s Magazine and the Contemporary Review offer one way to explore the relationship of feminism to the public debate on the ‘Woman Question’ and the specific way in which a feminist writer brought feminism to the broader public. Neither the leader of a specific, central feminist campaign (like Butler or Davies) nor a writer for a feminist journal (like Christabel Pankhurst in The Suffragette), her writings embody my claim that the established press was a crucial and vexed site of feminist articulation, not simply a vehicle for the dissemination of feminist ideas. It is a necessary source for histories of Victorian feminism, and one which we must read in distinctive ways. We must note, for example, how broadly antagonistic the established press was to the claims and arguments of Victorian feminisms in this period, even as ‘The Woman Question’ debate was played out in its


pages, and so how challenging it was for a feminist writer to negotiate.34 The way in which ‘feminism’ is represented in these sources is, then, part of the ways in which Victorian feminisms existed in the world. When Cobbe began to write, many of the institutional frameworks that create, nurture and sustain an intellectual culture – journals that circulate ideas, informal or educational centers that gather together people who share values and goals in their intellectual lives, patrons who provide financial support – were only just being created by Victorian feminists. The work of someone who used already existing institutions as sites for feminist thinking is profoundly important. The enormity, the difficulty, and the politically essential character, of the task is remarkable. In 1862, when Cobbe first enters the Woman Question debate with her piece ‘Celibacy v. Marriage,’ the only explicitly feminist periodical title available to English readers and writers was Parkes’ four-year-old English Woman’s Journal. Lydia Becker’s Woman’s Suffrage Journal did not begin publishing until 1870. At a minimum, attending to Cobbe’s writing in the established periodical press reminds us that there are different audiences for feminism, different podiums to mount; that Victorian feminism circulated in a specific culture in which how questions of interest to feminists were framed and by who must be part of our understanding; that Victorian feminisms circulated as constant commentary, as a perspective available on quarterly, monthly, and daily terms. It was, in other words, part of a nation’s speech to and about itself. For these reasons, the essays I work with here, including ‘Wife Torture in England’ and ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors,’ are those writings by Cobbe that have been most commonly taken up in scholarship about Victorian feminism. They are part of our archive of Victorian feminism precisely because they participated in the push for the Matrimonial Causes Act (1878) and the Married Women’s Property agitation. They are, in other words, part of those ‘campaigns’ of Victorian feminism that have received critical attention. I approach these texts in a way that partially returns them to their location within the larger ‘Woman Question’ debate that took place in the pages of a vast array of periodicals, journals, and newspapers in an effort to restore to our understanding of these sources the clout and resonance of the periodical press, in all its forms, and in so doing, challenge our


use of separate feminist campaigns and forms of writing as the foundation of our understanding of feminism in the Victorian period.

‘Speaking in Fleet Street’ Let me return to the scene in Cobbe’s autobiography that opens this chapter: One day in 1878 I was by chance reading a newspaper in which a whole series of frightful cases [of domestic violence] were recorded, here and there, among the ordinary news of the time. I got up out of my armchair, half dazed, and said to myself: ‘I will never rest till I have tried what I can do to stop this’.35 In 1878, Frances Power Cobbe was at the height of her astonishingly active professional life. She would turn her hand, after the epiphany evoked here, to the writing of ‘Wife Torture in England,’ an article which sought to produce in other readers the activating effects she records in her autobiography by presenting unflinchingly a catalogue of case after stark case of domestic violence. That article was so powerful in its excoriation of the current law ‘protecting’ women from domestic assault that it was largely credited with ensuring the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1878, which provided new legal avenues of recourse including separation and maintenance orders for women violently assaulted by their husbands.36 Staggering from her chair, dazed by her reading of case after case of violence against women, Cobbe vows to act. The scene is complex. In 1878, Cobbe had been retired for three years from her job as leader writer for the London Echo, a daily paper for which she wrote the ‘social leader’ three times a week for seven years. A leader is, in effect, much like an editorial in today’s newspapers. It is a statement of position, on any number of topics, presented in an unsigned column on the front page of a daily newspaper. Cobbe’s leaders regularly took up one and a half to two and a half of the four columns (approximately fifteen hundred words) on the front page of the Echo, a paper that began as a four page newspaper. Newspapers, for this highly professionalised reader, were clearly not neutral tools or objective reflections on the day. Newspapers continually assembled positions, carefully


formulated representations. The effects (and affects) they create had been her livelihood for seven years. As leader writer, Cobbe tackled issues as varied as Church reform, workhouse governance concerns, the London Season, and the divorce law. An important part of her work for the Echo had been to read the daily reports coming from the criminal courts (including reports of domestic violence) as an integral step in her preparation for writing that day’s leader. She wrote up such cases herself and, as Sally Mitchell has shown, circulated her write-ups to feminist journals, like Lydia Becker’s Woman’s Suffrage Journal , for further reprinting. These activities were all part of Cobbe’s effort to advertise the extent and horror of domestic violence.37 Cobbe’s recounting of this moment in her autobiography illuminates a number of core concerns in her writings, not least of which is the force that she ascribes to the press. As a writer of leaders and periodical articles for over thirty years when her Life is published, Cobbe’s investments in the press are complex and numerous. Moreover, those investments expose central questions about why the work of a feminist writer in the established press is vital to our understanding of Victorian feminisms. What are these investments? First, Cobbe represents herself as responding to these reports in a new and distinctive way. Tired of simply reading such accounts, she positions herself as an activist, not just a consumer of print. The feminist reader, identified both with and as Cobbe in this scene, takes up print differently. She is not satisfied with reportage, with merely knowing what has happened, when, and to whom. The community addressed by the newspaper, one which her account implicitly constructs as interested in abused women’s experiences, only partially includes her within itself. For a different community, a feminist community, the print record of atrocities against women that the newspaper provides can be used differently. It requires another response, and solicits action. Second, this scene carries with it an understanding of the importance of the established press. Minimally, the press is an important resource for feminist activism, providing the material for action in its record of women’s abuse and oppression. But, the scene also points implicitly to the need to address the established press (and its multiple audiences) precisely because it is a record of public policy on women and one that shows, however unintentionally, women’s impoverished status within that public. The


‘truths’ about women’s place it discloses include the ‘truth’ of a readership grown too familiar with print records of women’s degraded public status and the role of seriality – the press’ punctuated publication rhythms – in maintaining and producing that familiarity. Third, this scene points to the capacity of the press, of journalistic writing in particular, to effect change. Cobbe’s ‘what I can do’ is the statement of a writer and a reader. Her course of action will be to pressure and to make clear the need for compelling change; in other words, to write precisely because activist readers (like herself) will respond to the call for change. The result, in this instance, was ‘Wife Torture in England.’ In ‘Publics and Counterpublics,’ Michael Warner focuses on ‘the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation.’38 Cobbe’s feminism comprises activities that require what Warner terms ‘co-presence,’ such as executive committees, discussion groups, meetings, public lecture series. It also addressed readers and so provided a punctuated, cyclical kind of textual copresence to scattered, far-flung feminists. But what is of interest is Cobbe’s specialisation, through her writing in the established press, in addressing mixed audiences. One of the most important effects of writing in the non-specialist press, I would argue, is to generate a social basis for feminism that extends beyond those groups requiring co-presence in its sympathetic sense. This book accordingly focuses on a feminist figure whose writing addressed itself to a public that was overwhelmingly non-feminist, a public overwhelmingly not identified politically with feminist campaigns. I would add to Warner’s definition of publics the specific meaning of the ‘public’ that comes into being in relation to a periodical text. As Mark Turner argues, periodical forms create what sociologists of time call ‘temporal symmetry’ – the daily cycle, the weekly cycle, the monthly cycle, etc. – with readers interacting with the media at roughly the same time. This kind of simultaneity becomes increasingly significant in a collective media culture, and can lead to a form of social bonding with a community of readers all engaged in the same activity. In other words, if time is one of the ties that bond … and the periodical press is one of the chief ways that time gets organized, then all the different periodicities – each of those segments or cycles of time – are also socially binding.39


The nineteenth-century leading article, in which Cobbe specialised at one point in her writing career, is an instance of this kind of social binding. Dallas Liddle’s excavation of the history of the leading article reveals, again and again, the importance of this genre to the cultural work of the larger periodical form that is the daily paper. As he notes, for mid-Victorian readers, not only was the genre ‘the most important, authoritative, and characteristic mode of British journalism,’ but ‘a newspaper was its leading articles.’40 And the socially binding work of this genre is , I would argue, part of the source of its importance and authority. Liddle notes James Fitzjames Stephen’s 1862 contention that ‘[t]he best leading articles that are written are nothing more than samples of the conversation of educated men upon passing events.’41 He notes too that press commentators from 1820 onwards are precise about this function of the press, that there is, in other words, a cultural awareness of the ways in which such forms worked. Writing in 1855, W.R. Greg makes clear that [B]are facts without careful analysis or suggestive commentary would be profitless and undigestible to all save the trained and cultivated few … . To make up our minds promptly and decidedly on matters of public policy or on the conduct of public men is no easy task for any but those trained to the work. The mass, even of the comparatively cultivated and enlightened, will always need extraneous aid in the performance of this task.42 Critically, the effect of these samples of educated conversation is to make available to readers a public conversation in which they could participate. Again, as Liddle reminds us, the anonymity of newspaper leaders meant that the ‘voice of mentorship, guidance, and instruction in a leading article was simultaneously authorized and anonymous, and thus freely available to be appropriated word for word by readers, who thereby participated in its authority.’43 To write ‘Wife Torture in England,’ then, in response to the ‘everyday’ news of domestic violence is to reaffirm the political efficacy of the social bond that such writing constructs in time. If Cobbe’s wish to respond differently to the days’ news testifies to the ways in which feminist readers were not part of the nation’s conversation, her seven-year stint as a leader writer and her thirty-year


career as a periodical writer also tells us that, simultaneously, feminist analysis did participate in this conversation of educated men, that feminism was available for appropriation to all her readers, and that Cobbe maintained a commitment to the power of periodical writing and the community it creates (and rightly so, as the 1878 Matrimonial Causes Act attests). Cobbe’s commitment to periodical forms of writing stems, at least in part, from her awareness of the ability of the press to shape a nation’s conversation, and her belief that such change as feminism sought attacked the very foundations of how that nation understood itself. In her 1870 paper on suffrage, Our Policy, Cobbe stated clearly: ‘it is Sentiment we have to contend against, not Reason; Feeling and prepossession, not intellectual Conviction’.44 There is recognition here that the ‘social bond’ which can imagine women (and feminist women at that) as part of the nation needs constant articulation, needs the daily, weekly, and monthly assertion of its validity that the periodical press makes available. In her autobiography, Life of Frances Power Cobbe, by Herself, Cobbe offers a retrospective assessment of the efficacy of the ‘social bond’ that serial writing can produce. The dynamics of that assessment is intriguing, pointing to the exhilaration that accompanied (and perhaps helped to form) Cobbe’s realisation that the press was deeply influential: If not carried on too long or continuously, – so that the brain begins to churn leaders sleeping or waking (a dreadful state of things into which we may fall), – it is pre-eminently healthy, being so full of variety and calling for so many different mental faculties one after another. Promptitude, clear and quick judgment as to what is, and is not, expedient and decorous to say; a ready memory well stored with illustrations and unworn quotations, a bright and strong style; and, if it can be attained, a playful (not saturnine) humour superadded, – all these qualities and attainments are called for in writing for a daily newspaper; and the practice of them cannot fail to sharpen their edge. To be in touch with the most striking events of the whole world, and enjoy the privilege of giving your opinion on them to 50,000 or 100,000 readers within a few hours, this struck me, when I first recognised that such was my business as a leader-writer, as some-


thing for which many prophets and preachers of old would have given a house full of silver and gold. And I was to be paid for accepting it! It is one thing to be a ‘Vox clamantis in Deserto,’ and quite another to speak in Fleet Street, and, without lifting up one’s voice, to reach all at once, as many men as formed the population of ancient Athens, not to say that of Jerusalem!’45 The exuberance in the power of writing expressed here is matched, in the Life, to Cobbe’s definition of writing as expressly political. Where Cobbe’s retrospection of her Echo years gains fervour, for example, is in her remembrance of the kinds of social causes and stories she chose to champion in her writing. Her short chapter on ‘London in the Sixties and Seventies: Journalism’ recounts both her successes in using her column to alter the course of an individual’s life (she names both Susannah Palmer and Isabel Grant, women whose legal cases she championed in the Echo) and offers a framework for understanding her journalism work in her overall writing life. Cobbe tells us that it paid exceedingly well, notably more than the best monthly and quarterly periodicals. She also observes that the total of her journalism earnings over the course of her writing life never equalled the sums that her eldest brother withdrew each year from the family estate. But if the press is potent, the Life also testifies to Cobbe’s sense that, despite the many successes of her writing, women need still to address the ‘sentiment’ that does not see them as part of the nation’s talk. If Cobbe can revel in her ability to speak to ‘as many men as formed the population of ancient Athens’ or her ability to address the ‘nation’, she must also present her ambitions and achievements at the paper in terms that show her qualifications. She stresses her punctuality and dependability as a newspaper employee, ‘proud to say that for seven years …till [she] retired, [she] never once failed to keep [her] engagement’ (68). Her conclusion about the significance of her employment as a fact in a woman’s life is startlingly unassuming to modern eyes: ‘I wrote my leader, and as many “Notes” as were allotted to me, and thus proved, I hope, once for all, that a woman may be relied on as a journalist no less than a man. I do not think indeed, that very many masculine journalists could make the same boast of regularity as I have done’ (69). Her words reveal that the ‘nation’ still


requires evidence of women’s solidness, still views women’s professional aspirations and achievements with deep suspicion. In 1894, when these words were written, journalism and related forms of office work (stenography, typing) were much touted by feminists as suitable, respectable work for women.46 Cobbe’s 1888 contribution to the Woman’s Penny Paper, ‘Journalism as a Profession for Women,’ in which she lists women’s health and brain-power as a disability in journalism, reminds us that steadiness in application was long a real part of the conversation on women’s journalism. Nevertheless, as James Fitzjames Stephen’s 1862 comments on the leader writer tell us, that figure also resonated with real power. Where Cobbe’s quiet pioneering in the Life gently underscores the hidden history of women’s journalism, pointing to just how long women had been doing such work anonymously and unheralded, Stephen knew ‘That men should be found whose practice it is to write three or four such essays every week is sometimes considered as a sort of intellectual wonder.’47 For all that Cobbe was aware of the different meanings that could be attached to her periodical writing – as evidence of women’s employability, as a pioneering kind of intellectual wonder – her Life nonetheless affirms its lifeblood was political: In reviewing my whole literary and journalistic life as I have done in these two chapters, I perceive that I have been from first to last an Essayist; almost pur et simple. I have done very little in any other way than to try to put forward – either at large in a book or in a magazine article, or, lastly, in a newspaper-leader – which was always a miniature essay, – an appeal for some object, an argument for some truth, a vindication of some principle, an exposure of what I conceived to be an absurdity, a wrong, a falsehood, or a cruelty.48 It is as a political writer that this essayist takes her place alongside the many women we have come to know as Victorian feminists. Frances Power Cobbe believed in a biologically derived sexual difference, duties as well as rights, the value of legal reform to social change, the consciousness of dogs, the Conservative Party, the presence of England in Ireland, humour, good writing, and the open fair exchange of ideas and political positions. She agitated for married


women’s control over their property, for the improved education of women, women’s suffrage, and a greater presence for women in the political structures and processes of her day. Though she lived with a woman for over thirty years, she did not present herself as a sexual radical. To pore over her writing is to be struck by her great wit, her directness and her indomitable logic. Her writing yields little that is apparently ‘new’ to the store of social and political ideas that have come to define Victorian feminism, little that is ‘new’ to our knowledge of the goals and aspirations of feminist women in England from about 1860 onwards. But this is only true if what we look for when we look for the ‘new’ is limited to content, broadly defined. What is new and important about Frances Power Cobbe is whom she spoke to, where and how she took feminism about with her, her analysis of problems, her responses to the news of the day. Cobbe spoke to an audience as much composed of non-feminist readers, men and women, as those already, or about to be, convinced by Victorian feminism’s political analysis. She wrote in mainstream periodicals and journals, in half-penny evening newspapers, as well as in political pamphlets and on the feminist platform. And in doing so, she took feminism outside of the immediate political circles of politicians and social reformers, feminist committee members and organisers, government bureaucrats and local dignitaries, which form the immediate audience and group of supporters surrounding any political reformer. She wrote to the body politic more broadly conceived – to whoever wanted to pay half-penny for the evening London Echo, to the man or woman who subscribed to Fraser’s or the Contemporary or Macmillan’s or the Nineteenth-Century. Her newness, her significance, lies in the address of her writing, the locations of her feminist texts, and the strategies she used to occupy them.


2 ‘She and I have Lived Together’: women’s celibacy and signature in Cobbe’s early writing

When Frances Power Cobbe’s ‘What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?’ appeared in the November 1862 issue of Fraser’s Magazine, she was a forty-year-old Anglo-Irish woman, recently returned from a trip abroad. The trip had taken her to Italy, and had introduced her to a circle of feminist women artists based in Rome, including the woman who would become her life-long partner, Welsh sculptor Mary Lloyd. In 1862, living in London on a £200 inheritance from her father, Cobbe began to boost her income by writing for the press.1 One of her first employers, Fraser’s Magazine, was one of the most prestigious nineteenth-century periodicals, and was distinct amongst Victorian political journals in its self-proclaimed focus on principles rather than party-specific interests. It was also known for its style and fine writing, as well as its focus on politics, religion, and social conditions.2 One of Cobbe’s earliest periodical pieces, the witty, powerful ‘What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?’ introduced a new voice to the Victorian periodical reading public, launching its author’s long career as a distinguished writer on topics as diverse as women’s education and employment, workhouse reform, theology, domestic violence, and anti-vivisection. She would become one of Fraser’s Magazine’s most frequent contributors. Cobbe’s article became part of what she termed a ‘continuous series’ that she quickly repackaged in book form as Essays on the Pursuits of Women, published the next year in 1863. The article, and the longer series, also brings her to the attention of a group of London women, head-quartered in Langham Place and linked to her Italian friends, which would shortly present the first petition for women’s suffrage to the English Parliament.3 25


Cobbe’s ‘What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?’ was written in response to W.R. Greg’s ‘Why are Women Redundant?,’ an article published in the National Review in April of the same year.4 Addressing the effects of an apparent demographic shift that produced a number of ‘redundant’ women, Greg’s article brings together a cluster of concerns that had long preoccupied Victorian society and was reinvigorated by the appearance of the 1851 census, which seemingly confirmed that there were simply too many women about with not enough to do. This chapter focuses on the appearance, textual strategies, and packaging of Cobbe’s ‘continuous series’ on women’s pursuits in order to explore her intervention into the Woman Question and its meaning for our histories of Victorian feminism. In doing so, I argue that part of what is significant about Cobbe’s article is not simply the matter or the stuff of its rebuttal but must also be looked for in the workings of the larger structure – the press – that supports it. Cobbe enters press history and engages a large reading public – forging a name for herself in Fraser’s Magazine, becoming visible to the contemporary feminist community centred around Langham Place and claiming a feminist signature – in a particular way. She builds a signature, a press or textual name in the established press, through her intervention in the vast social debate that is the Victorian Woman Question. As we shall see, Greg invoked current medical definitions of women’s sexuality and drew upon his own earlier work on prostitution in order to identify women as inherently sexless, desire-free, and economically parasitic. Unmarried middle-class women, unable to ‘minister to men’ (451) are declared ‘redundant’. Arguing for a combination of enforced emigration and the appeal of the demimonde (the world of high-class prostitution), Greg’s article sets clearly on the agenda a call for a differently eroticised middle-class femininity for those women ‘left behind’ in the marriage stakes. Cobbe’s response necessarily and strategically engages with Greg’s eroticisation of middle-class femininity. Her picture of an economically, socially, intellectually, and emotionally productive single woman counterpoints Greg’s clapped-out threat to the body politic. In a recent article, Martha Vicinus reminds us that ‘Marriage represents sexuality more forcibly than any other public institution; support for it, as well as attacks on it, reveal larger social concerns about masculinity and femininity’.5 Cobbe’s entrance in the mar-

‘She and I have Lived Together’ 27

riage debate challenged social understanding about femininity, particularly understandings about ‘reproductive’ femininity. Her concern to argue for celibacy, a differently productive female body, participates in the larger feminist analysis of marriage by critiquing current marriage conventions, embracing a new kind of woman artist, and presenting a new vision of women’s sociability in the widest sense of that term. Importantly, this new vision and Cobbe’s distinctive signature circulates in the established press from the start of her career there. Indeed, the address of Cobbe’s writing (i.e. the established press) is a critical part of her signature, especially at a time when the separate feminist press was in the process of inventing itself. Reading the essays for layers of representation and meaning that are differently available to readers and differently articulated in specific types of sources, this chapter also insists upon the importance of what might seem an unfriendly site in thinking about lesbian history: the established nineteenth-century periodical press. Cobbe’s chosen ‘opponent’ in the redundant woman debate was the formidable William Rathbone Greg, the distinguished son of a prominent Unitarian family, a wealthy industrialist in his own right, and a man for whom periodical writing was a mode of self-expression, not a money-making venture. ‘Why are Women Redundant?’ appeared in the National Review, the ‘most distinguished periodical founded by Unitarians in nineteenth-century Britain, [and] clearly one of the great quarterlies of the Victorian age.’6 In 1862, the National Review was at the height of its relatively short run, edited by Richard Holt Hutton and Walter Bagehot, and boasting such eminent contributors as Matthew Arnold, James Anthony Froude, then editing Fraser’s Magazine, James Martineau, Francis William Newman, and Herbert Spencer. Amongst this august group, W.R. Greg was treated as a ‘special contributor’ who had been involved in the initial scheme to establish a new Unitarian periodical.7 Bagehot’s letters in this period indicate Greg’s unique stature as a contributor, offering a glimpse of the particular way in which Greg chose to regard his periodical writing: ‘Greg’s great motive (in my opinion at least),’ Bagehot writes to Hutton, ‘for trying to get up the review was that he smarts under the jurisdiction of the Editors of the big reviews and that he wants something where he can feel uncontrolled.’8


Greg was, as this brief summary suggests, a man of political consequence and great sway, able to write for the ‘big’ reviews and with sufficient clout to found one of his own. I want to take a moment here to give some sense of his method of arguing, and the key elements in analysis of ‘redundant’ women. His opening to ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’ asserts his status as a philosopher and specifies ‘The Woman Question’ as the philosophical ‘problem’ to be examined. It is Greg the philosopher who will look at Woman ‘with a certain degree of completeness, – with an endeavour, that is, to bring together all the scattered phenomena which are usually only seen separately and in detail.’9 Greg’s signature combines the philosopher’s clarity of thinking with the doctor’s authority to cure. Drawing on the authenticity of statistics, this philosophical clarity is paramountly the clarity of numbers, a question of figures and proportions. Greg musters statistical tables, which purport to identify the numbers of men and women in Canada and Australia, to make the argument that Nature specifies a ‘natural’ celibacy of 5 per cent of women between the ages of twenty and forty in Great Britain and its colonies.10 The actual percentage noted in the 1851 census, however, is some 30 per cent or 1,248,000 women of child-bearing age. This number is, Greg argues succinctly, ‘quite disproportionate and quite abnormal; a number which, positively and relatively, is indicative of an unwholesome social state’ (436). Having identified the number of redundant women, Greg proposes that emigration has both caused the problem of redundancy and is the answer to that problem. ‘We must restore by an emigration of women,’ writes Greg, ‘that natural proportion between the sexes in the old country and in the new ones, which was disturbed by an emigration of men’ (443). His article argues the case for the regulated emigration of women. His proposal is implicitly a raced one. Greg’s population figures for both Canada and Australia chart only the ‘white’ population of those colonies, arranged solely on the basis of sex. If emigration solves ‘redundancy’ at home, then it clearly also is intended to solve miscegenation abroad. But Greg also notices that emigration is overall only a small factor in his calculations. He reasons that emigration has ‘only raised the excess of adult women to about six per cent, whereas the proportion of adult women who are unmarried is thirty percent’ (446. Original italics). The answer to this further disproportion lies not in socio-


political causes of empire, but in what Greg identifies as ‘the growing and morbid LUXURY of the age’ (446). In the logic of the essay, the possibility of emigration lays bare middle-class women’s concerns with social appearance, their concern to present a good figure. ‘Hundreds of women would be really happier in a simpler and less lazy life,’ intimates Greg, ‘and know that they would; but to accept that life would be, or would be deemed to be, a derogation from their social status’ (447). Others, ‘probably thousands,’ are less bound by appearances, and ‘would willingly give up carriages, expensive dresses, and laborious pleasure, … They don’t wish to be idle, but they are not prepared to become drudges’ (447). Greg carefully traces here a class structure which posits middle-class women as important domestic workers in their own homes, but also clearly demarcates them from the working-class women or ‘drudges’ they oversee in that same house. Imagining emigration and its hardships permits Greg partly to re-envision women’s relations ‘at home,’ to imagine class-specific readjustments to life in England. As Greg offers his analysis of what is wrong with England’s women, he further parses his figure specifying redundant women, and as he does so articulates his definition of women. Though the middle-class women of England are victims of social appearances, mistakenly thinking they need ‘dainty living, splendid dressing, large houses, carriages ad libitum, gay society, and exoneration from all useful exertion’ (447. Original italics), Greg is not advocating a wholesale social revolution. Servants are, after all, a decided necessity. The 1851 census identified 905,165 women servants in Great Britain, but that figure does not trouble Greg in the slightest. Their ‘redundancy’ or celibacy does not represent a social disease or moral malignancy. Removing female domestic servants from the number of ‘celibate women,’ Greg insists that despite their unmarried status, they do not constitute a problem to be solved: They are in no sense redundant; we have not to cudgel our brains to find a niche or an occupation for them; they are fully and usefully employed; they discharge a most important and indispensable function in social life; they do not follow an obligatorily independent, and therefore for their sex an unnatural, career: – on the contrary, they are attached to others and are connected with other existences, which they embellish, facilitate, and serve.


In a word, they fulfil both essentials of woman’s being: they are supported by, and they minister to, men. We could not possibly do without them. Nature has not provided one too many. (451. Original italics) Greg’s article identifies a third cause of the ‘abnormal extent of female celibacy in our country’ (451). He treats this third cause briefly, noting simply that ‘[f]ew men – incalculably few – are truly celibate by nature or by choice… . In a word, few – comparatively very few – would not marry as soon as they could maintain a wife in any thing like decency or comfort, if only through marriage they could satisfy their cravings and gratify their passions’ (452). Men’s resort to prostitution is, then, the third cause of women’s deviant celibacy, and Greg is somewhat at a loss about how to resolve it. He suggests that if women were to ‘become less costly articles of furniture’ (453) more men would make offers of marriage; he thinks too that middle-class women must ‘imitate that rival circle in its attractive and not in its repellant features – in its charms, not in its drawbacks nor its blots; in its ease and simplicity, not in its boldness or its license of look and speech; in the comparative economy of style which covers so much of its wastefulness, and in the cheerfulness and kindliness of demeanour which redeems or gilds so many of its sins’ (453). The newly eroticised middle-class woman would not be celibate. Cobbe begins her article ‘What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?’ with a joke and a reference to her first article for Fraser’s Magazine published earlier that year, ‘Celibacy v. Marriage.’ More tellingly, the article’s argument begins by granting credibility, as well she might, to the eminent Greg whose article she is refuting. ‘We have not been surprised,’ she writes somewhat understatedly, ‘to find the article in question quoted as of the soundest common sense’ (‘What’, 61).11 Claiming a place for her signature in the weighty, respected Fraser’s Magazine, and establishing her own credentials on the topic by calling her readers’ attention to her past writing in Fraser’s Magazine, Cobbe’s explicit acknowledgement of the ‘powerful and not unkindly exposition’ (‘What’, 60–61) of Greg’s argument and its place of publication does two things. On the one hand, it signals that the ‘novice’ recognises the power and high cultural stakes of the periodical playing field she has walked onto and Greg’s


place within it. On the other, Cobbe’s recognition also claims her right and ability to be on that playing field, to participate in political discussion – to grant recognition of her fellow discussants and to wrest logical victory from them whenever she can. Cobbe’s launching moment, her entrance into the established periodical field with her series, exhibits the confidence and logical dexterity of one who aims, and claims, to be a key player – an analyst and philosopher – on this prestigious field. Cobbe’s larger rhetorical strategy derives essentially from this opening act. Positioning herself as a fellow commentator with power of exposition, Cobbe strategically grants Greg’s argument a number of concessions. Her language here is critical: Cobbe does not ‘share’ nor ‘agree’ to Greg’s logical starting point, which is that marriage is women’s true vocation. Rather Cobbe ‘admit[s] that, for the mass of mankind, marriage is the right condition, the happiest, the most conducive to virtue’ (‘What’, 61 – emphasis mine). The term ‘admit’ is both gracious and rigorously logical, permitting that – for the purposes of her argument in this textual space – the assumption can stand. From this admission, Cobbe builds her argument – one that will end in logical opposition to Greg’s – by soliciting agreement and pointing out shared interests or goals. If Cobbe grants Greg’s privileging of marriage, she also counters with the assertion that ‘There is only one kind of marriage which makes good the assertion that it is the right and happy condition for mankind,’ (‘What’, 62), namely marriages based on free choice. From this redefined or adapted concession, Cobbe’s article moves quickly to argue that free choice is possible only for women who are adequately educated and self-supporting. Tangling with an argument that had called for decreased educational and employment opportunities for women and the emigration of those deemed ‘redundant,’ Cobbe ‘arrive[s] at the conclusion that for the very end of promoting marriage – that is, such marriage as it is alone desirable to promote – we should pursue a precisely opposite course to that suggested by the reviewer [Greg] or his party. Instead of leaving single women as helpless as possible, and their labour as illrewarded…we shall act exactly on the reverse principle. We shall make single life so free and happy that they shall have not one temptation to change it save the only temptation which ought to determine them – namely, love’ (‘What’, 64–65).


The argument that follows is familiar to those acquainted with Victorian feminist thought – the lifting of the restrictions hampering women’s education, their right to find well-paid work, and the essential womanliness of all intellectually and economically fulfilled women. The article itself – its voice – flows energetically and elegantly through these now well-charted waters. Throughout ‘What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?,’ Cobbe carefully claims accord where she can find it, delighting particularly in demonstrating the ways in which such shared values can yield entirely ‘reverse’ courses of action. ‘What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?’ takes real pleasure in its logistical prowess, its ability to pick its way through a minefield of objections by embracing points of logical agreement and rigorously righting the errors of her fellow discussant. The remainder of her retort to Greg’s, which forms only one-third of her article, is peppered with such redefined concessions. The care with which Cobbe scrutinises the discussion for points of agreement and her willingness to grant points to the other players is always on conspicuous display: ‘[I]t is urged, and not unreasonably…’ (‘What’, 66); ‘It must be admitted here is the great knot and difficulty…’ (‘What’, 67); ‘this scheme has our entire sympathy and good wishes… (‘What’, 74). Such expressions of agreement, seemingly offered in the spirit of real conciliation, display the sense of shared concerns with Greg and like commentators that Cobbe assumes as the defining quality of her writing persona. Her skill in claiming points of concord whilst fashioning a new conclusion to the established premises is all the more significant when we remind ourselves of her venue. Cobbe’s care to hold tight to points of agreement tells us something of what she might have expected her readers to already know or agree to and her adroitness at introducing the ‘new.’ Though Fraser’s Magazine had a progressive political signature, this does not mean that Cobbe could assume in her readers a comfortable knowledge of, and easy consent to, the forms of feminist thinking that she could so readily convey. The ‘newness’ to Fraser’s Magazine readers of a feminist critique of marriage that we now trace back at least to Wollstonecraft seventy years earlier forms a substantial part of the heft of Cobbe’s signature here. Hers is the incisive yet generous, the sharp yet agreeable, voice of the ‘new.’ She is also not above having a little fun. Where Greg presents the rationale for an emigration scheme involving some 400,000 women


and the active suppression of any attempts to assuage their ‘redundancy’, Cobbe teasingly laments, ‘No false charity to criminals! Transportation or starvation to all old maids! Poor old maids! Will not the Reformatory Union, or some other friends of the criminal, take their case in hand? … There is reason to hope that many of them would be willing to adopt a more honest way of life were the chance offered them’ (‘What’, 72–73). Calling on her readers’ anticipated class prejudices, Cobbe also delights in pointing to the logical hash that masquerades as Greg’s solution to the Woman Question. After all, she gloatingly notes, emigration would send out the ‘wrong’ sort of women: ‘We cannot but fear… that the governesses and other ladies so accommodated will not much profit by the large selection thus afforded them among the blacksmiths and ploughmen, deprived of their proper companions’ (‘What’, 75). Greg’s logical howler in asserting that an uninterrogated notion of emigration is the answer to the malady or ‘disease’ (436) of redundant women serves as a critical turning point in Cobbe’s article in significant ways. As we shall see, Cobbe uses Greg’s championing of a classless, white, heterosexual notion of emigration to circulate a white, homosocial/sexual celibacy for middle-class women. Greg’s article had advocated wholesale emigration, ‘dispos[ing] of the matter [of women’s redundancy],’ as Cobbe writes, ‘by observing that the transportation he fondly hopes to see effected, of 440,000 women to the colonies, will at least relieve the market for those who remain’ (‘What’, 74–75. Original italics). Greg’s ‘market’ is implicitly and unquestionably a white, heterosexual, and reproductive one, in which white men travel to colonies where they tame the land in the name of England, but fail to take up with white women or populate it appropriately. Though Cobbe skewers some of its terms by pointing out what would be to her (and Greg) class inequities in the colonial marriage game, Greg’s emigration misstep is much more important because it allows Cobbe to queue her arguments about educated, middle-class ladies and their activities. What follows this re-orientation constitutes the great bulk of Cobbe’s essay (itself about twice the length of Greg’s), fully twothirds of its forty-odd pages. In many ways, the shift is consistent with Cobbe’s goals at the outset of ‘What Shall We Do?’ Countering Greg’s insistence on the sheer uselessness and diseased threat of redundant women, Cobbe ensures that the range of


women’s activities is given ample, glowing coverage. Offering to her readers an overview of all that women have accomplished in the realms of literature, painting, sculpture and philosophy, Cobbe insists on the substance of Victorian women’s contributions to culture. It is a key political claim, re-weighting the argument from what women are seen not to be doing (reproducing) to a generous treatment of their accomplishments and prospects. Nonetheless, the great heft of ‘What Shall We Do?,’ with its extended treatment of women’s pursuits of literature and sculpture, particularly the latter, can read as oddly disproportionate if we read it solely as a rebuttal to Greg’s. Why does Cobbe offer what amounts to mini art-historical lessons? Certainly, this display of cultivation is part of her answer to Greg’s insistence on women’s narrowly domestic and reproductive role. Elsewhere in the article, Cobbe takes great care to advertise the impressive range of women’s abilities in her article, finding space to name Emily Faithfull (then the head of Victoria Press), Bessie Raynor Parkes (editor of English Woman’s Journal), Jane Crowe (Secretary to the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women), Maria Rye (Female Emigration Society), and Jessie Boucherett (Society for Promoting the Employment of Women) in the course of her argument. She also carves out a niche for the value of her own work, claiming the status of philosopher just as Greg does, if slightly more tangentially. In extolling the necessity of philosophy and the real dearth of women involved in it, Cobbe suggests that ‘few women complete their love [of philosophy] by such hatred of error as shall urge them to the exertion of laboriously establishing and defining the limits of the truths they possess’ (‘What’, 90). This is, of course, a description of Cobbe’s own writing practise, and can well serve as a primer in what is distinctive about her signature: her espousal of logic balanced with a healthy dose of respect for sentiment. The word ‘hatred’ here is particularly intriguing since Cobbe works hard to present her alternative vision of women’s lives as arising not from ‘hatred’ for her fellow discussants’ view of affairs, but from careful consideration and respect for them, however much they disagree. More tellingly, however, Cobbe’s lengthy disquisition on the power of art serves also to introduce a conception of women’s relationships that celebrates and pays homage to the lesbian commu-


nity she seems to have first encountered in Rome, and was now part of in London. I say ‘seems’ here because I want neither to assume nor rule out that Cobbe’s sexual identity (or affective orientation) was called into being by her travels outside England. There is however a satisfying irony in Cobbe’s evocation of her Rome circle. Her experience there allows her to see fully the limits or boundaries of Greg’s emigration scheme – its powerful heterosexuality most prominently – and redefine those limits to promote her own ‘scheme’ for excess women’s lives without men. Where Greg solely imagines travel for women as furthering a larger heterosexual and imperialist imperative, Cobbe’s own travel gave her Mary Lloyd, her life partner first encountered through Charlotte Cushman, Harriet Hosmer, and the circle of lesbian women who were life-long friends.12 Through her celebration and defense of Harriet Hosmer, the American sculptor and ‘celibate’ then fending off accusations of fraud about her statue ‘Zenobia,’ Cobbe circulates a coded vision of lesbian life. Embracing an already culturally-sanctioned female celibacy to promote women’s educational, intellectual, and employment opportunities at home, Cobbe also offers a cover-story for emotional and potentially physical relations between middle-class women that could not be articulated more overtly. In order to discuss Cobbe’s representation of what Lisa Merrill has called ‘the sapphic family,’13 I want to trace Cobbe’s re-introduction of the term celibacy in her essay. Cobbe uses the periodical space available to her, her place as a ‘fellow commentator’ on the Woman Question, to weave intricate threads of meaning for her readers by presenting Harriet Hosmer as the embodiment of this cherished term. As Cobbe reiterates in her later packaging of this piece in Essays on the Pursuits of Women, it was written to be read against and through the ‘continuous series’ of three articles, of which it was the second. Reading the second essay, ‘What Shall we Do with Our Old Maids?,’ through the first, ‘Celibacy v. Marriage,’ restores the complex interplay between these texts, an interplay that also reframes the significance of Cobbe’s decision to set Harriet Hosmer firmly at the centre of her argument.14 ‘Celibacy v. Marriage,’ published ten months before its companion piece (February 1862) in Fraser’s Magazine, takes as its starting point yet another ‘able article’15 in a contemporary journal. Like ‘What Shall We Do?,’ then, ‘Celibacy v. Marriage’ assumes its place


within the flow of periodical discussion of a central social question – here not single women’s redundancy, but the effects of marriage, and the strains of supporting a family, on a man’s professional integrity.16 ‘Keeping Up Appearances,’ the ‘able article’ Cobbe cites as the opener to her piece, insists that marriage means that all men ‘must needs ‘keep an eye to the main chance,’ and consider at all moments, how will it pay for [them] to act in this [professional] matter?’ (‘Celibacy’, 39). More troublingly, it is the wife – with her desires for carriages and horses, expensive dresses, and even a servant or two – who prompts this ‘needful toadyism and expenditure’ (‘Celibacy’, 44). It is Cobbe’s characteristic strategy to grant full recognition to this argument as one worth considering. ‘[T]his argument,’ she writes (one suspects tongue in cheek), ‘is much too cogent in itself, and much too well urged from really noble points of view, not to deserve serious investigation’ (‘Celibacy’, 40). In what we recognise, reading backwards in the series, as a signature rhetorical move, Cobbe embraces all points of agreement between herself and her interlocutor, all the more wholeheartedly for what will be an impressive demonstration of the very different conclusions she can draw from these shared concerns. ‘Yes!,’ she agrees emphatically, ‘If anything good, or noble, is ever to be done on earth, it must be done disinterestedly’ (‘Celibacy’, 41. Original italics); ‘The actual fact must, alas! be admitted. The cares of a family have a tendency to make a man interested’ (‘Celibacy’, 43. Original italics). And again, ‘wives [do] fail in performing their proper part of inspiring feelings of devotion to noble causes’ (‘Celibacy’, 45). Cobbe’s care to enter the debate in a spirit of conciliation is strategically stressed by such comments. But any reader, or fellow periodical writer, lulled into thinking that the consensus-seeking Frances Power Cobbe will concur that marriage is a terrible bore, keeping many a good chap down, will soon be smartly awakened. In a piece that sets out, it would seem, to defend marriage against the inroads of a celibacy marketed as more disinterested or objective for men, Cobbe rigorously sets about redefining the question. The redefinition is indeed clearly marked in the title of her piece, for which Cobbe draws cleverly on the legal convention of appellant and defendant used in the still new Divorce Court (established five years earlier in 1857). As her deft evocation of this convention indicates, Cobbe’s rewriting of the question insists that these two


terms should no longer be linked as an either/or choice for women. The issue, it turns out, is not about husbands at all, but about wives. Whilst seemingly agreeing with much of her interlocutor’s argument, Cobbe recommends a cognitive detour: ‘[L]et us go further back in our problem,’ she suggests in the spirit of logistical open-mindedness, ‘What have we assumed a wife to be?’ (‘Celibacy’, 42). Following from this question, Cobbe tempts her reader to undertake an intellectual adventure, to ‘seriously inquire whether the true destiny of woman, if rightly understood, would not serve to make right this puzzle of life’ (‘Celibacy’, 43), and promises to prove the truly unthinkable: ‘if the wife were what the wife should be, the husband would not need to grow more mercenary and more worldly to supply her wants’ (‘Celibacy’, 43. Original italics). In short, women’s impoverished education, their ignorance of the world beyond their own front curtains, and their severely curtailed employment opportunities, have made them foolish bigots (‘Celibacy’, 44–49). Significantly, ‘Celibacy v. Marriage’ does not take the turn we might anticipate here. Cobbe’s argument ends before it lists the expected demands for improvements to women’s situation that we might expect to follow such a declaration of harm done to women’s character by social processes. Instead, she determines that the discussion of the detriments of marriage has been far too weighted to ‘the man’s side’ (‘Celibacy’, 50. Original italics), and proposes instead to explore the benefits of celibacy for women. The advantages seem clear, and are presented as the expression of women’s nature – that same nature which, unfettered, proves ennobling to the ethically challenged husband. Single women’s potential contributions to the world are duly imagined. But what interests me here the most is Cobbe’s focus, which is not on the accomplishments that single women can achieve – generalised philanthropic good, intellectual accomplishments, and so on. These make a near perfunctory appearance in Cobbe’s piece. Rather, Cobbe’s focus is on the emotional and social life of the celibate single woman, in particular the superiority of single women’s lives in comparison to single men’s. In many ways, Cobbe’s essay redefines the question asked at the outset, shifting her focus from what it has been assumed a ‘wife’ should be to demonstrating what women can be, opening up ‘The Woman Question’ to tackle much more directly the question: what are women?


Three statements in her piece are particularly striking. Firstly, Cobbe points to women’s domestic competency, which ensures at a minimum her physical well-being despite a man’s absence. ‘A man, be he rich or poor, who returns at night to a home adorned by no woman’s presence and domestic cares, is at best dreary and uncomfortable,’ writes Cobbe. ‘But a woman makes her home for herself, and surrounds herself with the atmosphere of taste and the little details of housewifely comforts’ (‘Celibacy’, 52). Second, Cobbe contemplates women’s emotional competency, their capacity to find emotional sustenance in a world without men. The public spaces which signify male homosociality – the clubs and barracks of middle-class Victorian men’s lives – offer mere acquaintance and physical proximity. A single woman, ‘[i]f she have no sister, she has yet inherited the blessed power of a woman to make true and tender friendships, such as not one man’s heart in a hundred can even imagine; and while he smiles scornfully at the idea of friendship meaning anything beyond the acquaintance at a club, or the intimacy of a barrack, she enjoys one of the purest of pleasures and the most unselfish of all affections’ (‘Celibacy’, 52). In a final insistence on women’s ability to establish intimacy, Cobbe reveals that ‘the ‘old maid’ [does not] contemplate a solitary age as the bachelor must usually do. It will go hard but she will find a woman ready to share it. And more! – (but it is a theme we may not treat of here). She thinks to die, if without having given or shared some of the highest joys of human nature, yet at least without having caused one fellow-being to regret she was born to tempt to sin or shame. We ask it in all solemn sadness – Do the men who resolve on an unmarried life, fixedly purpose also so to die with as spotless a conscience?’ (‘Celibacy’, 52–53. Original italics). Greg’s ‘Why are Women Redundant?,’ appearing two months after the first essay in Cobbe’s continuous series would answer that question with a resounding ‘no.’ As we have already seen, Greg’s men will ‘satisfy their cravings and gratify their passions’ outside of marriage. Accordingly, one of Greg’s proposed solution to the redundant woman problem is middle-class women’s adoption of those aspects of prostitutes’ behaviour and manner which he finds beguiling. Cobbe’s claim for women’s lives together, then, appears presciently to reject Greg’s dependence on the demi-monde as a model for middle-class women’s lives in no uncertain terms.


But, the slight opacity of the ending of Cobbe’s vision of single women’s lives together is intriguing, and moreover, is not fully resolved by reading it exclusively as an overt rejection of that kind of female heterosexuality which Greg advocates. On the one hand, Cobbe frames her women’s utopia by drawing on the language of passionlessness available for understanding middle-class women’s lives, married and unmarried. As Nancy Cott argues, passionlessness allowed middle-class women to understand and represent their same-sex relations as free from physical desire, and so superior to heterosexual relationships where physical passion was seen to be the defining characteristic.17 The single men of Cobbe’s analysis are incapable of imagining passion-free lives for themselves. Heterosexual men, instead, leave prostitutes behind where celibate women stolidly anticipate inciting no man to sexual sin. This evocation of women’s lives together dovetails neatly with those histories of lesbians that insist that women’s friendships or romantic friendships were as readily understood as free from any troubling kind of physical desire as men were considered to be governed by sexual passion. The celibacy of ‘Celibacy v. Marriage’ functions as an adequate cover story for women’s lives together, one adequate enough to be offered in the pages of an established periodical like Fraser’s Magazine as an acceptable alternative to marriage. Through my use of the term cover story I am not suggesting that Cobbe was intentionally or consciously masking an otherwise – or elsewhere – articulated vision of women’s sexual lives together, wrapped up neatly in the convention of women’s passion-free celibacy. I do not discount that Cobbe’s understanding of women’s friendships, and so of the possibilities for single women’s lives, indeed of her own life, was profoundly shaped, produced through, the lens of celibacy.18 It seems a capacious, productive language for her. But there is also something in this passage that reads less tidily than the argument from passionlessness permits, signaled perhaps in the slightly obscure syntax of that penultimate line, ‘She thinks to die …,’ which is seemingly made clear only by the question Cobbe poses about men. But how clear? The ellipses, that ‘more!’ that cannot be ‘treated of here,’ suggests that Cobbe is not merely inscribing a valued absence – of desire, of carnality – in women’s lives shared with each other. Though Cobbe raises the spectre of sexuality only to banish it immediately, there are also, after all, positives in


women’s lives that can be more lingeringly evoked: the pleasures and affections, the intimacies of ‘true and tender friendships’.19 But I do think that celibacy was also capacious enough to include within it – however muted or unacted upon – the possibility of physical passion between women. As Vicinus has argued, the explanatory force of passionlessness or romantic friendship is severely limited. Its source in a history-making of sexuality that begins with late nineteenth-century sexology and its pathologisation of lesbian sexuality, has tended to emphasise the acceptability of women’s homosocial/ sexual relationships at the expense of erasing the capacity of such relations to represent sexual desire between women.20 As Lisa Merrill argues, if the ‘possibility of passion between women did not occur to most … [nineteenth-century] contemporaries, as some historians claim, how can we account for the contradictory degrees of awareness and acceptance’21 that such friendships provoked in others? We need to keep this ambiguous representation of celibacy in mind as we return to Cobbe’s use of it in ‘What Shall We Do?’ and, later, to her repackaging of these essays. In addition, we need to keep in mind that ‘celibacy’ is a distinctive component of Cobbe’s signature in these Woman Question debates, one that she has chosen to highlight. If the opacity of Cobbe’s vision here obstructs a ready-made queer reading of her work, we need also to remember that this opacity or ambiguity is, at least in part, the opacity of this kind of source. What we can read in an article published in a prestigious, established journal is necessarily less intimate, and so differently rewarding, than what we might be able to read in a diary or a letter to an intimate friend. In Cobbe’s case, such intimate or personal sources do not exist. We have published, explicitly public statements, not diaries and intimate murmerings. The periodical source gives us something different – the site of Cobbe’s signature – and consequently we will know something different about ‘celibacy’ by attending to that difference. Given the source, it is perhaps all the more compelling that celibacy is a central strategy, and a central value, in Cobbe’s forceful entry into and occupation of the periodical field. It is the most powerful arrow in her rhetorical – and intellectual – quiver. And she aims it with precision and intent. With Cobbe’s avowal of celibacy in mind, let us return to that moment in ‘What Shall We Do With Our Old Maids?’ when Cobbe


begins what can seem to be a slight detour of sorts. I want to remind us that Cobbe shifts direction here precisely in response to Greg’s offering of a white, heterosexualised, and reproductive emigration as remedy to England’s ‘redundant’ women problem, along with middle-class women’s adoption of a differently eroticised behaviour and appearance that Greg bases on the manners of the demi-monde, or the world of high-class prostitution. It is at this apparent crossroads that Cobbe chooses a route that, striking decisively into the realm of women’s literary and artistic endeavours, showcases Harriet Hosmer as the exemplar of a differently productive woman’s body. The redefinition of productivity is critical here, and it is important that we retain full awareness of the path not taken. It is tempting and satisfying to see this change of course as almost entirely oppositional in nature. If Greg insists baldly that procreation is women’s only task, then Cobbe counters with women’s non-bodily creations. But I suggest that we need to retain our sense of the centrality of the sexual body in Greg’s argument when we turn to Cobbe’s – to consider her path as parallel to, and drawing upon, Greg’s, rather than swerving violently away from it. The care with which Cobbe has argued for points of accord with Greg should not be lost to us now when we turn to consider the kinds of women’s accomplishments – affective, intellectual, and physical – that she maps for us. When Cobbe presents Harriet Hosmer as the embodiment of a powerful, successful celibate woman, she is determinedly stepping into the midst of one of the most discussed professional scandals of the year. Earlier in 1862, Harriet Hosmer had exhibited her sculpture Zenobia at the London International Exhibition. At this time, Harriet Hosmer was one of the most successful women artists of her day. Her Zenobia – prominently displayed alongside the work of her mentor, eminent English sculptor John Gibson – was Hosmer’s bid for recognition as a major artist. As art historian Joy Kasson notes, Hosmer carefully fashioned her entry onto the international stage to mark her professional aspirations, her commitment to altering women’s place in that profession, and her daring challenge to sculptural traditions.22 In choosing the historical figure of Zenobia, the Queen of Palmyria (now Syria) who had ruled her kingdom for six years after her husband’s death, Hosmer claimed a figure that was symbolically weighty for her spectators, and grapples with the tradition of the bound female figure, most famously embodied in Hiram Power’s The Greek Slave (1844).23


Hosmer herself was something of a challenge to Victorian categories of sex and gender. She wore a man’s jacket and cap when working in her studios, as well as in photographs taken to advertise her work, and was known for her lively, tomboyish manners. There were any number of ways such flouting of gender conventions were explained in her day. Hosmer’s family life was routinely evoked as the explanation for her physical freedom and vigour. Her mother and sister had died of consumption, and her physician father was understood to have ordered physical and mental exercise for his daughter in hopes of saving her from that fate. Other commentators explained Hosmer by interpreting her behaviour as boyish and unformed, as the behaviour of a child, rather than, as Kasson writes, ‘confront the possibility that an adult woman possessed some of the powers and qualities of a man.’24 Though these narratives of family illness and childishness were powerful explanatory devices, Hosmer was still also read as dangerous by many commentators who saw in the sculptor and her work a troubling violation of the natural law of sex distinction.25 What is also important for my purposes is that with the exhibition of Zenobia Hosmer found herself at the centre of a hailstorm of criticism that focused on the authenticity of her work. The nineteenth century saw an important shift in the professionalisation of sculpture, one which reworked the relation between the sculptor as artist and the manual work of sculpting itself, putting greater distance between the act of ‘creating’ seen as an emotional and intellectual task and the physical labour of producing the finished sculpture. As Kasson writes, ‘other nineteenth-century sculptors had encountered public suspicion of their use of studio assistants to perform the actual work of carving the finished statue guided by measurements from the artist’s plaster model.’26 But it is Hosmer, a woman sculptor who sculpted women of power like Zenobia, who was on the receiving end of the most explicit charges of fraud.27 It is at the moment that these accusations against Hosmer were circulating that Cobbe chooses to represent Hosmer as the embodiment of women’s power, and the ultimate retort to Greg’s argument that unmarried women are redundant. As Cobbe sees it, the relation between women and the arts is indexical, demonstrating in no uncertain terms the scope of women’s talents and thus providing a pattern that predicts, indeed guarantees, the triumphs of women’s


contributions to society – whether unmarried or no. By this index, sculpture is ‘the touchstone of the whole question’ (‘What’, 83), the predictor of women’s redundancy, because it is ‘the noblest of the arts’ (‘What’, 85). Cobbe takes care to lay down her criteria for sculpture’s elevated position within the arts. It is ‘the one which tasks highest both creative power and scientific skill’ (‘What’, 82); it claims ‘more elements of power and patience than … almost any other human work, and it is, when perfected, one of the most sublime’ (‘What’, 82); a ‘deep and strange analogy exists between it and the highest we know of the Supreme Artist’s works’ (‘What’, 84); and, as the art of calmness and repose, it is ‘the art to be practised only by great souls, – great races of men’ (‘What’, 86). For the distracted, befuddled or simply resistant reader who might fail to retain the full import of this apparent digression on women and the arts, Cobbe firmly underlines once more the absolute weight which she confers on sculpture as the ultimate measure of women’s relevance, the critical arbiter of women’s genius: We repeat that the sharpest test to which the question of woman’s genius can be put is this one of sculpture. If she succeed here, if a school of real sculpturesses ever arise, then we think that in effect the problem is solved. The greater includes the lesser. They may still fall below male composers in music … They may produce no great drama … Yet if really good statues come from their studios, statues showing at once power of conception and science of execution, then we say, women can be artists. It is no longer a question whether the creative faculty be granted to them. (‘What’, 86). Within this formulation, Harriet Hosmer shines as the beacon of what women can achieve.28 Her Zenobia is, Cobbe asserts, ‘definite proof that a woman can make a statue of the very highest order. Whether we consider the noble conception of this majestic figure, or the science displayed in every part of it, from the perfect pose and accurate anatomy, to the admirable truth and finish of the drapery, we are equally satisfied. Here is what we wanted’ (‘What’, 87). What is it, then, that Hosmer so definitively embodies? In the first instance, Cobbe uses the careful groundwork on sculpture which precedes her introduction of Hosmer to redefine the terms of the


conflict of authenticity surrounding her. Commenting on the assessment of Zenobia above, Deborah Cherry notes that ‘Cobbe defended Zenobia against the major points of criticism. She argued that the sculpture has an intellectual foundation and is the product of deep knowledge, [that] the subject is worthy of representation, [that] the depiction of the figure could not be bettered and [that] the drapery is admirable.’29 We can also add that Cobbe embraces the very shift in the production of sculpture – the shift which saw professional sculptors work more and more closely with teams of marble-cutters than had historically been the case – which ostensibly fuelled the accusations of fraud against Hosmer. Where the accusers asserted that Hosmer’s employment of artisan marble workers nullified her claim to be the originating sculptor or author of Zenobia, Cobbe identifies past practise – when it was ‘customary for the artist to perform much of the mechanical labour of the marble-cutter himself’ (‘What’, 86) – as simply one more pragmatic obstacle to women’s getting on with their work, akin to a lack of access to anatomical instruction or the cash to set up a large studio. Her curt dismissal of such impediments robs the accusation of its sting, denying any larger ideological meaning to this shift in artistic practise. Cobbe’s blithe assurance, ‘in our time things are changed’ (‘What’, 86), calmly refuses to sling any mud back at those who question Hosmer’s authenticity. To this list of specific refutations, however, we must also add Cobbe’s particular sense of sculpture and her characterisation of Hosmer’s work. Recalling that Cobbe’s embrace of Hosmer and sculpture is part of a larger rejection of Greg’s narrowly heterosexual and reproductive vision of women’s lives, we note that the specific allure of sculpture that Cobbe articulates is critical. In the set-up that introduces Hosmer as the epitome of women’s artistic abilities, Cobbe attempts to convey the distinctiveness of the sculptural form, noting for her English audience that Italy comes as a ‘revelation’ (‘What’, 83) to those without easy and familiar access to sculpture. Cobbe’s sculptural revelations are overwhelmingly bodily: the ‘Niobe’ is no longer ‘a woman of noblest mould inspired by maternal anguish…[but] glorified MOTHERHOOD, on whose great bosom we could rest, and round whose neck we could throw our arms… the ‘Psyche’ [is not] a poor fragment of a form, once perhaps graceful and fair, … [but] the revelation to each of us of our innermost


ideal of friend or wife, the sweetest, purest of our dreams made real before our eyes’ (‘What’, 83). The eroticisation of sculpture evident here – the welcoming bust of Niobe, the experiential alignment of the revelation of ‘friend or wife’ – reminds us that Italy’s revelations to Cobbe included Mary Lloyd, her life-long domestic partner who was also a sculptor, the homosocial circle of women artists and thinkers, Harriet Hosmer and Charlotte Cushman amongst them, as well as the ‘genius breathing through form’ (‘What’, 83) that is the sculptural form for Cobbe. The erotic swoon that is sculpture also importantly frames Cobbe’s understanding of Hosmer’s own sculptural style. In her recent analysis of Cobbe’s intervention into the furore over Zenobia, Deborah Cherry argues that she ‘reiterates the feminine stereotype … so retaining the critical terms by which most women artists were judged.’30 Indeed, Cobbe does praise Hosmer’s strength: it is the ‘power, force, [and] grandeur’ (‘What’, 88) of Zenobia that elicits approbation. Further, as Cherry notes, Cobbe constructs a chronology of women’s artistic practise that locates this strength firmly in a transformed present, a ‘Now’ (‘What’, 87) that rejects the ‘weak … washy … sweet …soft’ (‘What’, 87) attributes of past women’s misoriented aesthetic work. Cherry rightly suggests that Cobbe’s critical toolbox draws on aesthetic attributes ordinarily reserved for art by men. Cherry further connects this critical orientation to Cobbe’s own investment in a notion of sexual difference that partially rewrites the terms of Victorian gender ideology. Where nineteenthcentury conceptions of gender understood women has naturally weak, passive, and selfless, Cobbe rewrites women’s weakness as a deviation, a falling away, and a containment of women’s ‘natural’ womanliness. Cobbe’s notion of sexual difference embraces force, power and intellectual prowess for women. Importantly, Hosmer’s Zenobia shows not just that women can be artists, but that ‘a woman with all the charms of youthful womanhood – can be a sculptor, and a great one’ (‘What’, 87). This reading of Cobbe’s celebration of Hosmer’s strength is persuasive. But we must also consider the celebration in the larger periodical context of Greg’s article, which provides the occasion for its articulation, and what I have been arguing is the double address or circulation of Cobbe’s article, the cover story of celibacy. Cobbe’s celebration of Hosmer’s strength does reproduce the critical terms


that, thus far, had historically maligned women’s artistic production. But in an article that draws consciously on the writer’s earlier exploration of women’s celibacy, Hosmer’s strength must also be read through her status as celibate, alongside her status as an artist. Cobbe’ defense of Hosmer, in other words, reverberates beyond the specific confines of the art historical world, and the particular battle against sex prejudice that takes place there. It echoes out, as Cobbe intends it to, to the world of women’s celibacy. Where Cherry reads Cobbe’s aesthetic appreciation of Hosmer as recapitulating feminine stereotypes, we can connect those same stereotypes to Cobbe’s delineation of a celibate and social life for women. I want to stress that it is not my intent in what follows to reconfigure the meaning of Hosmer to feminist art historical understanding. Rather, I want to connect a figure and a practice – Hosmer and sculpture – to the issues of celibacy as Cobbe frames it in her series of essays, and so to understand how she inhabits the periodical debate on the Woman Question as a feminist and a celibate. Returning to Cobbe’s bodily revelations of the effects of Italy’s sculpture on spectators, we note that this experience is revelled in through terms which Cobbe almost immediately uses to hierarchise and reject women’s past artistic practise. If women artists erred in being ‘weak … washy … sweet …soft’ (‘What’, 87), the spectator is not similarly cautioned against sweetness, purity or the appeal of motherly bosoms and necks. These indeed constitute the appeal of sculpture. The binary terms of sexual difference which make contemporary women artists succeed or fail by their strength or weakness is applied differently to those doing the looking, where spectatorial capitulation to the swoon of sculpture is the sign of that sculpture’s power. At the same time, Cobbe is careful to record the risks attendant upon the new women artists’ embrace of strength, power and force. Though ‘all true artists recognise [strength] with delight, there is no inconsiderable number of men to whom it is obviously distasteful, and who turn away more or less decidedly in feeling from the display of this or any other power in women, exercised never so inoffensively’ (‘What’, 88). Characteristically, Cobbe is scrupulous not to reject this sexual disgust out of hand in her response. ‘We do not wish,’ she writes, ‘to use sarcastic words about sentiments of this kind, or demonstrate all their unworthiness and ungenerousness’


(‘What’, 88). Nonetheless, Cobbe is unable to grant credibility to this point of view, hitherto a signature of her rhetorical style throughout the bulk of this essay. Rather, she finds this sexual disgust to mark the limit of what can be rationally debated, calling instead for a simple end to such accusations: ‘We would rather make an appeal to a better judgment, and entreat for a resolute stop to expressions ever so remotely founded on them’ (‘What’, 88). Intriguingly, this is where Cobbe marks the sexual politics of spectatorship, noting that it is ‘men’ who may respond with distaste to women’s strength in art. In her earlier description of sculpture’s power, Cobbe is careful to designate her spectators in the plural, momentarily suspending the gendered identity of her spectators and so leaving room for both masculine and feminine viewers in her panegyric on sculpture’s mesmeric effect. Why specify the gender of her spectator here, and not earlier? In part, Cobbe’s masculinising of sexual disgust here allows her to call on feminist orientalism in her response.31 The disgust of male spectators has its source, she writes, in ‘the old error that clipping and fettering every faculty of body and mind was the sole method of making a woman – that as the Chinese make a lady’s foot, so we should make a lady’s mind’ (‘What’, 88). Male disgust in the face of women’s powerful art belongs to the ‘mean and miserable man who would prefer that a woman’s nature should be pinched, and starved, and dwarfed, to keep on his level, rather than be nurtured and trained to its loftiest capacity, to meet worthily his highest also’ (‘What’, 89). Here, Cobbe’s partial rescripting of Victorian gender identity is given full articulation: if women’s bodies are distorted, she argues, the distortion has its source in Victorian concepts of womanliness which can only interpret women’s strength and force as perversion. Thus are both the sexually discomfited viewers of Hosmer’s sculpture and those who were crying ‘fraud’ neatly dispensed with as purveyors of a restrictive, distorting conception of Victorian womanhood. But what is also kept in play by this apportioning of blame and disgust is the binary of sexual difference that keeps some spectators swooning – rightly so, by Cobbe’s reckoning – at the power of women’s sculpture, Hosmer’s pre-eminently. Here the very same sexual binary that threatens to ‘lose’ some women artists to a negative assessment as ‘feminine,’ and subjects others like Hosmer to a


masculine disgust at their sexual dissidence, also generates a sexual binary across sculptor and viewer that we might understand through passionlessness, the discourse which facilitates Cobbe’s utopia of women’s lives together. Strength in women’s art is conveyed through terms understood by ‘perverted’ viewers as masculine but read by Cobbe as simply the fulfilment of women’s entire nature. ‘Earnestly would we enforce the opposite doctrine, that as God means a woman to be a woman, and not a man, every faculty HE has given her is a woman’s faculty, and the more each of them can be drawn out, trained, and perfected, the more womanly she will become’ (‘What’, 89). For the swooning viewer, too, the response to such sculpture is also womanly, the response of that same viewer who will form intimate, enriching relations with women when no men are to be found. It is as the figure capable of soliciting such a response in viewers – as the strong sculptor of enrapturing pieces – that Hosmer’s authenticity and authority is reestablished in the face of the accusations lodged against her. In other words, Cobbe defends and celebrates Hosmer’s authority as a sculptor precisely as the practitioner and origin of physical, affective responses between women. And it is around Hosmer, defended because of the authenticity of the bodily and affective responses which she is capable of eliciting, that Cobbe substantially builds her own press signature. Hosmer’s debased signature as an artist, the victim of a sexual disgust which denies strong physical and affective responses to women, is reclaimed and newly positioned as the foundation stone for Cobbe’s own press signature as a feminist. Others are distressed by Hosmer’s strength and the effect of her pieces on others, and so she is seen as perverse, the object of sexual disgust, or as fraudulent and inauthentic. Far from being a figure of inauthenticity and suspicion for Cobbe, however, Hosmer is confidently claimed as the centre of an argument for women’s expanded productivity, making Hosmer and the forceful celibacy which she represents a central value in Cobbe’s argument. The full force of this gesture is more readily assessed when we remind ourselves of the key role that such signature already plays in feminist agitation in this period, and would continue to play in Cobbe’s own life as her stature within the feminist political community and beyond was established. Deborah Cherry has noted the critical value of ‘signature’ to the Victorian feminist movement in


the 1850s and 60s when petitions and memorials to parliament were – along with pamphlets, essays, and committee work – a defining political strategy. In the 1880s and 90s, mass processions and meetings would define feminism’s political activity. In this earlier period, ‘although women were claiming a political presence, by no means would they have appeared in public en masse.’ (Cherry, Beyond the Frame, 159). In the 1850s and 60s, feminist organisers placed great faith in the sheer number of petitions they collected, insisting on the political efficacy of the innumerable slips of paper containing signatures that were carefully glued together, gathered up, and sent to Parliament.32 It is the signature – and the author/figure or person which it evokes – which is the critical political tool. Cobbe’s careful construction of her periodical signature through celibacy, and her championing of Harriet Hosmer whose professional signature was under attack, resonates all the more deeply in this context. Cobbe’s own signature would come to be prominent on such petitions precisely because of her success as a periodical writer, a product of the careful shepherding and safeguarding of her signatory impact. Her embrace of celibacy – of women’s relations with each other – as the centrepiece of this signature is striking. Claiming her celibate friend Hosmer as the embodiment of women’s capacity for artistic and intellectual production in the face of the slanderous accusations against her, Cobbe practices one element of the celibacy she celebrates in ‘Celibacy v. Marriage,’: that ‘blessed power of a woman to make true and tender friendships’ (‘Celibacy’, 52). In noting Cobbe’s protection of Hosmer, we must also recall that Hosmer is an intimate friend who fashions physically and emotionally energising sculpture. In safeguarding the artist as friend, Cobbe is also safeguarding the very physical arousal that the friend elicits in her audience. Returning to the cultural flow that cradles Cobbe’s essay, we must also recall that her advocacy on the part of an intimate performs broader cultural work. The timeliness of Cobbe’s intervention to protect Hosmer underscores the central point in her essay: that a feminist player in the periodical field can both make the larger, sweeping logical and philosophical points that Greg’s article demands in retort, and show how these philosophical points are to be practised – made use of – in everyday life. Feminism is not simply a set of ideas, but also an active practice.


I have been arguing for a value to the complexity of allusion across the series of Cobbe’s articles in Fraser’s Magazine, a complexity which is the result of the series’ historical moment – its place in the cultural flow of the periodical debate on the Woman Question. Our understanding of how a feminist signature is constructed in the 1860s established press, and of how lesbian identity/possibility is articulated in that press, is enriched by attending to this cultural flow. I want now to turn to the future life of these same articles. In their continued circulation in book form, we can trace the ongoing construction and movement of Cobbe’s feminist signature in the early 1860s and the place of celibacy in that signature. After the success of ‘What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?, Cobbe moved quickly to capitalise on the opportunity that her entry into the Woman Question presented. The Fraser’s Magazine series had brought Cobbe to the attention of the Langham Place women, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Bessie Rayner Parkes, and Emily Faithful among them. Cobbe’s book, Essays on the Pursuits of Women, repackages the articles that had caused such a stir, including ‘What Shall We Do With Our Old Maids?,’ along with a paper on women’s admission to university examinations given at the Social Sciences Congress, and a piece on the place of women in Italy, and two papers previously published in Macmillan’s Magazine. Emily Faithfull, the publisher of Cobbe’s book, was a member of Langham Place. She was also a success story, which demonstrated the business acumen of women pushing the boundaries of Victorian gender conventions. She is the evidence that women can succeed in arenas of action traditionally barred to them. One of the founders of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women in 1859, Faithfull founded the Victoria Press in 1860 and the successful Victoria magazine in 1863. She was also Printer in Ordinary to the Queen. Her Victoria Press office trained women compositors, printing the Transactions of the NAPSS and Victoria magazine, as well as a range of other titles. She was one of the Langham Place circles most prominent and well-received proofs of women’s ability to enter the labour force in hitherto unprecedented ways.33 Choosing to publish with the Victoria Press, Cobbe elects also to identify her press work and her signature with this bold new initiative in women’s political and cultural life. Cobbe’s burst upon the periodical scene as a commentator on the Woman Question, her subsequent


repackaging of her Fraser’s Magazine and other essays in Essays on the Pursuits of Women (1863) are brave claims for an overtly feminist signature. The frontispiece of her book makes clear Cobbe’s investments: her work is dedicated to ‘The Authoress of The Connection of the Physical Sciences, the Foundress of the First Female Reformatory, and the Sculptress of ‘Zenobia.’ We know those women as Mary Somerville (the mathematician), Mary Carpenter (ragged children’s advocate), and of course Harriet Hosmer. A list of ‘Works by the Author’ also ensures that the readers of this collection know Frances Power Cobbe as the author of a range of books and pamphlets on ethics, religious duty, and the politics of workhouse reform. Two of these pamphlets on workhouses, ‘The Sick in Workhouses’ and ‘Friendless Girls, and How to Help Them,’ are published with Emily Faithfull. Together these materials locate Cobbe firmly in a world of women’s work – intellectual, philanthropic, creative, political – and, as importantly, a world of women’s collaborative enterprise. In an exploration of gender and authorship in the nineteenth century, Alexis Easley notes women writers’ exploitation of different publishing forms to expand their readership. Working with women writers who wrote anonymously in the press, Easley discerns a critical pattern in which such writers ‘alternat[ed] between their anonymous – often ‘masculine’ voices in the periodical press, and their socially constructed ‘feminine’ voices as authors of signed books, [and so] …expanded the range of possible audiences and subject matter for their work.’34 In critical ways, Cobbe conforms to the pattern Easley identifies. Immediately issuing her Woman Question essays from Fraser’s Magazine in Essays on the Pursuits of Women (1863) with Faithfull’s Victoria press, Cobbe aims emphatically at a politically engaged audience, one which has, for whatever reasons, sought the work of a writer publicly identified with a highly politicised group. Though there is no guarantee that such a readership is feminist, nor a way to gauge its size, the Victoria imprint on her collection does tell us that Cobbe is moving quickly to repackage her work to appeal to those who are actively interested in reading materials identified with a feminist cause.35 The links between celibacy and Hosmer, then, are all the more visible to the readers of this edition of her work. The brief preface explicitly links ‘Celibacy v. Marriage’ and ‘What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?’ as part of a ‘connected series’ on the ‘Pursuits of Women,’ with the


order of reading further underscoring the coherence of conception and analysis that threads these pieces together. That the preface also directs readers that the essays ‘especially… apply to the pursuits of Single women’ suggests that it is the readers of this Faithfull edition of Cobbe’s journalism who are expressly addressed by the conception of ‘celibacy’ that these essays articulate. This exuberant moment however is followed by an intriguing retreat. After Essays on the Pursuits of Women, Cobbe does not write again for the established periodical press on the Woman Question until 1868, fully five years later. In that time, though Cobbe continues to write for Fraser’s and publishes frequently with the Theological Review,36 her pieces do not again take up the Woman Question explicitly until December 1868, when she publishes ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors: Are the Classifications Sound?’ for Fraser’s Magazine. What happened? How does so assured a signature of feminist analysis in the established press come to be erased for so long a time? Again, part of the answer lies in the cultural flow eddying around the text. In this case, navigation of the flow takes us further out than the established field of the periodical press, to the world of the Victorian Divorce Court (then only in its seventh year of operation), the newspaper reports of divorce trials, and – most particularly – a trial for divorce that brought Emily Faithfull, Cobbe’s publisher and a key member of the Langham Place Circle, to notoriety. The divorce case of Codrington v. Codrington and Anderson that follows is highly wrought, opaque, and so resistant to easy interpretation. Nevertheless, the case and responses to it provide an important framework for understanding the apparent shift away from celibacy in Cobbe’s writing life that the publication of Essays on the Pursuits of Women initiates. As we shall see, the Codrington trial for divorce damages and redefines Emily Faithfull’s position within Victorian feminism. In Cobbe’s apparent retreat from the feminist signature she had so energetically claimed, a feminist signature now strongly linked with Faithfull’s, we can perhaps trace the cooling effects of the Faithfull debacle on Victorian feminism’s public name. Feminist historian Vicinus wonders if lesbian history has ‘exaggerated the acceptability of romantic friendships… The notorious example of the feminist Emily Faithfull (1835–95) provided ample opportunity to editorialize against romantic friendships.’37 After joy-


fully celebrating the possibilities of ‘celibacy’ for women, the Faithfull ordeal suggests that Cobbe and her circle found ‘celibacy’ to be over-exposed by the Codrington trial. Romantic friendship – the celibacy at the centre of Cobbe’s writing – no longer functions adequately as a cover story for women’s lives together. In exploring the assertion and retraction of Cobbe’s writing signature in this period we can explore the workings of the ‘romantic friendship’ narrative in a very specific place. Read together, the stories of these two women – Cobbe, the writer who turns away from women’s celibacy in her published writing for a time, and her publisher Emily Faithfull – tell us something about the risks attendant upon speaking about women’s celibacy in the established Victorian press, the range of narratives that can be used to explain women’s ‘celibacy’ or relations with each other, and the options available to women like Cobbe and Emily Faithfull who ventured such risks In 1864, Admiral Henry John Codrington filed for divorce from Helen Jane Smith Codrington on grounds of adultery.38 The case came to the Divorce Court in July of 1864. Newspaper coverage of ‘Codrington v. Codrington and Anderson’ was extensive, appearing in the Times, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, Reynolds’s Newspaper, and the Daily Telegraph. The ins and outs of the case are fairly entangled. The pertinent facts for our purposes are these: Admiral Henry Codrington accused his wife Helen of adultery with Colonel David Anderson. Denying the charge, Helen accused Henry of ‘wilful neglect and misconduct, conducing to her adultery, if it had been committed.’39 Helen also charged that ‘one night in October 1856, while she was occupying the same bedroom with Miss Emily Faithfull, in the house where she was residing with her husband in Eccleston-Square, [the Admiral] had come into her bedroom and attempted to take improper liberties with Miss Faithfull.’40 Emily Faithful had lived with the Codringtons for three years from 1854 to 1857, from when she was nineteen to twenty-two. She was asked to leave the household when, according to Henry Codrington’s deposition, Helen Codrington ‘positively and absolutely declined again to enter the same bed with the admiral, and she insisted on having a separate bed and sleeping with Miss Faithfull.’41 The terms of her leave-taking are also pertinent. A sealed packet outlining the reasons for Faithfull’s removal from the Codrington home was left with the Admiral’s brother, General Sir William Codrington.


Faithfull’s role in the Codrington trial is intimately connected with the contents of this mysterious packet. In the immediate aftermath of responding to her husband’s suit for divorce (filed in November 1863), Helen Codrington obtained a signed affidavit from Faithfull stating that the admiral had attempted to rape Emily in October 1856. At trial in the summer of 1864, however, Faithfull repudiated the affidavit she had signed, denying that the Admiral had attempted to rape her, and indicating that she had signed the affidavit without reading it because of her faith in Mrs Codrington’s version of events. She had seen only a ‘white figure’42 in the room she shared with Helen. The jury found in favour of Admiral Codrington, granting him his divorce. Colonel Anderson was required to pay the Admiral’s costs of £943.2s.4d. Interestingly, the court also ordered the Admiral to pay his ex-wife’s costs of £1,118.10s.0d, finding that the Admiral was complicit in his wife’s abandonment of their conjugal bed through his indifference. Martha Vicinus has argued that the ‘Codrington divorce trial and Emily Faithfull’s contradictory role cry out for a lesbian reading.’43 But she also notes the difficulty in establishing such a reading. The ‘evidence’ is, as Vicinus points out, fragmentary and inchoate. Newspaper reports of the trial jostle with repudiated affidavits. For our purposes here, what does emerge clearly is the risk to the reputation of women associated with Faithfull. The private letters of Faithfull’s contempories indicate that Faithfull’s Langham Place colleagues circled uneasily around the meaning of her involvement in the divorce case to the reputation of their organisation. In a series of letters written between August and November of 1864,44 Joseph Parkes, lawyer and father to Bessie Raynor Parkes who was herself a member of Langham Place alongside Faithfull and editor of its periodical, English Woman’s Journal, offers both his interpretation of the key characters and events at the Divorce Court and an argument for Faithfull’s expulsion from Langham Place. Though they represent only one assessment of the trial, Parkes’ letters are critical documents in understanding what the burgeoning women’s movement had at stake in the Codrington divorce. Parkes’ letters indicate that he believed unequivocally that Faithfull lied on the stand about her place in the Codringtons’ marriage. ‘E.F is steeped up to her eyes in the affair,’ the lawyer writes to his daughter, ‘& does not tell truth to those she advised with.’45


Parkes further believed that Emily’s perjury was rooted in her desire to disguise her role in providing a place for Helen Codrington’s adulterous assignation with Colonel Anderson at the Princess Street address of her Victoria Press business.46 Throughout these letters, Parkes is at pains to condemn what he sees as Faithfull’s willingness to put what little self-preservation she could muster ahead of judicial enquiry: ‘she made up her tale to cut the best figure for herself in her painful ambiguous & contradictory relations to both [Admiral and Mrs Codrington].’47 Parkes was equally certain that Helen Codrington was the real source of damage to Faithfull: ‘E.F’s worst plight is being so long the ‘friend’ if not companion of so loose a woman as Mrs C & palpably continuing so late to [herd?] with her.’48 And, since the ‘dirty case will take all the enamel offer [sic] E.F’s reputation & ruin her business,’49 he also insists that a hasty retreat from public life is Faithfull’s only possible response to her public shame. Parkes’ letters also reveal an interest – quiet but stated – in Emily Faithfull’s dress. In the lull following the trial’s first recess when Emily Faithfull was understood to be avoiding a subpoena, he passes on to his daughter Bessie a rumour then making its rounds in the Law Court where he worked: ‘that [Faithfull] is still in London in Male attire. I should doubt the fact, thinking her more probably abroad.’50 Newspaper reports testify to the perception that, whatever the trial by jury determined in the end, there was more to the case of Codrington v. Codrington and Anderson than was making it to the stand. Reynolds’s Newspaper offered an account of ‘The Extraordinary Codrington Case’ that editorialised on the immoral conduct of all involved: This ancient mariner, after a certain period of married life had elapsed, withdrew himself from the nuptial couch, and never, it was alleged, entered it unless his wife was sleeping with a female friend. On such an occasion the ‘fatherly old man,’ under the pretence of poking the fire, and performing other housemaid’s work, quietly walked into his wife’s chamber in his night shirt, and as noiselessly slipt into her bed. Whether this nocturnal visit was paid to Mrs Codrington or her friend, Miss Faithfull, or only for the purpose of keeping both warm by maintaining a good fire, we cannot presume to determine. We much regret that the


name of a young lady who has hitherto been associated with many philanthropic projects should be mixed up in so very nasty and foul a matter. In justice, however, to the admiral and Miss Faithfull, it must be admitted that the jury has virtually whitewashed them by its verdict.’51 The implication of dirt in Reynolds’s white-washing conclusion, and the overall satisfaction with which the paper pokes fun at the Admiral’s ‘nocturnal visit,’ conveys some sense of the sexual excess seen to characterise the Codrington trial. White-washed by the jury verdict or not, Faithfull seemingly did not share the analysis of her situation that Parkes’ conveyed to his daughter, Bessie: ‘most men & nearly all your Sex {women] will give her up as a dangerous woman & of impure mind.’52 Faithfull continued to manage the Victoria Press for three years after the trial, resigning only in 1867, and there is no evidence that any printing contracts with her were cancelled as a result of it. After Codrington, she went on to establish a very successful career as a public speaker on women’s employment, and had particular success in a series of speaking engagements in America. But if Faithfull regrouped her business ventures, her ties to some of her London friends were strained. Unsurprisingly, given her father’s letters, Bessie Rayner Parkes appears to have broken off with her. Emily Davies, the editor of Faithfull’s Victoria Magazine, also stopped seeing her. Writing in an unpublished family chronicle written sometime after 1864, Emily Davies writes that ‘Miss Faithfull was obliged, owing to some references to her in reports of a Divorce case, to withdraw for a time, from society, & I, & others, ceased to be associated with her.’53 Others, like the poet Robert Browning whose own Rome circle included the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, delighted rather like Reynolds in the scurrilous potential of the divorce and seemed completely comfortable with, if not the contents of the sealed packet, then certainly their likely significance. Unlike the Reynolds’s reportage, however, which seems to assert an overall heterosexual narrative, Browning’s delight lies in his apparent knowledge of Emily Faithfull’s ‘perversity,’ a knowledge that he is eager to share, if in a rather obfuscating way. For Browning, it would seem that the divorce scandal could readily take its place alongside existing narra-


tives about Faithfull’s behaviour and identity. Writing to his friend Isa Blagden, Browning reports that one of the counsel in the case told an acquaintance of mine that the ‘sealed letter’ contained a charge I shall be excused from even hinting to you – fear of the explosion of which, caused the shift of Miss E. from one side to the other. As is invariably the case, people’s mouths are opened, and tell you what ‘they knew long ago’ though it seems that did not matter a bit so long as nobody else knew: Mrs [Anne] Proctor, for instance told me of a lie she (E) had invented to interest Adelaide, about as pretty a specimen as I ever heard, though familiar with such sportings of the fancy. After all, folks are safe enough in the main – if you know a thing, and fear to be the first in telling it, all’s one as if you were ignorant: you won’t say – ‘I’ll have nothing to do with him or her, I know why & won’t tell’ – because friends smile and reply ‘Really, you can’t expect that, without a definite charge being made, I am to avoid the person you please to dislike’ – that is – ‘I contest your superior experience, and disbelieve in your acuteness, & suppose you to be prejudiced somehow besides’: then one day comes a howl & a wondering at this wicked world.54 Vicinus reads this letter as confirmation of Sedgwick’s argument about the openness of the gay closet, suggesting that Browning’s ‘equivocation acknowledges without stating the sexual nature of Emily’s relationship with Helen’ (93). I want to return to Sedgwick’s argument about the relationship between ‘knowing’ and ‘telling’ later. Each of these documents – private letters, family histories, press reportage – indicate in differing, often contradictory, ways that Faithfull’s involvement with Helen Codrington could not be adequately explained by that narrative of celibacy – of women’s intimate relations with each other – lauded just three years earlier in Cobbe’s ‘What Shall we Do with Our Old Maids?’ and reiterated with Essays on the Pursuits of Women. Whatever happened in Helen Codrington’s bedroom – two young women sharing a bed as comfort against one’s bleak marriage; a consensual heterosexual threesome; a husband’s rape of his wife’s intimate friend; lesbian sex between long-time friends – the cover story of women’s friendship that Cobbe praises did not account for it. The stories that the press


told, and Emily Faithfull’s contemporaries carefully took apart, burst the constraints of that narrative. Martha Vicinus suggests that the Codrington divorce trial dealt in the familiar enough tale of marital estrangement and adultery, but also introduced to the public ‘a new text: the mannish woman, the tyrant husband, and the married woman who claimed her own independent sexual subjectivity, in relationship with both women and men.’55 What strikes me about this new tale is the difficulty of its telling. Joseph Parkes’ letters, the Reynolds’s editorial, Emily Davies’ circumspect account of her departure from Victoria magazine, Browning’s tale of the ‘charge’ that will explode if told – these accounts and the silences they register speak as much about what cannot be named, though it is known, as they do about what can be offered for public or private consideration. That the ‘what’ each account ‘knows’ may not be commensurate with the others in no way lessens the connections in the rhythm, the structure, of knowing and telling across these accounts. In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick argues that ‘’Closetedness’ itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence – not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it. The speech acts that coming out, in turn, can comprise are as strangely specific. And they may have nothing to do with the acquisition of new information.’56 We can connect Sedgwick’s analysis of the closet with Vicinus’ ‘new tale’ of the mannish woman by attending to the discourse, or cultural flow, surrounding the Codrington trial. To turn Vicinus’ analysis of the Codrington affair slightly on its head, it is not so much that the trial introduced a ‘new tale’ to a public; but that the trial – as an institutional procedure – brought that new tale forcibly into a new arena, the recently constituted Divorce Court, charged with adjudicating, defining and purging acceptable heterosexual marriage. In other words, the relations between Helen and Emily are not a new text at all, but gain their threatening power when they are played out on a new stage, specifically one charged with overseeing the institution of heterosexual marriage. It is this careful balancing between texts and the differing communities that take them up that the Codrington trial upsets. In her 1862 essays and the 1863 collection, Cobbe could offer women’s celibacy as an empowering narrative for middle-class women, seemingly able to


separate the threat to courtship and marriage that such celibacy intrinsically entails. After Codrington, the balancing is impossible to sustain, at least for a time. In the silence before the Codrington divorce trial, Cobbe depicts a celibacy that brings women together as a viable retort to concerns about women’s social place and the pressure on them to marry. In effect, Cobbe’s celibacy can be publicly celebrated precisely because the domesticity in which she locates it muffles its other, less readily articulated, meanings. Once that silence is broken with the Codrington divorce, however, celibacy circulates as a much more dangerous idea – at least for a time. Vicinus suggests that ‘[h]omosocial, and homosexual relations, were most accepted among bourgeois women if they remained unmarried and within their all-female communities; they were most threatening if they disrupted hetereosexual norms of courtship and marriage.’57 In other words, celibacy is acceptable as a retort to emigration and the pressures of marriages not yet contracted. But a celibacy implicated as a cause in a scandalous divorce case, and revealed as actively desiring, deals a direct blow to Cobbe’s depiction of single women energetically claiming community with other women. In suggesting that the Codrington divorce substantially restructures Cobbe’s feminist signature in the press, I am not claiming the Codrington case as an especially notable or egregious moment in the history of silencing lesbian identity. As Sedgwick argues, the silence of the closet ‘accrues particularity by fits and starts.’58 The Codrington trial, and the retraction of Cobbe’s feminist signature that follows it, is simply another moment in which the deep silence surrounding lesbian identity gains additional depth and murkiness. But it is also a silence that we can measure, plumb, and describe. In the first instance, Faithfull’s self-presentation in the divorce proceedings as an innocent, inexperienced and trusting young woman – the victim of Joseph Parkes’ ‘loose’ woman – seems to have netted her some benefits. Her ability to retain her printing business and the launching of her career as a public speaker can, perhaps, be understood as made possible by a reading of her involvement in the Codrington affair as that of a naive young woman, a reading that does not risk celebrating celibacy but instead silences lesbian identity. But this narrative has its limits, which we can trace in the retreat from Faithfull by women like Davies and Parkes, and by the quiet expiration of professional relations with her by women like Frances Power Cobbe.


The extraordinary impact of the Codrington trial on the world of feminist journalism is also something we can fathom. Barbara Leckie’s work on divorce court journalism establishes the very real scandal associated with the Divorce Court and its reportage, and allows us to read Davies, Parkes, and Cobbe’s retreat from Faithfull as a reasonable response, if a response that necessarily deepens the silence surrounding celibacy. The Codrington case is an early example of the high visibility case that becomes so common in the period. As Leckie documents, the sheer production of material related to divorces gives us just one measure of how conspicuous divorces could be, and so the dangers for those associated with the Divorce Court’s sordid revelations. Ballads, pamphlets, moral tracts, newspaper trials bound in volumes with pen-and-ink illustrations, portraits of key players, short stories, parodies, as well as the Divorce Court Reporter itself – connection with divorce in any form, whether as defendant, co-respondent, witness or associate, generated the risk of exposure. In 1862, Cobbe’s bold journalism sought to engage feminism’s opponents on their own turf, even turning the legal terminology of the divorce action to her own account in ‘Celibacy v. Marriage.’ That same journalist is also masterfully attuned to the damaging effects that the publicity surrounding the Codrington divorce trial proceedings in 1864 can have on all associated with it, especially for one whose work lauded the women’s friendships at the centre of the trial. Judith Johnston and Hilary Fraser suggest that professional women writers were constantly managing the ‘ideological prescriptions that constructed women as passive, self-sacrificing, domestic goddesses who inhabited the private sphere rather than the noisy world of public debate.’59 In her first writings in the established press on women, Cobbe established a press signature through attention to a topic that was seen to erode gender ideals: celibacy. When Cobbe returns to the question of women’s contribution to society after Codrington, she does so through a focus on marriage as a contract and, compellingly, divorce itself. As we shall see, from 1868 onwards, Cobbe made a concerted effort to use the sensation or scandal of divorce to make very specific cases for women’s employment and educational opportunities. Though the overall message remains consistent, Cobbe’s attention is refocused on women’s relations to men – not with each other – and the need for those relations to be predicated on the fullest range of choices for women.

3 The ‘force’ of sentiment: Married Women’s Property and the ideal of marriage in Fraser’s Magazine

After the publication of her series on women’s pursuits in Fraser’s Magazine, Cobbe turned to other matters in her extensive writing for the periodical press. She wrote fourteen more pieces for Fraser’s between 1863 and 1868 – some of them on travel, others on social questions ranging from the poor laws to our duties to animals. She also began her long association with the Theological Review, for which she wrote twenty-one titles between 1864 and 1877 on topics such as women’s work in the church and Darwin. Cobbe’s seeming silence on heterosexual celibacy after 1862 can be read in many ways, one of which is as a journalist’s response to the potential for damage that the scandalous visibility of the Codrington divorce case inflicted on all associated with it in 1864. The writing silence on identifiably feminist questions between 1863 and 1868 did not mean, however, that Cobbe’s commitment to feminist causes had permanently waned.1 In the same month that she began working for the new daily London newspaper, the Echo, she also turned her pen specifically to feminist concerns with the publication of ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors’ in the December 1868 issue of Fraser’s Magazine, the site of her series on women’s pursuits six years earlier. The year 1868 saw the Victorian feminist community gathering with a freshness and new focus, despite the failure of their attempts to revise the 1867 Reform Act, which enfranchised more men by amending the property qualification. Though Mill’s motion to amend the Reform Act had not passed, reception of his speech and the vote itself was received with a small measure of pleasure by 61


feminist campaigners. Certainly, in the months immediately following passage of the Reform Act and in the lead up to the 1868 election, Victorian feminism moved quickly into new avenues of activity, with the Act itself seen as constituting, in Jane Rendall’s words, ‘a new point of departure and a different set of possibilities for the future.’2 Amongst those possibilities was the establishment of the new National Society for Women’s Suffrage and the revision of the electoral register, deemed newly important by the complexity of the Reform Act. The election of 1868 also called feminist campaigners into action. In March 1867, during debate of the proposed Act, Emily Davies had noticed the political possibilities inherent in the discrepancies between Romilly’s Act of 1850 (under which the term ‘man’ automatically included women unless explicitly stated otherwise) and the proposed wording of the new Reform Act, which used the term ‘man’ throughout except in its educational clauses.3 Spearheading the identification of qualified women voters after passage of the act, Becker succeeded in identifying thousands of qualified women. In Manchester alone, nearly 6000 women were identified as qualified voters under the new Reform Act.4 But the 1868 election held out other possibilities. The new rating regulations of the Reform Act, which had abolished the compounding of rates, were shown to place added financial strain on poorer householders. Lydia Becker thought this would invigorate feminist arguments for ‘no taxation without representation.’ Most importantly, the election period itself offered the chance to make the electorate consider women’s questions. If, as Rendall indicates, the central focus of the 1868 election was the Irish church, feminists nonetheless grabbed the opportunity to highlight women’s education, the laws affecting married women, and the enfranchisement of women or ‘the greatest question brought before the public for many years’5 as the real political questions of the moment. And that is precisely what they did. Feminists ratcheted up their use of that most traditional of political tactics, the petition to Parliament, before and after the election. Between late 1868 and early 1869, for example, the women’s suffrage societies presented 257 petitions signed by 62,000 people. Reading the many articles, chapters, and books on the fight for women’s suffrage in the aftermath of the 1868 election reminds us

The ‘force’ of sentiment 63

that the policies, strategies and decisions taken were as insistently local and opportunistic as they were founded on broader philosophical ideals. Feminists moved to take advantage of political opportunities as they presented themselves, whilst striving to create political opportunity wherever they could. When in May 1869, in the newly constituted House of Commons, Jacob Bright moved to amend the Municipal Corporations Act for England and Wales so that ‘wherever words occur which import the masculine gender, the same shall be held to include females for all purposes connected with and having reference to the election of or power to elect representatives of any municipal corporation,’6 he did so in response to the failure of the Reform Act of 1867 to be similarly revised. In the months following the passage of the Reform Act, as we have seen, mid-Victorian feminists and their supporters scrutinised their opportunities to press for the vote and prepare the ground for further pressing. If one part of the campaign required more fundraising, lecture tours, and the slow careful grooming of public opinion, another part could move to gain ground more immediately. Bright had pointed to the newness of the exclusion of women in the municipal franchise, arguing that his amendment returned the law to its earlier spirit. His amendment passed with little discussion, and was seen at the time to presage a changing tide of opinion in the House of Commons. Such hopes were premature, yet Bright’s successful amendment – and all of the feminist activity in the post-1868 election period that historians like Rendall have examined – shows us the importance of ‘the moment’ in our reading of feminisms’ styles, decisions, policies, the status and the strategies of writing as feminist activity. Published in December 1868 as part of the campaign to reform married women’s property law, Cobbe’s essay appears during the height of feminist anticipation and expectation for social change that flowed post-1867. This chapter explores the ways in which ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors’ circulates as feminist pamphleteering, as feminist writing in a period of heightened feminist activity. Though we can readily link it to the broad mandate of the Married Women’s property law reform committee, which Cobbe joined in 1871, ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors’ offers us an opportunity to understand the differences between ‘pressure group’ writing (or writing for a specific political cause) and the kind of political writing that Cobbe publishes in the established press.7 Offering first a


brief overview of the Married Women’s Property Law agitation, this chapter also examines the contribution that Cobbe’s vision of heterosexual celibacy – the ‘true and tender’ friendships between women she had celebrated in her earliest writing for the established press – makes to feminist arguments for change to marriage law. Work on married women’s property law reform, part of the renewed feminist focus following the 1867 Reform Act, had its origins in the 1850s effort to reform divorce law. In the space between the 1850 Royal Commission and the 1856 Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Divorce and Matrimonal Causes Bill, an alliance of feminist-minded men and women also agitated to reform property laws pertaining to married women (or feme coverte). Under nineteenth-century marriage law, a married woman’s legal identity becomes subsumed under that of her husband. They were ‘one person’ under law. She could not enter into contracts, sue or be sued, or make a valid will, without her husband’s consent. Her husband also took possession of all of her personal property, such as wages or rent earnings (including those from before her marriage), and had custody of their children.8 In its first form, the Married Women’s Property Committee was headed by Barbara Leigh Smith and Bessie Rayner Parkes, and included Mary Howitt and her daughter Anna Mary Howitt, Eliza Fox, Anna Jameson, and Elizabeth Sturch Reid. Working alongside the committee, Lord Brougham, Matthew Davenport Hill and Thomas Erskine Perry were reform-minded men supportive of feminist causes with the political experience and connections required to make reform possible. This first committee campaigned widely for reform, publicising the cases of married women hampered and harmed by current property law in public meetings, and publishing essays. It also collected signatures for a petition to Parliament, successfully gathering over 26,000 signatures in 70 petitions across the country. Women signing included the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, Radical thinker and writer Harriet Martineau, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the actress Charlotte Cushman, and Jane Carlyle. The petition was presented to Parliament by Erskine Perry on 14 March 1856. The work of this group, however, was effectively derailed by the passage of the Divorce Act in 1857. By making divorce easier to obtain, though still unfairly available to women, the Divorce Act took the sting out of feminist arguments for married women’s need


to control their own property. That Act’s limited provisions for separated wives (alimony for non-adulterous women) and deserted wives (feme sole control over property) were sufficient seriously to hamper the work of feminists seeking more extensive change to married women’s property law. At a time when parliamentary appetite for reform was near sated, the continued pressing for marriage property law reform risked incurring the criticism that feminists wanted to overthrow marriage itself. The 1857 Divorce Act was seen by many to have ‘taken care of’ the problem of abandoned and abused wives, the only married women about whom there was any consensus. The question remained how to press for reform of marriage property law without being seen to attack marriage as a whole. The second peak in married women’s property law agitation was 1868, fully eleven years after the passage of the Divorce Act. Its resurgence was part of a unified drive for legislative change post-1867 Reform. In April 1868, a second Married Women’s Property Committee was established, formed by women involved in the promotion of higher education for women and in the new Manchester Women’s Suffrage Society (formed in 1867). Negotiations over this new committee’s constitution and methods of action focused on ways in which to organise feminist activity in the post-Reform period, particularly how to solicit the sympathy of those who might find the suffrage movement too radical. Lydia Becker, for example, a member of the Manchester suffrage society, suggested that meetings not combine discussion of both suffrage and married women’s property issues, but should be organised so that supporters could arrive or depart for different sessions.9 Her suggestion gives us some sense of the tact with which Victorian feminists sought support in a political climate that could prove to be unpredictable or hostile to their work, depending upon the ways in which a reform campaign was introduced or to which other political goals it was wedded. In a period when suffrage – manhood and universal – was hotly debated, calls for other changes were linked to it with care. Becker’s strategic planning also reminds us that the feminist community, like any other political community, was a diverse constituency that embraced a wide range of issues. Consensus – on issues, links with other political groups, directions for action – was carefully nurtured. Pitching reforms to such a diverse community required planning and management of any number of possible responses.


In its work, the Married Women’s Property Committee organised petitions, lobbied parliament, drafted legislation, published pamphlets, and issued annual reports, remaining in existence for fourteen years until passage of the 1882 Act, the second of three Married Women’s Property acts (1870; 1882; 1893) passed by the British parliament. The first act, passed in 1870, offered only partial redress for married women. It protected a married woman’s earnings after marriage, certain monies invested in specific ways, and any legacies under £200 that she might inherit. The 1882 Act gave a married woman possession of all her property, before and after marriage, which was held as her ‘separate estate,’ though it retained other elements of coverture, including refusing married women the right to legal residence separate from her husband. The 1893 Act tidied up loopholes left open even after the 1882 amendments, ensuring that every contract entered into by a married woman (unless acting as an agent for her husband) bound her separate property whether or not she possessed it at the time of the contract.10 The high stakes of Victorian feminism in marriage meant that mid-century feminists elaborated a complex tangle of strategies for its transformation. Where late nineteenth-century feminism asserted the failure of marriage as an institution in established and specialist press alike, mid-Victorian feminists aimed to transform marital practice, in their own lives and those of others.11 As Philippa Levine remarks, ‘One of the most remarkable features of Victorian feminism was its concerted attempt to remould rather than reject marital practice whilst at the same time not annul the worth of the single woman’.12 In her work on late nineteenth-century feminism, Lucy Bland has identified three key feminist tactics for transforming marriage.13 The legislative tactic focused on rewriting coverture law, including married women’s property, divorce reform after 1857, and women’s bodily rights (domestic violence and, later, protection from marital rape). The protective and educative tactic aimed to change marital practice through sex education. The utopian or imaginative tactic promoted the formation of ideal relationships between men and women. Though Bland links these tactics to late Victorian feminist activity, they also describe much mid-century feminist activity. Writing as a heterosexually celibate woman, known for her celebration of heterosexually celibate friendships between women in Fraser’s Magazine, Cobbe promotes both a


legislative and an imaginative change in marriage by highlighting property-based conceptions of marriage and critiquing the relations between men and women. Despite the centrality of reformed marriage as a mid-Victorian feminist practice, however, Cobbe’s tactics in ‘Criminals’ as she promotes legislative change reminds us that core definitions – of ‘women,’ of ‘emancipation,’ and of ‘feminism’, are at stake in the Married Women’s Property law agitation – as they are throughout this late 1860s period of intense feminist activity. If traditional political tactics, such as petitioning and memorialising government, served key purposes in 1860s feminist organising, those tactics also raised specific strategic problems and political choices. In her analysis of the ways in which late nineteenth-century suffrage and antisuffrage spokespeople evoked the category of ‘women’ in their arguments, Denise Riley observes that the ‘drive towards political representation exposes the fluctuation of ‘women,’ philosophically as well as strategically’14. Her analysis reminds us that part of what is at stake in the feminist calls for property law reform post-1867, in which ‘Criminals’ participates, is the definition of ‘women’ itself. In ‘Criminals,’ as we shall see, Cobbe evokes the working-class woman needing unhampered control of her earnings who was at the very core of Parliamentary and much feminist debate over married women’s property law as well as the middle-class woman who wants control over her property as the first step to political rights. Each circulates distinctively, and at times, in competition with each other. These figures of womanhood make an appearance in Cobbe’s argument, but centre-stage in this essay is the woman who reaches the age of majority, who claims autonomy on that account, and who values reciprocity in relationships. Frances Power Cobbe was a member of the second Married Women’s Property committee from 1871 to 1874, joining after the passage in 1870 of the first Married Women’s Property Law with its disappointingly limited provisions. The Married Women’s Property Committee was one of many such committees dedicated to specific campaigns that Cobbe was to join and for which she would give speeches and write pamphlets, including the National Society for Women’s Suffrage. Published in December 1868, Cobbe’s ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors’ is part of this second campaign to reform Married Women’s property law, appearing alongside articles by other


members of the committee such as John Boyd Kinnear’s ‘The Marriage Laws of England and Scotland’ and Alfred Dawes’ ‘The Injustice of the English Law as It Bears on the Relationship of the Husband and Wife,’ both published in the Contemporary Review in the same year.15 Kinnear, who had been a witness to the Royal Commission on Marriage Law, focuses on the legal and administrative difficulties of current English marriage law, and looks to Scottish law for some of his solutions. His piece on some of the absurdities of current marriage law reminds us that the first reform of marriage law, the 1857 Divorce Act, had its roots in Parliament’s desire to streamline judicial procedures. In a rather more stiffly written piece, Dawes expounds upon married women’s property, ending with a short look at the particular injustices of the Divorce Act and its unequal access to divorce proper for men and women. ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors’ is the first writing for legislative change that Cobbe publishes in the established press. Her earlier pieces in Fraser’s Magazine on redundant women, celibacy and marriage, and women’s education, offer highly politicised arguments about women’s pursuits and opportunities, as we have seen. This piece, however, so strongly identified with the activities of the Married Women’s Property Committee, marks her first entry into active political campaigning in the established press.16 In many ways, then, ‘Criminals’ is almost pure propaganda, decisive writing with a distinctively political goal in mind. The strong tie to a wellresearched legislative debate has meant that Cobbe’s essay has a prominence in feminist scholarship not always accorded to her other writings.17 It has also meant that ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors’ can be read simply as a straightforward contribution to the Married Women’s Property law debates, a text to turn to should a clear statement of feminist demand for change in this law be required. It is ‘pressure group’ writing, a term Brian Harrison employs to mark the distinctiveness of writing for an express political purpose. The idea of pressure group writing has proven enormously fertile for feminist scholarship on nineteenth-century women’s political activities. Writing more than twenty years ago, Brian Harrison suggests that the nineteenth-century pressure group periodical, or specialist press, needed systematic exploration. Since that time, feminist periodicals such as Votes for Women, English Woman’s


Journal (1858–64), Englishwoman’s Review (1866–1910), Women’s Suffrage Journal (1870–90), and Time and Tide, have become more and more a part of the way in which we understand the world of nineteenth-century feminisms. But feminist writing outside of the specialist press awaits the fuller consideration that Harrison calls for, and his influential essay, ‘Press and Pressure Group in Modern Britain,’ offers critical tools for analysis. Of particular interest here, is Harrison’s call to consider audience when assessing pressure group writing. His piece lays out the broad relations between press and pressure groups in Britain since 1780 by, first, looking at the ways in which pressure groups understood and attempted to influence the non-specialist press, and, second, by considering the specialist press as supplement and counteract to the established, or non-specialist, press. Taking feminism as a point of departure, Harrison argues that tracts, posters, advertisements, processions and open-air meetings are aimed at the unconverted, whereas pressure-group periodicals, annual reports of committees, and the branch and annual meetings of committees are aimed at the initiated.18 These distinctions are drawn, of course, primarily from suffrage politics from about 1880 on, and the implied division between forms aimed at initiated and those at unconverted readers does not map easily onto the range of feminist activities in the late 1860s when many of these forms of agitation remained untested by feminists. More importantly, Harrison’s terms cannot register the complex, often contradictory, evocation of ‘women’ in political writing that Riley argues is central. When the category of ‘women’ is itself unstable and, moreover, when the specific goals of feminist activity (suffrage, marriage reform) are understood as potentially at odds with each other, the definition of ‘converted’ and ‘unconverted’ readers is a highly intricate undertaking. Converted to what? The vote? Property reform? The vote for which women? All of them? Property owners? Those who are married or those who are single? Nonetheless, Harrison’s work reminds us of the crucial distinctiveness of such writing in the specialist press. In the mid-Victorian feminist movement, pressure group periodicals include titles, such as the English Woman’s Journal and Becker’s Women’s Suffrage Journal that were produced, disseminated and supported by feminist activists. Feminist writing in the established or non-specialist press is a rather different affair in 1868, however, when the Englishwoman’s Review is


the only specialist feminist title in existence, and here the need for further adjustment of Harrison’s terms is necessary. The open-air meetings and large processions that characterise suffragette activity are very much in English feminism’s future. Harrison’s reminder about the importance of ‘audience’ in understanding political writing, however, retains its value. He notes ‘the immense importance [reformers] attached to the influence of the non-specialist press; the great trouble they took to mould its outlook’19 since only through the established press could reformers speak to those who were unable or uninterested in attending reform gatherings. Neither a ‘tract’ circulating to the uninitiated under the contentious signature of a pressuregroup organisation nor a partisan article aimed at the pressure-group itself, ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors’ circulates widely to converted and unconverted audiences simultaneously, aiming to bring its topic into wider consideration and to steer readers towards a particular interpretation. It is clearly invested writing, but its location in the non-specialist press and the doubleness of its audience confer the legitimacy of reasoned debate, not the contested legitimacy of a partisan cause. If, then, as Harrison writes, ‘[t]he pressure group periodical experienced a tension between the need to hearten the activist and the need to enlighten the unconverted,’20 it is perhaps even more the case for a feminist writer like Cobbe working in the established press in the period immediately after the 1867 Reform Act and the 1868 election, a period of high flux, of potential and possibility for feminism. Her 1868 piece must both enlighten and hearten disparate readers in a space that is not expressly identified with the cause in question, and at a time when the various avenues for feminist activity are just beginning to undergo radical redefinition. Harrison’s important distinctions between forms and audiences, then, generate critical questions for feminist writing in the 1860s as long as their historical specificity is adjusted to consider the status of mid-century feminist writing that espouses political change but does so in the established press without the authenticating banner of a pressure group periodical signature. If ‘Criminals’ purports to make the case for reform of married women’s property law, its articulation in the progressive, but non-specialist, Fraser’s Magazine means that it perches somewhat uncomfortably on the threshold between pressure group writing for the initiated, and writing aimed at the uncon-


verted – who themselves range from those who support the cause of reform (and perhaps pick up a pressure group title) but do not embrace the entirety of feminist thinking on marriage or are worried about women’s claims for suffrage, through to those who are entirely antagonistic. In particular, that range of audience tells us that the divide between unconverted and initiated audiences quickly sketched by Harrison is much more complex – in effect less of an absolute divide – than it initially seems. The division of labour – and the division of writing forms – that Harrison sees operating in late Victorian feminism is much less robust, certainly much more modest in its effects, in mid-Victorian feminism, than the later explosion of Edwardian feminist titles might make it appear. Writing in this threshold space in 1868, Cobbe’s ‘Criminals’ is not pressure-group writing as Harrison defines it. Yet it must also aim, at least in part, to be ‘inspirational, informative, and integrating’.21 Some of the tensions that I write about below in ‘Criminals’ are measures of the complex of readership and purpose that midVictorian feminist writing faces in the established press. Cobbe writes to convey the energy and confidence of the feminist movement and its understanding of marriage – an inspirational dissemination to the converted – whilst also responding to the tactics of those who oppose change or require different methods of persuasion. Arguing the case for married women’s property law reform in the established press, Cobbe’s ‘Criminals’ offers the chance to explore feminist tactics, the careful negotiation of audience, during a key political time when specialist feminist titles were thin on the ground. Cobbe’s article, then, offers an opportunity to explore the specific evocations of ‘women’ in married women’s property agitation, to track the strategies of feminist organising, and to do so in relation to writing for a multiple audience in which the very definition of ‘which women?’ is precisely what is up for debate. Cobbe begins her article with an allegory: a visitor of unspecified sex from another planet witnesses an English marriage ceremony in a village church. Through a series of questions and answers, the visitor learns that English women devote themselves almost exclusively to preparation for marriage, whereas men ‘very rarely included any preparation for the married state’22 in their education; that the marriage vow at the centre of the ceremony, ‘With all my worldly goods I thee endow’ (109), is not reciprocal but works to the


severe detriment of the woman; and that ‘women who lead a dissolute life, to the moral injury of the community’ (109) do not pay the severe penalties married women do, but instead own ‘[w]hatever they earn or inherit … are able, also, to sue the fathers of their children for their maintenance, which a wife, of course, is not allowed to do on behalf of her little ones, because she and her husband are one in the eye of the law’ (109). The visitor learns, further, that only the most heinous crimes require those convicted to forfeit their property, leaving the visitor to ask: Pardon me; I must seem to you so stupid! Why is the property of the woman who commits Murder, and the property of the woman who commits Matrimony, dealt with alike by your law? (109) The Fraser’s Magazine reader familiar with Cobbe’s earlier writing on celibacy and women’s pursuits will recognise a few signature moves in the article’s opening setup. Having laid out the subject of her article so succinctly in the allegory, Cobbe sharpens her pen to focus on one question: ‘When has a human being fairly passed out of the stage of pupilage and attained his majority?’ (110). In order to get this vital question answered, she is prepared to create points of accord for the larger purpose of moving debate forward. ‘[W]e must all admit,’ she suggests, that ‘the just and expedient treatment of women by men is one of the most obscure problems, alike of equity and policy’ (109). Similarly, ‘Let us admit (if it be desired) that the pupilage in which women have been hitherto kept has been often inevitable, and sometimes salutary’ (110). There is no room for the ‘acrimony which too often creeps into arguments on this subject [and] is every way needless and mischievous’ (110). It is, then, Cobbe’s declared interest to control the question to be answered, to mark off an area for discussion by all without digression into fields of inquiry that add nothing to the immediate discussion. Her audience, unconverted and initiated, is carefully and decisively tutored in the process of debate, the minimal requirements for the civil exchange of perspectives on and solutions to a knotty, divisive issue. Accordingly, the intent debater and attentive reader of this piece must avoid ‘angry feeling and aimless discussion’ (110) by keeping firmly in view the one question Cobbe carefully poses:


‘Ought Englishwomen of full age, at the present state of affairs, to be considered as having legally attained majority? Or ought they permanently to be considered, for all civil and political purposes, as minors?’ 110). Importantly, it is the position of the married woman under the Common Law which most readily presents itself as a case study for the larger question, that position representing ‘the most striking instance wherein the existing principle presses upon women, and where its injustice appears most distinctly’ (110). Married women’s property law reform is thus adroitly repositioned as a specific instance of a larger philosophical question that itself is swiftly hived off from the tumultuous topic of marriage proper. The move is critically important when divorce is seen to have taken care of the most egregious abuses of marriage law. The ensuing discussion of the question of the married woman under Common Law is broadly divided into two parts: firstly, an explanation of the Common Law affecting married women as its supporters currently understand its operation, and, secondly, a critique of both this explanation and the Common Law as feminists perceive it. Cobbe lays out what she sees as the grounds of the current Common Law offered by those who support it. They are justice, expedience and sentiment. Cobbe briskly summarises the non-feminist position. Supporters of the Common Law point to its ‘natural justice,’ which awards control of a wife’s earnings and property to her husband as ‘fair return’ (112) for his labour to support them. Cobbe uses an analogy with the workhouse to illustrate this argument from ‘justice’: ‘The woman’s case is that of a pauper who enters a workhouse. The ratepayers are bound to support him; but if he have any savings they must be given up to the board. He cannot both claim support and keep independent property’ (112). The non-feminist supporter of the Common Law also argues from expediency, asking ‘How can two walk together except one of them have it all his own way? … If somebody is to rule it can only be the husband, who is wiser, stronger, knows more of the world, and in any case has not the slightest intention of yielding his natural predominance’ (112). The final argument in favour of the Common Law is based on sentiment. It urges ‘the beautiful ideal of absolute union of heart, life, and purse which the law has provided for, and which alone it deigns to recognise’ (112–13).


Thus stands the supporter’s argument for the Common Law. Cobbe is quick to ‘admit heartily that there is much sense in these arguments of justice and expediency, and much beauty in this ideal of absolute union of interests’ (113). Her tone here is soothingly conciliatory, conveying respect for those who support the status quo. ‘[W]e remember,’ she writes, ‘the thousands of husbands and fathers who thus labour all their lives long for their wives and children’ (113); she agrees that ‘[i]n the large sense and the common run of life, men are wonderfully unselfish towards women’ (113). Cobbe takes some time to commiserate with the supporters of the Common Law and their views of women. ‘How ignorant are most women in money concerns!,’ she exclaims, ‘How painful is the notion of a wife holding back her money from him who is every day toiling for her support!’ (114). The line between conciliation and critique, however, is a fine one. This section of her article continues to swell in evident agreement with the supporters’ vision of conjugal life, ending with yet another little allegory of marriage in a humble cottage, in which the day-to-day life of a young married couple is detailed. He goes out to labour; her ‘deft fingers’ repair their clothing; little children gather around them; and ‘they grow old in unbroken peace and love, the man’s will having never once been disputed, the wife yielding alike from choice and from necessity to his superior sense and his legal authority’ (114). The upwelling panegyric ends with a question Cobbe dares her readers to answer: ‘Who will suggest anything better in its room?’ (114). Of course, Cobbe dares to answer her own question, and the remaining two-thirds of her paper spells out her response. And, for all the initial agreement with the supporters of the Common Law’s vision of marriage, designed it would seem to prove that she will not be mischievously acrimonious in her approach to debate, Cobbe’s answer to her question is resounding. She has a much better vision of the grounding of married life to offer, one founded on a reformed law’s recognition of a married woman’s majority and right to her own money and so to self-governance. Moreover, the core of Cobbe’s rejoinder is based on her critique of a socially sanctioned and produced sense of the (sexual) property men have in women, not on Equity law issues. The first element of Cobbe’s retort to the image of wedded bliss in a humble cottage requires that she revisit the terms of support for


the Common Law: justice, expedience and sentiment. Upon reexamination, these points reveal themselves to be vulnerable to scrutiny. If it is ‘just’ that a wife gives up her property, receiving ‘ample quid pro quo’ (115) in the form of her husband’s support and protection, the required follow-up question is simple: ‘Does she get it under the existing law?’ (115). Cobbe’s willingness to entertain the terms of her non-feminist opponents’ arguments, the terms of the unconverted, and to treat such starting points as having logical consequences that can be traced through to conclusions, means that she does not ever simply overpower the opposition. She allows it to be cut away by its own terms. A kind of no-nonsense sleight-of-hand is her preferred mode, not a rough and ready attack. Consequently, Cobbe makes her point by insisting on yet another analogy that could be reasonably expected to appeal to the progressive reader of Fraser’s Magazine. ‘Let us suppose the managers of a public institution to engage with a contractor,’ she writes, ‘to pay him 1,000£ on the nail for the supply of the institution with provisions for a year. At the end of a month the contractor has spent the 1,000£ on his own devices and is bankrupt. The institution starves accordingly. What, in such a case, do we think of the managers who gave the 1,000£, without security for the fulfilment of the contract, and what do we think of the contractor?’ (115). The answer is obvious: we think the managers bumblers and incompetents. It is a mere extension of this conclusion – the opposition’s own terms – to make clear the argument that married women’s property law needs reform. As Cobbe summarises, The legal act by which a man puts his hand in his wife’s pocket, or draws her money out of the savings’ bank, is perfectly clear, easy, inexpensive. The corresponding process by which the wife can obtain food and clothing from her husband when he neglects to provide it – what may it be? Where is it described? (115) The sleight-of-hand here lies not in the conclusions to be drawn when married women’s property is considered as other property under law, which are self-evident, but that it is so considered. Cobbe’s analogy between marriage and public institutions is of great interest here since it distinguishes ‘Criminals’ from other


writing on married women’s property. Lee Holcombe has shown that press publications from those arguing for property law reform tended to focus on the everyday problems that unreformed laws created for married women, particularly poor married women.23 Like the reformers in the 1850s, the second wave of married women’s property law reformers in the 1860s also emphasised the pragmatic benefits of amendment so clear to them from the workings of a ten-year old divorce law, specifically working-class women’s need to control their own earnings. The emphasis on pragmatics was in many ways itself pragmatic when we recall that the taste for reform on this issue was slight. Where Victorian feminists saw married women’s property law reform as a ‘woman’s question’ in its essence, other supporters were extremely reluctant to contemplate the reform in this light. Adapting to this reluctance was strategic. Supporting reform of marriage law, for example, the Times is at pains to point out that arguments based on ideas of equality were unacceptable and would not yield the required reform: ‘theories now afloat respecting the equality of the sexes and the independence of women have not yet received the sanction, even if they have received the consideration of the English people’; but reform of a law that pressed ‘with peculiar severity upon the poorer classes of the community’ (31 July 1869, 9) was to be applauded. The Times is staunchly against women’s suffrage at this time, and would remain so through to 1916. Its separation of marriage law reform from questions of women’s equality can be anticipated. But, the argument that current marriage law was class biased, not sex biased, would also be essential to the House of Commons debates, where more abstract appeals to equality and rights also played little part.24 Cobbe’s reliance on analogies, rather than real life stories, runs against the general trend Holcombe identifies, and points to her determination to show that women are figures of public policy, endlessly discussed yet denied basic rights under the law. It also points to the particular character of the mixed audience she addresses. Her aim throughout ‘Criminals’ is to appeal to logic, not emotion, and so to make married women’s property law a matter for logical analysis and solution. And here the pragmatic presentation of married women’s property law as legislative reform for the working classes poses logical difficulties. Where stories about personal hardships


might yield personal redresses, larger analogies point to illogicalities that can be corrected. Analogies with the workhouse and other public institutions are part of her effort to present marriage as a relationship of contract, like many others, one which requires forms of legal redress should it sour or go awry, not an exceptional union deserving exceptional treatment under the law. Part of Cobbe’s strategy here – like feminist strategy generally in Married Women’s property law agitation – is to point to the real hardships that extraordinary legal status garners married women, but to do so without reliance on individual cases. Under England’s Poor Law, that same public institution that so mishandled its finances in her analogy is not obliged to admit abandoned wives if the technicalities of marriage law are observed, even when women are starved as a consequence. In addition to these analogies, Cobbe’s piece briefly records three real stories, with sources acknowledged in notes, and refers readers to the report of the Special Report of the Parliamentary Committee on Married Women’s Property Bill for more illustrations. The effect of such analogies in this space, then, is multiple. Choosing not to emphasise individual stories, Cobbe averts the possibility of a ‘piecemeal’ solution to a systemic problem that non-feminist readers might move quickly to support, even as the effect of the analogies aligns the systematic solution to marriage property law with ‘other’ reforms (of workhouse management, for example) embraced by progressive Fraser’s Magazine readers. To feminist-identified readers, these analogies hold out the promise of the very systematic reform of marriage law that many support even though wary of accusations of marriage-baiting. Next in her argument, expediency makes the husband of England’s Common Law a ‘lawful tyrant’ (117), able to control the budget of his household whether he be wise and good or ‘a fool, a gambler, [and] a drunkard’ (117). Again, Cobbe points to the extraordinary status of husbands under the law: It is continually repeated in this connection only that laws cannot take note of exceptional cases; they must be laid down to suit the majority, and the minority must do as best they can… . The greater number of people are honest, and neither steal their neighbours’ goods nor break into their houses. Yet the law takes pretty sharp account of thieves and burglars. (117–18)25


Under current equity law, those families rich enough to afford it could arrange to protect their daughters’ assets and property by creating what was called a ‘separate estate,’ effectively holding a married woman’s property in separate trust for her own use. Cobbe notes that the very same expediency of endowing all financial power in the husband urged by upholders of the Common Law is daily overthrown by all who can afford to make the separate marriage settlements for their daughters that equity law makes possible. ‘The parent,’ Cobbe writes, ‘who neglected to demand such a settlement before he gave [away] his daughter, would be thought to have failed in the performance of one of his most obvious and imperative duties’ (119). ‘How then,’ Cobbe demands, ‘can it be argued that the same rule [Common Law] is generally considered expedient, yet invariably evaded by all who have means to evade it?’ (119). Cobbe’s stress on logical inconsistencies here prepares her readers to consider logically the effects of sentiment on the question she has set for discussion; the answer to her question above of ‘how’ such inconsistencies as the Common Law of marriage can exist is ‘sentiment’ or what we might term ‘ideology.’ But this section of ‘Criminals’ also resonates with the class-based reasoning that elsewhere Cobbe eschews, pointing again to the careful balancing of strategies and tactics that writing for a mixed audience requires. Though it is Cobbe’s key point that exceptions are precisely the business of law, and so to be handled by systematic legal reform, the ‘lawful tyrant’ whose exceptionally bad behaviour she highlights is identifiably working-class. Drawing on Illustrations of the Operations of Our Laws, she presents briefly one of the three individual instances that her article offers: How many poor wives has it [common law] driven to despair, as one time after another they have been legally robbed of their hard won earnings, who can calculate? One such hapless one, we are told, when her lawful tyrant came home as usual, drunk with the spoils of her starving children, took up some wretched relic of their ruined household and smote him to death. She was a murderess. In former times she would have been burnt alive for ‘petty treason’ for killing her lord and master. But what was the law which gave to that reckless savage a power the same as that of a slave-holder of the South over his slave? (117)


‘Criminals,’ then, does use the classed (and raced) based argument that would prove the winning strategy in the House of Commons, a strategy in which brutish working-class husbands bear the shame of the need for reform to English common law. But, though the argument will in fact ‘win’ in the House of Commons – where reformers insistently point to the ingrained class bias of such ‘expedient’ legislation and the dire need of working-class women for legal redress – ‘Criminals’ does not put all of its eggs in this basket. As Cobbe repeatedly confronts the anomalies of marriage law, she moves closer to her central critique of ideals about marriage. If her own analogies stress the potential of logic to resolve married women’s property concerns, she is nonetheless fully aware of the power and force of ideology, or sentiment, in the debate. She brings the debater’s recognition that the opposition’s terms of engagement, however illogical, are precisely what must be grappled with. It is ‘the sentiment entertained by the majority of men on the subject’ of marriage, she writes, ‘the ideal they have formed of wedlock, the poetical vision in their minds of a wife’s true relation to her husband’ (121) that most strongly shapes response to calls for the reform of marriage law. In this threshold space that addresses both converts and the unconverted, Cobbe chooses not to focus on the pragmatic benefits of law reform, whether to working-class or middle-class wives. Rather, this venue, with its mixed audience, is the site for the consideration of the sentiments that drive or produce the understanding of marriage in which only the most egregious deviations can be ‘corrected’ by legal intervention. If Cobbe’s ‘Criminals’ is part of a feminist legislative tactic, it also announces loudly its imaginative strategy. In fact, Cobbe does more than announce this by, say, countering one sentiment with another. She points to the real hard labour required from those who would seek to reform established Victorian imaginings of marriage. The poetical visions of wives’ relations to husbands that men revel in, the ideology of domestic intimacy, is Cobbe’s most significant target. Choosing not to stress pragmatics, Cobbe also chooses not to validate the vision of heterosexual married intimacy that will tolerate only corrections to extremes (understood primarily through class terms) rather than the radical recasting of the foundation or building blocks of intimacy which she believes is required.


Cobbe’s tone as she considers the sentiment underpinning married intimacy is carefully judicious, drawing the reader into a collective consideration of the issues at hand. ‘Let us,’ she invites, ‘try to fathom this sentiment, for till we understand it we are but fighting our battles in the dark’ (121). Using the threshold space of Fraser’s Magazine, Cobbe reframes this grappling as a collective undertaking, a movement towards social cohesion, by both the initiated and the unconverted. Her description of this sentiment is worth quoting at length for the way in which it identifies the object to be analysed at the very moment that it suggests collective complicity: Is it not this – that a woman’s whole life and being, her soul, body, time, property, thought, and care, ought to be given to her husband; that nothing short of such absorption in him and his interests makes her a true wife; and that when she is thus absorbed even a very mediocre character and inferior intellect can make a man happy in a sense no splendour of endowments can otherwise do? Truly I believe this is the feeling at the bottom of nearly all men’s hearts, and of the hearts of thousands of women also. There is no use urging that it is a gigantic piece of egotism in a man to desire such a marriage. Perhaps it is natural for him to do so, and perhaps it is natural for a great number of women to give just such absorbed adoring affection. Perhaps it is a tribute to the infinite nature of all love, that for those who know each other best, as a wife knows her husband, there is no limit to human affection. At all events it seems a fact that the typical Man (if we may call him so), desires such love, and the typical Woman is ready to give it to him. He is impatient at the notion of a marriage in which this conception of absolute absorption of his wife’s interests in his own shall not be fulfilled; and, so far as legislation can create such an ideal, he is resolved that it shall do so. (121, emphasis added) The possible explanations of this sentiment are multiple – perhaps natural to man, perhaps to woman, perhaps a tribute to affection. Yet, ultimately it is the fact of such sentiment that matters. The sentiment or ideal of marriage described here is one that Cobbe identifies as ‘burst[ing] out sooner or later’ (121) in private or,


interestingly, in the newspaper. ‘Nothing can be more amusing,’ she writes, ‘than to watch such spontaneous outbreaks of the natural man in the dignified columns of the Times’ (121). With these remarks, Cobbe articulates the threshold space in which she operates. Unlike the Times, whose comments on married women’s property law indicate support for reform with real reservation about larger arguments for equality, Fraser’s Magazine presents a space in which the ‘natural man’ and his sentiments can become objects for scrutiny. But Cobbe’s assertion of the ideal of marriage underwriting support for the Common Law also points to Cobbe’s awareness of the plurality of her audience in Fraser’s Magazine: the feminist initiate, the cautiously sympathetic, and the stoutly antagonistic. If her comments on the ‘natural man’ who haunts the columns of the Times solicit a complicitous humour in her feministidentified readers (hence proving integrating and inspiring), the lengthy definition of the ideal of absolute absorption and her call for its recognition (‘is it not this’) also demands that her reader concede that such a definition is operative, perhaps even in him/herself (informative). A kind of social cohesion is evoked in the very description of the sentiment that proves so damaging. With this presentation of the absolute absorption model of marriage, Cobbe also nails her political colours to the mast. The attitude to marriage so baldly presented must be reckoned with if it is to be reformed. If feminist-identified readers respond to the humour of the Times’ ‘natural man,’ asplutter with indignation about potential changes to marriage, Cobbe nonetheless insists that such outbursts constitute the real ‘force’ (121) to be assessed. Choosing neither to grapple with this sentiment nor acknowledge its existence risks losing the battle for reform. Cobbe’s decision to address ‘sentiment’ here, and the care with which she does so, points to the embattled place of marriage in Victorian feminist activity. Discussion of marriage was risky for Victorian feminists; how and when to invoke the oppressions of marriage is at the centre of much feminist debate. Though it may seem reasonable enough to imagine that discussion of marriage in the abstract would be at the centre of any argument for reform of married women’s property law, it was not necessarily the case. Cobbe’s direct, robust handling of the sentiment of marriage, then, distinguishes her essay in significant ways. As many historians of


nineteenth-century feminism have shown, the vexed question of the place of married women in the demand for the vote shaped the formation of societies, policies and the state of internal politics in the feminist movement for decades. Cobbe’s ‘Criminals,’ intervening in the married women’s property agitation just one year after the failure of Mill’s proposal to amend the 1867 Reform Act, articulates its claims at a time in the history of feminism when married women became increasingly visible as a ‘problem’ for feminist organisation, one that would be thought and rethought, reconsidered and debated, in the many decades before the vote was achieved in 1918. Though this long history is too complex to rehearse fully here, I would like to note the overall contours of the debate. Sandra Holton identifies overall two conflicting approaches to women’s emancipation that were, in turn, based on differing understandings of women’s claims for citizenship in this period. The status of married women’s claim for citizenship was at the centre of this conflict, one which after the 1867 Reform bill and increasingly from the early 1870s on, hardened into two quite distinct camps of feminist activity that were often at odds with each other. The exclusionist approach to women’s emancipation argued that women’s citizenship was rooted in the independence of the individual, an independence marked by and attached to the ownership of property and the payment of taxes. In this line of argument, the single woman and her widowed sisters ‘appeared to some …to form a possible vanguard for their sex, as their claim might most clearly be framed according to these longstanding radical accounts of citizenship’.26 In the suffrage campaign, the exclusionist approach actively wrote married women out of the demand for the vote. Moreover, as Holton has demonstrated in her work on Elizabeth Wolstenholme, exclusionist suffrage arguments increasingly required that other feminist campaigns, such as married women’s property law that concentrated on improving married women’s lives by dismantling coverture, be set to the back burner, to be recommenced only when the newly enfranchised single woman could bring to them her political clout. The second approach to women’s emancipation based its claims on the moral autonomy of the individual. From this perspective, married women’s claims to civil and political rights were as clear as


any other women’s. Moreover, ending coverture, the legal doctrine by which married women were denied civil and political rights, was as vital a feminist goal as the attainment of the franchise. Indeed, as Elizabeth Wolstenholme repeatedly argued, to exclude married women from demands for the vote was to endorse coverture, the primary tool of their oppression. By the late 1880s, Wolstenholme’s conviction that demanding a limited suffrage for women perpetuated outrageous inequalities led to her founding of the Women’s Franchise League in 1889, along with Alice Scratcherd and Harriet McIlquham. It was the first women’s suffrage organisation to expressly include the married women’s franchise. As Ursula Bright made clear to the World Congress of Representative Women during the Chicago World Fair in 1893, the Women’s Franchise League were adamant ‘in plain language to ask for votes for married women’.27 Cobbe’s decision to tackle the sentiment of marriage then occurs at a time when married women presented a philosophical and policy conundrum for feminist organisation, and when the question of ‘which women’ the broader movement of feminism could advocate for is held in painful suspension. As we trace her manipulation of the concept of an ‘ideal,’ then, we need also to keep in mind that Cobbe’s diverse audience is diverse in several ways, taking particular care not to reduce the ‘feminist-identified reader’ to simply one position, one policy, or one way of reading. After all, she is at pains to point out in her article that ‘thousands of women’ subscribe to the absolute absorption model of marriage, feminist-identified readers perhaps numbered amongst them. Cobbe’s interest in promoting alternative models of relationships that offer, not different models of intimacy, but different models of exchange and contract, is revelatory here. The centrality of companionate ideals of marriage to English feminist thinking, from early nineteenth-century utopian socialists to constitutional suffragists, is long established. By the 1860s, as Shanley suggests, companionate marriage was a ‘deep and abiding goal of Victorian feminists,’ alongside legal equality and the suffrage.28 And, we recall, the transformation of marriage was a key goal for feminists in the property law agitation.29 Shanley shows that the connection between equal rights in law and greater intimacy in marriage was forcefully argued in the 1850s by writers like


Caroline Norton and Barbara Bodichon, becoming a staple of ‘feminist ideology in the upsurge of organised political feminism that followed the submission of the women’s suffrage petition to parliament in 1867’.30 Most importantly for my purposes here, Shanley also shows the ways in which companionate intimacy played a limited role in arguments for married women’s property law reform when that argument moved into the House of Commons. There, as we see above, it was the class inequity of the Common Law that was most strongly stressed. Shanley points to the gap between the broad goals of feminists in this period and the tactics used to gain key reforms by liberal allies in Parliament, noting that with the passage of the 1870 Married Women’s Property Law feminists had ‘failed to gain parliamentary endorsement of their contention that a woman’s loss of her independent legal personality upon marriage was unjustifiable’.31 In other words, feminists failed to convince Parliament that married women’s property was a ‘woman’s question’ at its core. Though Parliamentary discussions indicate that many of those who opposed reform grasped the larger social transformation in marriage desired by the bill’s supporters, the bill was presented in the House of Commons as legislation for the working classes. Nonetheless, it is possible, I think, to consider the focus on working-class hardships as yoked to the feminist ideal of companionate intimacy even though companionate intimacy was not to prove a triumphant tactic in parliamentary debate. In this reading, each sordid case detailing a working-class wife’s vulnerability under current common law evokes, however subtly, middleclass women’s dissatisfaction with marriage as it is currently defined, as well as the model of companionate intimacy between men and women that Victorian feminists elsewhere promoted. Working-class women’s hardships are, then, a way for middle-class women to voice their own marital unhappiness. Cobbe’s position on domestic intimacy, however, is worth noting. ‘Criminals’ is striking in the complete absence of any picture of marital intimacy that is not held up to criticism. On the one hand, this lack of investment in the models of companionate intimacy that were so central in feminist thinking suggests that, writing in the established press, Cobbe simply follows the path that arguments for reform of married women’s property law will take in the House of Commons. This may well be further evidence, then, of the gap


that Shanley discerns. Writing to a diverse audience, Cobbe uses strategies that appeal most broadly to her various readers rather than relying on a tactic strongly identified as overtly feminist. But, Cobbe does not simply downplay companionate ideals of marriage in her critique of the Common Law. She chooses instead to focus on the danger that ideals of any type of marriage can pose to feminist arguments for change – from life in a ‘humble’ cottage, to the ‘poetical visions’ of absolute absorption and so, perhaps, to companionate marriage. Again, this choice can be read in a variety of ways. Remembering first that the broad audience of Fraser’s Magazine includes a full range of feminist-identified readers, Cobbe’s choice to pay short shrift to the power of companionate intimacy in ‘Criminals’ altogether suggests an awareness that feminist commitment to the idea of companionate marriage as a political strategy comes with risks in the broader political sphere. Cobbe’s focus here, in the established press, on the dangerousness of ideals might be read as a caution to or a register of concern about models of companionate marriage for her feminist companions. If companionate marriage is an inspiring and integrating ideal for many feminists, Cobbe’s choice suggests at a minimum that it is also dangerously explosive in the world of broader, non-feminist politics. In Cobbe’s estimation, ideals – such as the tranquil life in a humble cottage that opened her piece – operate as cover stories for the real sentiment guiding Common Law on married women. The logic of Cobbe’s essay recognises that the sentiment of absolute absorption will concede only that outrageously ‘non-intimate’ marriages – in which a husband deserts his wife, for example – justify intervention, and so require only limited legal reform. That logic also posits that the ideal of companionate marriage is a strategic dead-end in this agitation. Deconstructing such traditional marriage ideals, then, is as much a vital feminist task as proposing alternatives. And, here too we must recall that the multiplicity of Cobbe’s audience does not reside solely in a simple distinction between the converted and the unpersuaded reader. Her feminist readers represent a wide range of perspectives on and ideas about marriage. In this context, Cobbe’s decision to overlook the possibilities for heterosexual intimacy that reformed marriage may hold suggests an implicit argument that heterosexual companionate intimacy has limited value in women’s private lives, an argument that we can


read as pitched to her explicitly feminist readers. Cobbe’s choice not to entertain companionate ideals of marriage, then, indicates that improving the quality of heterosexual relationships within marriage is not her interest. It is a broader feminist policy that she actively chooses not to endorse here. For her feminist readers, Cobbe’s rhetorical suspension of a central feminist ideal registers a reservation about its overall usefulness, as well as its specific efficacy as a political strategy in the married women’s property law agitation. Cobbe’s decision not to elaborate a companionate model of heterosexual marriage in an argument about married women’s property law is all the more significant when we recollect the full revisionary force of such companionate models. Commenting on the marriages of early nineteenth-century feminists, Levine suggests that marriage was a ‘site wherein feminist practices could be mapped out and established within the domain of normative heterosexual relations’.32 Unlike their Edwardian sisters who rejected the practice of reformed marriage as a key political practice, many Victorian feminists saw reformed marriage as a ‘political point’.33 We need only to think of the pressure on the pregnant Elisabeth Wolstenholme to marry Ben Elmy despite her deep commitment to the overthrow of coverture to realise that reformed marriages were seen as part of feminist practice, not anaethema to it.34 With this possibility opened up, Cobbe’s other tactics in ‘Criminals’ read quite differently. Her focus on analogies, not individual cases, for example can now also be read as part of her address specifically to her feminist readers. For some members of that community, individual cases register most forcefully the dissonance between feminist ideals of companionate intimacy in marriage and the experience of some marriages that they wish to stress. Again, Cobbe’s pointed silence on reformed marriage, and the smattering of individual cases that she uses, resonates as reservation and critique. Where other forms of feminist writing counter stories of absolute absorption with companionate intimacy, Cobbe turns instead to models of contract that permit her to ignore altogether what marriage might look like under reformed marriage property law. Cobbe’s tactics here – emphasising the dangerousness of ideals at the expense of promoting the Victorian feminist ideal of companionate marriage – point to the difficulties and the opportunities of the space she occupies in Fraser’s Magazine, and


her vision of intimate relationships. There will be no extended representation of marriage improved by legal reform here. Instead her focus on contract, and indeed the close to her argument in ‘Criminals,’ resolutely marginalises marriage in this discussion. Improving the quality of heterosexual relationships within marriage is simply not her aim. Finding legal ways to protect women from men’s unjust power is a key goal, as is enhancing women’s autonomy, but trumpeting the power of improved, companionate marriage is not Cobbe’s task. Another reading is also crucial to note that marks the small role that representations of married intimacy play in ‘Criminals,’ and connects it to the vision of intimacy that animates Cobbe’s writing, and reminds us of the variety of feminist thinking in this period. Throughout her 1860s writing on women, Cobbe finds valuable intimacy for women in all sorts of relations outside of marriage, from the political intimacies of the feminist community whose activities she regularly extolled to the ‘true and tender’ friendships women make with each other. Writing six years earlier, for example, in Celibacy v. Marriage, Cobbe insists that ‘[a]ny two people who live much together (even in less tender connexion than husband and wife) cannot fail most importantly to colour each others’ views of the great purposes of life.’(79) If Cobbe does not offer an extended vision of heterosexual companionate marriage, then, her analysis of married women’s property law is nonetheless grounded in a conviction about the multitude of possible forms of intimacy. It is also committed to showing the necessary connection between intimacy and individual autonomy and freedom. Accordingly, though Cobbe does not agitate for improved heterosexual domestic intimacy, she does propose an alternative model of contract as the basis for domestic intimacy. Once again, the same careful judiciousness and commitment to social cohesion is evident. Beginning her discussion by building consensus, Cobbe begins with the assumptions of her non-feminist readers, and so imagines how best to go about realising marriages of absolute absorption. Pushing the model to its limits, Cobbe briefly imagines what is required for fulfilment of its terms. If such marriages are desirable, she queries, ‘do men set the right way about securing them … Is perfect love to be called out by perfect dependence?’ (121).


The value to this rhetorical highlighting of consensus building is clear enough, but again the plurality of her audience is also evident. Cobbe’s tactic of apparent concession is immediately undercut by a quick descent into farce. There are, she contends half-humorously, three ways to consider the union of two human beings. The first ‘is the sort of union between any friends who are greatly attached to each other; a union oftenest seen, perhaps between two sisters, who each have full liberty to come and go, and dispose of their separate resources, but who yet manage commonly to live in harmony and affection’ (122). Second, is the ‘Union of the celebrated Siamese twins… . if either have a pocket, the other must needs have every facility of access thereto’ (122). Finally, ‘for the most absolute type of Union of all, we must see an example in the Tarantula Spider … when one of these delightful creatures is placed under a glass with a companion of his own species a little smaller than himself, he forthwith gobbles him up’ (122). ‘[I]t is singular,’ Cobbe notes, ‘that the only one which seems to have approved itself, in a pecuniary point of view, to the legislative wisdom of England should be that of the Tarantula’ (123). The tone here refers the reader back to the opening of ‘Criminals’ in which the opening vignette suggests that it takes an extra-planetary perspective to see through the Common Law on marriage to the real oppressions it perpetuates for women. The humour (re) aligns the progressive identity of the Fraser’s reader with a feminist perspective on married women’s property law and marriage itself. Feminist and non-feminist alike are brought into a social collective that, cohering around the idea of a person of majority who has the constitutional right to determine property use, can grapple with the legal reform of marriage property law. For Cobbe, and now her mixed audience, the model union must be the first, in which the financial autonomy and legal personhood of the single woman of majority are kept intact. As she points out, the world of Victorian contract is chock full of options: ‘[p]artnerships, limited liabilities, and all other devices for amalgamation of property’ (123) are there for discussion, yet forever dismissed as viable models for married women’s property law. The example of the union of the two sisters, moreover, gently reaffirms the possibilities for other intimacies that ‘Criminals’ offers. In the first instance, the union of friends or sisters is juxtaposed to the union of absolute absorption, that ‘noble Oriental metaphor … [that] describe[s] a


wife’s relation to her husband as “bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh”’ (122). The juxtaposition is clear: friends and sisters have no need for bodily absorption, yet manage nonetheless to share lives of intimacy, of ‘harmony and affection’ (122), that put those relationships above the common run of contract. The effect is to neatly sever the quality of and possibilities for intimacy from the apportioning of monies and properties whilst demonstrating the capacity for contract to treat the financial matters of individuals in intimate relations with propriety and efficiency. The effect is also to elbow marriage out from its privileged place as the only relationship of intimacy that has any claim to consideration. If husbands and wives share ‘tender and trustful’ (123) relationships, so too do sisters, friends and brothers. The contracts that serve them to settle their affairs are more than adequate to the task for husbands and wives. That said, unions between friends and ‘sisters’ resonate within the framework of an article that seeks to remove marriage’s exceptional status in law and to offer up other visions of domestic intimacy. We need to register the meaning of this decision for those feministidentified readers who might well respond to Cobbe’s decision not to imagine heterosexual marriage differently in this space, but to promote instead the figure of the individual woman free to contract with her sister. It is too simple, I contend, to read this decision as indicating nothing more than a pragmatic bowing to the limits of what a non-feminist reader can bear to digest. Given the importance of the established press at this time to feminist-identified audiences, we need also to find a way to read between the lines of such apparently straightforward pragmatic choices. Removing marriage from her discussion does grant Cobbe the space she wants to elaborate a different feminist ideal – that of the empowered woman who has reached majority. But that figure also resonates with all the energy of what she means to the heterosexually celibate feminist woman reading this essay, the sister whose preferred intimacies never did require her to relinquish civil rights in the first place. By imagining the married woman as the heterosexually-celibate woman who always did have her civil rights, Cobbe also implicitly records a vision of possibilities for domestic intimacies between women that have no need for marriage. After all, Cobbe’s fleeting suggestion that sisterhood and women’s friendships offer a viable model for marriage reverberates as a lived experience for the Fraser’s Magazine


reader who was part of the feminist community in which she lived. The feminist reader of Fraser’s Magazine is fully aware that women in heterosexually celibate relations with other women, what Faderman has termed homo-affectional relationship, remain feme sole in relation to their property and earnings.35 The ‘two sisters’ with ‘full liberty’ and ‘harmony and affection’ who flit swiftly through Cobbe’s argument at this point are those women. Emotionally, sexually, and politically, the Victorian feminist community offers one model of the possibilities for women’s life-long intimate relations with each other.36 In her coda to ‘Criminals,’ Cobbe makes explicit the place of married women’s property agitation in the feminist campaigns of the period by turning to consider the larger question of the ‘general tone of legislation, the general line of policy pursued these days by English men towards English women’ (125). This turn that can be understood at least in part through its participation in the question of ‘what women’ Victorian feminists argued for in 1868. Indeed, Cobbe makes the causal relationship between the category of women and the policy pursued strikingly clear, and in so doing remakes what we might read as a matter of internal feminist politics (which policy shall we foster, which women’s interests shall we promote) into the very stuff of feminist cohesiveness and solidarity. ‘Half the discussions which go on about women would be stopped at the outset,’ she asserts, ‘if the speakers could settle what women they are going to talk of’ (126). In what follows as she settles the question of ‘what women’, Cobbe relocates this always potentially divisive question outside feminist politics, sketching a feminist vision of Victorian womanhood that highlights accord and unified vision. As the choices of ‘what women’ are being discussed makes clear, the ‘speakers’ Cobbe addresses here are divided between pro- and anti-feminist positions, the former espousing visions of womanhood that stress competence, ability, and intellect, the latter capable only of imagining women of the most selfish inanity and lightheadedness. Are we to speak, queries Cobbe, anticipating only one feasible answer, of ‘the women of strong characters, or the women who have as little character as their own looking-glasses… [the woman who] lives for affection, for duty, for elevated and refined pleasures of taste and intellect … [or the woman who] lives for admiration and passion, for low pleasures of vanity and sense’ (126)?


Cobbe’s answer to the ‘what women’ question is strategically disingenuous. Though Victorian feminists labour over the inclusion of married women in the demand for the vote and the logistics of combining suffrage with property law meetings, Cobbe’s definition deliberately obfuscates the political minefield of the range of different political claims possible within Victorian feminism for different classes of women. Rather her definition is decidedly a moral and intellectual one, not a question of women’s relationship to property, the payment of taxes, or their marital status, but of their character understood as mental and emotional competence. Making this argument, Cobbe draws freely on a specific formulation of Englishness that, as Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall have shown, largely underpinned the thinking of the political classes in this period.37 The weight of history, and the progression of an English civilisation presented as inevitable, bears down upon the question of English women’s place and society. ‘[T]he old Eastern, or class, or feudal relations between men and women,’ writes Cobbe, are no longer viable. ‘[A]ll these things are changed for us’ (125). Cobbe’s claim for the civil rights of a citizen who has reached the age of majority is nested in a history of the ‘Teuton race …[which has] borne women whose moral nature has been in more than equipoise with their passions; and who have both deserved and obtained a freedom and a respect unknown to their sisters of the south’ (C, 125). The lynch pin of all domestic unions, then, be they limited liabilities, partnerships or the heterosexually celibate bonds between two women, is the figure of the English woman who has attained majority. It is with this figure that Cobbe finally tackles the place of women’s equality in arguments for legal reform: Much time and more temper have been lost in debating the sterile problem of the ‘equality’ of men and women, without either party seeming to perceive that the solution either way has no bearing on the practical matters at issue, since civil rights have never yet been reserved for ‘physical, moral, and intellectual’ equals … the right to hold property, to make contracts, to sue and be sued – no class, however humble, stupid, or even vicious, has ever been denied them since serfdom and slavery came to an end. If men choose to say that women are their inferi-


ors in everything, they are free and welcome then to say so … But whatever a woman may think on these subjects, she has no need to argue, much less to grow shrill and angry about it. ‘Granted,’ she answers to all rebuffs; ‘let me be physically, intellectually, and morally your inferior. So long as you allow I possess moral responsibility and sufficient intelligence to know right from wrong (a point I conclude you will concede, else why hang me for murder?) I am quite content. It is only as a Moral and Intelligent Being I claim my civil rights. Can you deny them to me on that ground?’ (128) Like the ideal of companionate marriage – an ideal that resonates deeply for some members of her feminist audiences but is risky in the established press – Cobbe’s remarks on equality balance an embrace of the ideal with a statement that such ideals are simply not needed to make the Married Women’s Property law reform claim. This closing moment in Cobbe’s argument speaks to the need to separate rhetorically the political goals that feminists understood as logically connected, yet thought required separation for public consideration. Just as Lydia Becker suggested that combining suffrage and married women’s property meetings might damage efforts for causes that could be strategically separated, so Cobbe declines here to entangle married women’s property law reform with the question of women’s equality. The effect is complex. Since changes to married women’s property law need not be fodder for equality arguments, reform is deftly positioned as a modest claim for civil rights withheld from no class, excepting women, since ‘serfdom and slavery came to an end.’ ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors’ is not a return to the joyous celebration of heterosexual celibacy that characterised Cobbe’s earlier connected series on the pursuits of women. Rather, the article shows us the ways in which this celebration opens up a place in Cobbe’s writing to rethink the relations between property and the forms of relationship and intimacy, and a wariness about promulgating ideals of marriage as a stepping stone to property law reform. Cobbe’s piece is not, then, a plea for a companionate ideal of marriage, but a critique of the work of ideals in shaping public discourse on property and


women. Registering real reservation about the power of ideals of intimacy in Married Women’s Property law debates, Cobbe’s paper holds to forms of contract that she believes better serve to realise the goals feminists embrace. In 1874, Cobbe stepped down from the Married Women’s Property Committee, one of several women to do so. That same year, Gladstone’s Liberals lost overwhelmingly to Disraeli’s Conservatives in the General Election, with a number of key supporters of women’s franchise lost in the process. The women’s movement regrouped radically in the wake of this key political change, and the place and nature of women’s suffrage claims in the women’s movement was substantially revised. With Lydia Becker as the leading figure, she who had been so attuned to the nuances of combining suffrage with married women’s property, Victorian feminism began to focus on an increasingly exclusionist suffrage campaign, one in which married women’s claims to enfranchisement were marginalised in order to achieve what some hoped was a more likely limited franchise for single women. Other key women’s campaigns, like Married Women’s Property and Contagious Diseases agitation, were pushed back as the vote, however limited, was more and more seen as the central political claim for women that would, in turn, secure so many other political rights. Despite its defined purpose within a well-documented campaign, and despite the clarity of its political request, ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors’ is a text that opens onto a larger set of questions and pre-occupations than the married women’s property law agitation: The question of feminism’s audience, of the place of married women in mid-Victorian feminism, of how to address the powerful over the question of power itself. ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors’ ends with the seeming certainty of the English woman of majority, whose competence and capability for citizenship asks simply for the restoration of a once enjoyed, ancient right. The certainty and conviction seem to undermine any present claim for its ‘thickness’ as an historical document of feminism. But that certainty – the need for it, the terms of its declaration, its status as strategy – are precisely what matter, and can lead us to consider its implication in the complex web of feminist activity in 1868.


4 ‘Speaking in Fleet Street’: the feminist politics of the editorial in the London Echo, 1868–1875

Working three mornings a week, from December 1868 to March 1875, Cobbe was second-leader writer for the London Echo, an evening paper that inaugurated the new half-penny format. Published in response to the 1867 Reform Bill that increased working-class male suffrage, the inaugural issue came out on December 8, 1868. It quickly rose to a circulation of 100,000, the largest circulation to date of an evening paper. Its success was achieved in the face of initial antagonism towards the paper from newsagents, who refused to handle the paper because of the low profit margin its cover price represented. The Echo used newsboys, girls and women as deliverers in response. Early advertisements in the paper suggest that the low price was aimed at a working-class audience, and ads continued to address working-class male readers throughout the Echo’s run. But the paper, offering racing news and stock prices from the 11:30 am London Stock Exchange report, became a commuter paper as popular with city ‘gents’ as the desired working-class readers. Writing three second-leader articles a week, Cobbe earned two guineas for each leader, a sum rather less than the three guineas she received for a similar column in the Standard or the Daily News. Nonetheless Cobbe averaged £300 per year writing leaders and notes for the Echo in her seven year tenure there. She left the paper with her friend, the editor Arthur Arnold, after the paper was sold in 1875.1 Cobbe was not the first woman to write regularly for the daily newspaper press. Nevertheless, her tenure at the Echo is significant to the history of Victorian feminism. In addition to its value as fact 95


about the kinds of work Victorian women did, Cobbe’s leader writing is important for the ways in which she uses the editorial to offer alternate visions of women’s lives, women’s value, and ultimately women’s history.2 This chapter approaches Cobbe’s Echo writings as crucial sites for examining the newspaper press’ contribution to Victorian feminist practice and enriching our sense of what constitutes nineteenth-century feminist practice. Work on the feminist specialised press continues to show the importance of the press to the establishment of a distinctively feminist community of Victorian women. My focus here is the ways in which Cobbe uses the daily newspaper editorial or leader in the nonfeminist newspaper press to practise a feminist analysis that is distinguished in key ways from the committee meetings, specialist journals, memoranda writing, platform speeches and even the periodical essays Cobbe herself wrote, that we commonly think of when we consider nineteenth-century feminist activity. By writing frontpage leaders in a daily evening paper, Cobbe practices yet another way to take feminism ‘out’ beyond the feminist community, as she does in her writing for the non-specialist periodical press, conveying to an non-feminist identified audience how differently the day’s news – a murder, a law suit, a marriage, a divorce – reads through feminist lenses. Capitalising on the immediacy of a daily newspaper, Cobbe creates an ‘everyday’ voice for feminism in her leader writing, a voice that is articulate, educated, and commonsensical. Drawing on colloquialism, humorous plotting, and the conventions of literary genres such as farce, melodrama and tragedy, the editorial ‘we’ of Cobbe’s leaders presents a feminist analysis of contentious political topics as familiar, already traversed terrain, an everyday knowledge available to all who read a daily evening paper. The newspaper leader offers a distinctive venue for feminist strategising, and one that presents distinctive challenges to scholarly assessment. As Laurel Brake has argued, it is the high-culture volume form, not the serial, that has been ‘normalised institutionally’ (209) by nineteenth and twentieth-century publishers, universities, and libraries. If as Brake argues the ‘elusiveness and unrecoverability of full nineteenth-century part-issue and periodical texts hamper study’ (209), their elusiveness has also profoundly shaped the relation of these materials to our understanding of nineteenth-century feminist practice. Print culture studies has

‘Speaking in Fleet Street’ 97

shown the ways in which the elements of the commodified text are differently emphasised across diverse print culture forms. For scholars of nineteenth-century feminism, the stress on the ‘signature’ or the author function – the significant woman leader of a campaign or political organisation – has led to critical examinations of those speeches, letters and other writings of women which have survived in named archives. Organisations like Langham Place or the Ladies National Repeal similarly can serve as a kind of ‘author’ function; associated titles like the English Woman’s Journal, Victoria, and the Cause can then be assessed as documents with significant signatory import. But if an extended notion of ‘signature’ or author function has cut a navigable feminist path through the vast tangle of nineteenthcentury serial texts, other serial texts which have something to offer to studies of nineteenth-century feminisms are less amenable to this category of organisation. With the loss of ease of access comes a loss not only of content, the sheer heft of serial engagements with issues of interest to feminist scholars,3 but also of elements of analysis such as the relations between seriality and audience that have profound implications for our understanding of feminism. The unsigned daily leader in a half-penny evening paper circulates differently than the letter to the editor of the Times, the paper delivered at the Social Science Congress or the signed piece in the Contemporary Review, even when the words are identical across all of these forms. In exploring these relations, I want also to give some sense of the texture of Cobbe’s writing: her humour, her storytelling abilities, and her agility in wielding the 1200-odd word limit available to her three times a week. Not all of the leaders that I have been able to identify as Cobbe’s discuss issues which fit easily into the capacious boundaries of what we currently define as ‘feminist.’ Nevertheless, drawing on Philippa Levine’s substantial defense of the value of feminism as a term designating the conscious, ‘thorough and holistic understanding of the pervasiveness and connectedness of a host of gendered subordinations’4 that characterises nineteenthcentury women’s activities, I focus here on a selection of Cobbe’s writings that address readily identifiable Victorian feminist activity, including marriage property law reform, divorce, domestic violence, and the representation of feminism in the press.5


Space does not permit the discussion of all of Cobbe’s leaders in this seven year period, but the complete sweep of Cobbe’s editorial scope – from anti-Ritualist objections, Church reform appeals, workhouse governance concerns – requires assessment as feminist activity. After all, part of the way in which Cobbe occupies the Echo’s editorial space is by attending to a variety of social issues of the day, from the grandly political to the humorously fleeting. It may be that part of the negotiation in writing for the daily newspaper press – part of what gets feminism some ‘say’ there – is precisely the willingness to represent feminism as one concern among many. The overall effect of any regular newspaper feminist voice is to make feminist analysis part of a larger discussion within the format of the non-feminist paper. I prefer a reading, however, which sees the extent of Cobbe’s concerns in her leader writing not so much as a strategy – implying a tactical capitulation to feminism’s marginal political status – but as a crucial representation of nineteenth-century feminist practice. In this way, the feminist who writes for the nonspecialist press is seen to be a ‘citizen’ in the fullest sense, commenting on a collection of issues that are not overtly gendered whilst also insisting on the centrality of gender to all social analysis. In other words, Cobbe’s writing for the Echo shows us that nineteenthcentury feminism is an analysis serially integrated into Victorian culture, as well as a political analysis that targets specific reforms or campaigns. Seeing feminism as integrated in this way – within the day’s news, within the textual space of a non-specialist newspaper – means that we must see spaces like the Echo alongside the specialist feminist press, and the signed work of feminist organisations and figures (including Cobbe), as valuable fields for feminist action. Like many newspapers in its time, the Echo found ‘The Woman Question’ a critical social question ready-suited for newspaper treatment. Cobbe regularly wrote leaders examining women’s education, divorce law, women’s property law reform, domestic violence and women’s suffrage in the seven year period she was employed on the paper. The leader genre allows her to engage with real life grievances–citing court cases then at trial, quarrelling with legal judgements, and offering other case judgements for approval. In twelve hundred words or less, her snappy leaders grounded the logical analysis and consensus building of her extended writing in the periodical press in concrete, worldly, cases.


When the Echo first appeared in 1868, the Divorce Court had been issuing separations and divorces for just over ten years. The Court, its proceedings and particularly dramatic divorce suits, received regular front page coverage in the Echo, with occasional grace notes updating trial progress appearing in its more terse ‘Notes’ section. Unsurprisingly, then, one of Cobbe’s earliest general editorial subjects in the Echo is divorce. The relation between divorce and the nineteenth-century newspaper press is, however, more complicated than the apparently ‘natural’ fit of the juicy divorce story to newspaper sales might indicate. In work on the British newspaper press and the Divorce Court, Anne Humpherys complements important scholarship on the workings of the Divorce Court that explores its impact on the construction of marriage and gender,6 by examining the effect of the Court on the workings of the press.7 As Humpherys notes, the Divorce Court lead to the first ‘governmental restriction of newspaper reporting of judicial proceedings’ (220). Tracing the emergence of a genre of Divorce Court reporting, Humpherys also notes that by the time of that Court’s establishment in 1857, format for court reportage was well-established and effectively transferred to the reports coming out of the new Court. In 1875, for example, the official shorthand reporter in the Divorce Court, as well as other reporters taking general notes, could provide copy for more than one paper at a time. Individual papers could then edit that copy as they saw fit. The genre of the report was complemented by the established rules governing placement of the reports in the newspaper. Sensational divorce cases were covered in the news section, where they would be summarised and, occasionally, editorialised. Otherwise, divorce court proceedings often appeared in the ‘Law Report’ section of the paper, usually in the second-half of the paper and in reduced type. Humpherys points out that law reports tended to come after both the foreign and domestic news, parliamentary news, theatre reviews, but just before the sports news and entertainment announcements, ‘thus emblemizing their liminal cultural status – part record, part entertainment’ (221). What is most important about Humpherys’ work here is her argument that the press was a strong force in ‘naturalising’ divorce and that ‘Divorce Court and press together both lessened the tolerance for violence in the family and helped construct the notion of marriage as a equal companionate relationship between husband and


wife’ (228). In other words, seriality – the cumulative effect of repeated coverage – is a vital tool for normalising divorce. Cobbe begins writing in the Echo in 1868, eleven years after the establishment of the London Divorce Court and when the genre of divorce reporting is, by Humpherys’ chronology, long established. Overall, Cobbe’s work on the Echo can be read in accordance with the larger patterns that Humpherys identifies, particularly her writing on domestic violence. But there are key differences from these larger patterns in the specific intervention that Cobbe’s editorial writing in the Echo makes. Where we can read the end effect of broad press coverage of divorce across a variety of newspapers as a ‘naturalising’ of divorce and a reconstruction of marriage, in effect reading divorce as inherently progressive, Cobbe’s press work raises the question of the adequacy of divorce law as the primary legal response to concerns emerging from the marriage debate. In other words, what we see in her writings is not a ‘naturalising’ of divorce and an accompanying valourisation of companionate marriage. Instead, Cobbe uses the space of the newspaper leader differently. Capitalising on the press’ examination of divorce, Cobbe’s leaders constitute the serial production of a feminist discourse working, in turn, to forward an analysis that does not come ultimately to rest on companionate marriage as a self-evident or uncomplicated measure of progress. As Shanley, Holcombe and others have argued, the existence of a Law Reform Society that undertook divorce reform prior to the establishment of an organised feminist movement complicated feminist participation in that reform.8 The 1857 Divorce Act is ‘the outstanding event of the century’9 for women and ‘one of the greatest social revolutions’ of the Victorian period.10 It is also a watershed in nineteenth-century feminist activity. This is not because it embodied feminist principles (it did not) but because it altered the direction of feminist activity. As legal scholars have shown, the Divorce Act did not originate with women’s rights advocates, but with legal reformers interested in redefining the relationship between ecclesiastical law and civil law and a Parliament eager to claim the justifiability of civil divorce. Prior to 1857, divorces were adjudicated by the Ecclesiastical Court which followed canon or church law. Two kinds of divorce were possible. The first, divorce a vinculo matrimonii (or divorce from the bonds of matrimony), was


effectively an annulment, and was awarded to either husband or wife on the grounds that the marriage was flawed from its beginning. Such divorces allowed the partners to remarry, though any children were deemed illegitimate. The second form of divorce, divorce a mensa et thoro (divorce from bed and board) was granted on three grounds – adultery, sodomy or cruelty. This form of divorce was essentially a judicial separation. It did not allow partners to remarry, but did permit them to live apart. Under divorce a mensa et thoro, a woman did not regain the property rights she had lost through her marriage under the Common Low. Though Ecclesiastical Courts did issue alimony orders, such orders were not legally enforceable, with the Ecclesiastical Court having only the rule of ecclesiastical censure through which to urge compliance. Both forms of divorce were expensive, with an uncontested divorce a mensa et thoro estimated to cost between £300 and £500. The only exception was to get a divorce a vinculo matrimonii through the extraordinarily complex procedure of pursuing a private act of Parliament, an even more expensive process which still required the plaintiff first to obtain a decree of divorce a mensa et thoro from the ecclesiastical courts.11 Unsurprisingly, very few divorces were granted. The origins of divorce reform began with an 1850 Royal Commission, which recommended the establishment of a civil divorce court and rewrote the grounds for divorce only slightly. Arguing that divorce a mensa et thoro be granted to men and women on the grounds of adultery, cruelty and perhaps willful desertion for an extended period, the Royal Commission also maintained that a wife’s adultery should be the sole grounds for divorce a vinculo. Various procedural delays and government troubles (including the collapse of Lord Aberdeen’s government over charges of mismanaging the Crimean War) meant that the recommendations of the Royal Commission (adopted by the government in June 1854) were not discussed in parliament. In 1856 a new Select Committee of the House of Lords, chaired by Lord Lyndhurst, responded to changes in the political climate since 1850, changes which included increased feminist agitation on the iniquities of the Royal Commission’s proposals, specifically the predicament of married women separated from their husbands who could not claim wages or property in their own names. The 1857 Divorce Act that was subsequently passed set


up the new Divorce Court, and introduced two new divorce decrees. In addition to retaining the old ecclesiastical divorce a vinculo matrimonii (renaming it a decree of nullity), the Divorce Court could now issue a decree of judicial separation, which replaced the old divorce a mensa et thoro. This decree was granted on grounds of adultery, sodomy and cruelty, to which was added the new grounds of desertion without cause for two years. Parties to this divorce were not free to marry again. Wives who sought judicial separation could receive court-ordered alimony, as in the past, but this alimony was now legally enforceable. The new Divorce Court followed the old Ecclesiastical Court in its practise of denying alimony to adulterous wives. The second new divorce decree was one of absolute divorce, a new form of the old divorce a vinculo matrimonii that had been obtainable previously only through private act of Parliament. Absolute divorce permitted remarriage. Husbands could petition for an absolute divorce on the grounds of a wife’s adultery; wives could obtain an absolute divorce only if her husband was guilty of aggravated adultery, that is adultery coupled with incest, bigamy, cruelty or bestiality. The act also permitted wives deserted by their husbands to apply for a protection order at local magistrate’s court. The order had the effect of a judicial separation, and gave the wife the same legal rights as a single woman, or feme sole, over her property. These new provisions to the law followed many of the changes originally proposed by the Royal Commission, changes that were the result of feminist intervention, particularly in their recognition of the hardships on wives from husbands’ desertions. Without that intervention, as Shanley writes, the Divorce Act would have ‘been confined exclusively to questions about the relationship of ecclesiastical to civil law and the justifiability of civil divorce … [F]rom being regarded as a measure concerned with curtailing the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts and abolishing parliamentary divorce, it came to be seen as one affecting the rights and legal status of married women with respect to both sexual relations and property’ (39). In other words, though grounds for divorce under the new Divorce Act remained unequal for husbands and wives, feminist intervention ensured that the divorce law was as much about the definition of marriage as it was about duelling jurisdictions. And, as the Codrington trial shows us, the meaning of marriage and the divorce court’s ability to adjudicate competing definitions of mar-


riage was at the centre of each divorce trial, as much as the ‘newness’ of the site of adjudication that is the civil divorce court.12 The reforms of the 1857 law retained, then, many of the unequal structures that characterised marriage, and hence still required feminist critique. Cobbe engages serially with divorce in a non-specialist editorial space, pushing forward this analysis to a readership which, perhaps, sees the provisions of the 1857 law as taking ample care of the problem of marriage, as providing sufficient reform. In Cobbe’s leaders, marriage – companionate or not – is not the primary category through which women’s lives are structured, nor is it the intent of her writing to agitate solely for marriage reform. Cobbe locates her critique of the stories coming out of the Divorce Court prior to the point of marriage, in the conditions that limit women’s choices, in women’s education and employment opportunities. In doing so, Cobbe is forwarding a Victorian feminist analysis of marriage and the shaping force it is in women’s lives, introducing feminist ideas to an audience who may or may not be aware or supportive of them.13 The earliest Cobbe leader on divorce is the 1869 ‘A Lesson in Matrimony,’ published about two months into her tenure on the paper and taking up a full two columns of the four column front page layout. Cobbe’s focus is on the 212 divorce suits then awaiting adjudication in the Divorce Court: ‘if this is not business,’ she writes, ‘we should like to know what is’ (18 January 1869). Cobbe’s overt purpose in this leader is to consider the larger social significance of the case numbers and to assess if the Court’s existence can be tallied with the Englishman’s’ boast that ‘society… is in its golden age, and wants absolutely nothing to realize his perfect beau ideal of the human happy family – nothing, not even a Divorce court’ (18 January 1869). More particularly, both the object and vehicle of that analysis is not so much divorce as that ‘boasting animal,’ the Englishman himself. He sees that the numbers are ‘wonderfully eloquent in their own way,’ yet puzzles that the usual ‘unanswerable explanation’ of class does not apply here. The numbers of cases could be understood if they had been ‘sent into the Divorce Court by the lower class of the community alone …[for] The state of moral degradation at which our poor seem to have arrived would account for figures ten times the sum of these’ (18 January 1869).


But, Cobbe’s focus is on the plaintiffs in the cases themselves, the ‘class who can afford to pay for peace and do not mind publicity’ (18 January 1869), and the class to which the boasting Englishman belongs. Here, she questions ‘how is it that they make so bad a show, and argue so little in favour of the moral health of that society of which our typical Englishman is never tired of saying good things?’ (18 January 1869). Cobbe dismisses those who would read divorce figures as yet another sign that ‘things have arrived at a very serious pass indeed.’ Her intent instead is to ‘give a very simple reason for all this, and urge that our marriages turn out so badly because they are not well made’ (18 January 1869). Her analysis of its poor craftsmanship comes to rest more and more insistently through the course of the editorial on the boasting Englishman himself, and the gap between his sense of ‘what an ideal woman ought to be’ and his inevitable disappointment when the ‘perfect marble statue’ turns out to be ‘a dull, foolish woman, who has no sympathies for anything he undertakes, and knows no world beyond her next-door neighbour and her dress’ (18 January 1869). ‘A Lesson in Matrimony’ concludes with the observation that there is ‘something radically wrong about our present matrimonial system’ (18 January 1869) without any suggestions for improvement. There is nothing ‘new’ to Victorian feminism in this editorial, nothing ‘new’ for us to add to Victorian feminism’s arsenal of words and thought. But the ‘newness’ of an idea is a very complicated affair, as much a matter of audience as of ratiocinative rigour. At the very least, Cobbe’s leader here gets the message out to an audience which, perhaps not having read Wollstonecraft or even Cobbe’s earliest periodical essays, finds the critique of the ‘woman as ornament’ school of marriage thought a bracing read. As Brake has argued, the stratified readership that constitutes the Victorian publishing market was understood to require and respond to a range of publishing formats and prices.14 Leader writing is then a critical strategy in bringing feminist perspectives to a segment of this stratified readership that may not, perhaps cannot afford, or would not want to read, the Englishwoman’s Review or any of the quarterlies and monthlies that published feminist writing from time to time. In addition, we can look to Cobbe’s manipulation of the available cultural space of the leader and its constitutive elements. Writing


under the assumed masculinity of the anonymous editorial signature, the routine feminist analysis espoused in Cobbe’s leader reads differently than it does as a signed piece in a progressive periodical. By marking middle-class masculinity as constructed, as the figure requiring education, the leader inverts the expected relations between Englishmen, women and education, repositioning the ornamental woman on whose behalf a plea for education is more typically made. Here, in the anonymous, default masculine space of the leader, it is the middle-class man who is carried away by emotion, whose fancies about women border on the ridiculous, and whose ideas of love and marriage are ‘very stupid and uneducated thing[s]’. By using the default masculinity of the newspaper leader, Cobbe’s leader questions middle-class masculinity from the inside, deftly disarming possible accusations of feminist bias as she does so. We can also see the default position of masculinity, always implicit in anonymous writing for the newspaper press in this period, reframed in Cobbe’s usage. Occupying anonymous masculinity, Cobbe does not simply exploit a space in order to be heard – as we so often read women’s use of anonymous and pseudonymous signatures. She shows us that this necessary strategy is capacious enough to enable a critique of masculinity, an assessment of its limitations, rather than merely channeling feminist critique through the sympathetic masculinity that serves only as a launching device of approbation. The default masculinity of the newspaper leader is also inherently expansive. The voice of the leader here claims more than just the voice of ‘one man.’ It is constitutively collective. Behind the single voice of its writing stands the weight of the paper as a collective whole. The brief observations of this early leader serve, in many ways, as a kind of quick guide to what will be more fully worked through arguments in Cobbe’s later editorials. As Cobbe’s dexterity in manipulating what the textual space of the leader can hold increases, there is a strong sense that she comes to use the editorial space in more targetted ways to elaborate, specify and make concrete her analysis of what is wrong with marriage. Though later leaders will continue to offer analyses of the Divorce Court’s workings discrete from discussion of particular cases, her writing comes to separate into the various elements that we see positioned behind


these early comments: the question of domestic violence, middleclass women’s preparation for marriage, the idealisation of women, married women’s legal disabilities, the representation of workingclass women. By repeatedly focusing on such issues, Cobbe exposes the continued existence of a set of power structures that the recent availability of divorce as a remedy can obscure, if only superficially. Cobbe’s consideration of divorce in a broader framework, her consideration of the numbers of divorce cases, serves not to lament divorce itself, but to understand that those numbers point to conditions of marriage that remain unchanged, no matter how many or few divorces move through the Court. The serial form of the leader here structurally embodies the power structures she assesses: each day produces case after case for critical commentary. Let me turn now to Hayter v. Hayter, the subject of a leader titled ‘Money in Women’s Hands’ written more than a year into Cobbe’s time at the Echo. Again, the analysis here is not ‘new’ to readers familiar with the feminist traditions supporting nineteenth-century feminist activity. Where the early ‘A Lesson in Matrimony’ capitalised on the reading of anonymity as masculinity, the case of Hayter v. Hayter shows Cobbe using her now finely honed storytelling skills to connect larger political processes – in this case the movement of the proposed Married Women’s Property Act through the House – to the daily lives of her readers. Again, it is the space of the leader itself that generates a substantial part of the feminist effect of these writings. Cobbe’s leader on the Hayter case is number 362. It takes its place within a vast march of leaders responding, assessing, and commenting on the day’s news, day in and day out. In other words, part of what is negotiated in the newspaper leader space is time itself, a time that differently registers in a monthly or quarterly review, an annual lecture or a platform appearance. The leader stresses the sheer dailiness of the events discussed. Time will bring the material requiring feminist attention – the next divorce case, the next murder or domestic battery, the next breach of promise – just as it will bring the next leader’s take on those events. Within this space, Cobbe’s storytelling skills are vital. She renders distinct a story that must also takes its place alongside innumerable stories telling, perhaps, the same or similar tales. Indeed, it is Cobbe’s point to capture the similarity of these tales – which she will argue are structurally connected – within a


story that also captures their specificity, their uniqueness, and their personality. In 1865, when a clerk in a mercantile office earning £400 a year married the daughter of the secretary of the Duke of Kent with a fortune of £3000, he did not anticipate that the means by which he dispensed sums to his wife for household expenses would become the stuff of London newspapers. But as the Echo second leader, ‘Money in Women’s Hands’ reveals to its readers, Mr Hayter never gave Mrs Hayter a separate allowance for her own use. The result, and one cause for the divorce suit, was a debt for over £100 payable to a range of linen-drapers, confectioners, livery-stable keepers and boot-makers, for which Mr Hayter was responsible under current matrimonial law. Other elements of the Hayters’ domestic life are also recounted: ‘he used to go to his parents to breakfast, and he was there again in the evenings three to four times a week’ (5 February 1870, 1) with Mrs Hayter frequently left alone with their two young children. Why does Cobbe partially reproduce the Hayter v. Hayter court transcripts for her Echo readers? At first glance, following the line of Humpherys’ argument, Cobbe’s leader participates in a larger press phenomenon that naturalises divorce and argues for more companionate ideals than those which surely framed the Hayters’ marriage. But Cobbe is also using those records to convey the daily texture of a specific life, captured in the semi-dramatising format of her leaders, and the killing detail of one couple’s banal disaffection. Where Cobbe’s first divorce leader referred only briefly to women’s interest in dress as a ‘disappointment’ to their husbands, this leader attacks such a representation of marital relations showing their source in the emotional drudgery of daily living. The expected response to the Hayters’ woes – apparently wrought by the wife who flies in the face of the family finances by buying expensive clothing – might be to ‘throw all the blame of such disasters on the folly, vanity, and selfishness of women.’ But Cobbe departs from conventional analysis to offer this commentary: To expect that an adult human being should be at the same time entirely under control and as irresponsible as a baby in a cradle, and yet at the same time fully prepared to exercise all the judgment and self-restraint to be acquired by experience and


independence, is just one of those absurd anomalies in which we find ourselves landed after starting from contradictory premises. 5 February 1870, 1 Where English stereotypes of women offer the phenomena of ‘extravagant wives’ and ‘stingy, penurious, and mean’ old maids as irrefutable, if mysterious, explanations for the Hayters’ present dilemma, Cobbe focuses on the strictures of women’s day to day life, protesting the ‘state of hourly dependence’ that was Mrs Hayter’s life and the general degradation of women. There is no mystery in all this. Women do but follow the universal law which makes freedom the indispensable condition on which alone the virtue of frugality, as well as all other virtues, must be worked out. If they are to deal with the disposal of money at all, and not sit like little birds in a nest waiting for crumbs to be dropped into their mouths, they must needs be trained to do so by giving them a free part in its expenditure, and enforcing on them a stern responsibility as to the incurring of debt. 5 February 1870, 1 Her column ends with a matter of fact appeal to the House to pass the revised Married Woman’s property bill of the next session and the suggestion that women be taught the ‘value of money’ alongside the piano. Cobbe’s specific contribution in this leader then is to draw readers’ loyalties away from too pat an understanding of the events towards a feminist, politicised analysis of an individual predicament by bringing her readers up close to the daily humiliations of a woman whose own life plays out against a backdrop of dependence, drudgery and an indifferent husband. Legal reform initiatives, which make their way through official political institutions using memorials, petitions, and all the expected forms of political pressure, risk boredom and distance. In ‘Money in Women’s Hands,’ these same reform initiatives are presented as part of a story, as part of a life. A final case, Kelly v. Kelly, the subject of two Echo leaders, showcases Cobbe’s ability to use the leader’s potential to respond quickly to the day’s news in order to connect large political processes to the daily grittiness of lives. Mr Kelly, an Irish clergy-


man of forty years experience, is sued for divorce on grounds of what we would term mental cruelty. The divorce is granted, with alimony payable to the wife, because though no physical cruelty was involved ‘moral force had been used sufficient to break down health, and justify the law in interfering for the protection of the wife’s person’ (11 February 1870). The first of Cobbe’s two leaders, ‘Mr Kelly’s “Quietus”’, details the nature of Kelly’s treatment of his wife, his ‘quiet domestic infamy’ (11 February 1870), and his attempt to defend his actions as ‘affectionate discipline’ (11 February 1870). Vilified in front of her husband’s congregation for her ‘filthiness of spirit’ and her ‘whore’s forehead,’ constantly badgered to confess to actions she had not performed, Mrs Kelly was treated ‘worse than any child in any school, the butt of ridicule, the subject for abuse, the object of incessant detraction, the receptacle for all the venom and filth that can be poured out upon her unoffending head by the one person especially bound to love, cherish, and protect her’ (11 February 1870). There are no ‘explosive’ events detailed here. Rather, the leader shows how degradation and subjugation – explosive events of a different nature – are enacted in time, day in day out ad nauseum. The leader ends by quoting the last words of Lord Penance’s judgement: So much injustice, so much perversion of mind, such abiding rancour for so trifling a cause, so much deliberate oppression under provocation so slight, moral chastisement so severe, administered with so much system, maintained with such tenacity up to the brink of so perilous a danger to health, with so utter a disregard of consequences, and all to extort confession of acts never committed, and force repentance for no guilt, will probably never be witnessed again. 11 February 1870 The second leader on this disturbing case, ‘Mr Kelly Once More!,’ responds to a 263 page pamphlet that Mr Kelly wrote and published after the completion of the trial, a copy of which was directed, we are told, specifically to the leader-writer of the Echo. In this pamphlet, Mr Kelly defends his actions on the grounds of his wife’s criminal failure to fulfil her wifely role, most particularly her failure to sympathise with him ‘in time of trouble.’ Cobbe’s leader is at pains to point out the nature of that ‘trouble.’ Mr Kelly had lost


£1100 in lawsuits undertaken ‘to vindicate the liberty of the pulpit’ (10 March 1870) and lost further amounts in unsound investments: ‘Again I asked her,’ he says, indignantly, ‘Did you console with me on the occasion.’ And the answer is: ‘You were violently angry with me for not sympathising with you in the loss of £5000!’ ‘This,’ says Mr Kelly, with mournful pathos, ‘was not sharing with me in my ministerial trials’. 10 March 1870 Again, Cobbe’s storytelling abilities, her economical use of the semi-dramatised report to comment on Kelly’s self-justification, show us what the leader can offer to Victorian feminist analysis: timeliness, a pressing sense of lived injustice, and a feminist critique woven directly into the fabric of reportage. Utilising the leader to set the matter straight directly, to rebut Kelly’s narrativisation of his life, as well as to augment feminist arguments for the passage of the Married Women’s Property law, Cobbe points out that the lost £5000 came to Mr Kelly through a bequest from Mrs Kelly’s sister, the bequest becoming Mr Kelly’s lawful property upon his marriage: ‘Lord Penzance’s final sentence, decreeing alimony of £164 a year to Mrs Kelly, cannot fail to give universal satisfaction, seeing that the greater part of Mr Kelly’s money was derived from his wife’s and her sister’s property, and had been wasted by him in those lawsuits and bad investments in unfortunate results, in which she so cruelly refused to “sympathise”’ (10 March 1870). The leader ends by recognising the new precedent for divorce set by the case: Henceforth it is ruled that there exists a line short of either physical cruelty or adultery, over which, when a husband – or, we presume, a wife – trespasses, the law of the land will interpose to free the sufferer from the yoke. Let domestic despots beware! 10 March 1870 The two leaders addressing Kelly v. Kelly tackle the idea of companionate marriage head on. Mr Kelly had, in effect, commandeered the companionate ideal itself as perverse justification for his actions, and it is his appeal to ‘affectionate discipline’ that so outrages Cobbe. If divorce coverage in other newspapers serves to promote companionate marriage, Cobbe’s Kelly v. Kelly leaders exploit the


genre’s immediacy – and the intimacy that such immediacy can convey – as vital proof that the companionate ideal of marriage is no guarantee of women’s rights, and is as liable to malicious contortion as the ‘lord and master’ logic of marriage ever was. Reverend Kelly is skewered by his stake in his own self-representation, by his insistence in telling his story, and the ability of the leader to engage quickly and pithily with his text. The effect is striking: a story adroitly told, semi-dramatised in the leader, presents the ‘stuff’ of the argument in support of divorce and property law reform, in a way that the formal exchange of logical political positions cannot. The work of Cobbe’s leader here, then, is to give texture to support divorce and the call for Married Women’s Property reform. Here too we can see the value of reading the newspaper press through the lens of feminist history, and vice versa. Where interest in the shaping effects of the Court on the newspaper leads to an examination of the emergence of a companionate ideal in press coverage of divorce – on the affective relations between husband and wife – it also displaces feminist concern with the structural inequities that result under current marriage law and are retained in the new Divorce Law. Cobbe’s writing shows us that the emerging companionate ideal is necessarily the stuff of feminist analysis. Though she urges the need to establish loving marriages, the Kelly leaders suggest that healthy affective relations between husbands and wives can never hope to flourish in a climate of such legal disabilities, nor can the companionate ideal itself escape ideological manipulation. Where loving relations may have mitigated the effects of the economic, social and political asymmetry between husbands and wives, it would also seem that such loving relations can rarely be the likely end result of those same asymmetries. If divorce was acceptable fodder for the front page of an evening newspaper, legal reform was similarly compelling. Three leaders, published over a period of two years, showcase the unique opportunities that writing in the daily newspaper press presented for feminist editorialising on legal reform, in this instance the reform of married women’s property law. They also document the strategies Cobbe employs in her newspaper writing to dramatise, vivify, and make immediate the political inequities and outrages of a social order – or public sentiment as Cobbe would term it – that feminists argued was diminished by women’s


political and social disenfranchisement. The first leader, ‘Husband and Wife,’ was published on 19 August 1870, just ten days after royal assent was given to the Married Women’s Property Act, and when Cobbe had been writing for the paper for over a year and a half. The ‘Husband and Wife’ leader registers the deep feminist disappointment in the bill that had been so radically gutted as it moved its way through the House of Lords the previous year. The bill that was crafted by the House of Lords applied the principles and language of the equity courts to specific kinds of property held by married women. Where an earlier bill, supported by the Social Sciences Association and the Married Women’s Property Committee, proposed granting married women the same property rights as unmarried women, the Act of 1870 gave married women only limited property rights: rights to earnings after marriage, but not earnings saved from before marriage; the opportunity to apply to register savings and certain kinds of investments with banks and friendly societies; and the right to inherit land and real property, but only money settlements up to £200. Like the Divorce Act in 1857, the Married Women’s Property Act 1870 presented a difficult strategic choice to the Married Women’s Property Committee and their supporters in Parliament. Withdrawing their support for the proposed revised bill risked not being able to offer substantial amendments in the current legislative session, and so losing even this limited reform. To support the bill, as was eventually determined, was to know that the new law would make further reform very difficult indeed, offering as it did some answers to problems identified by the Married Women’s Property Committee, primarily how to safeguard the earnings of working-class women. The bill was supported, and ‘that legislative abortion,’ as Cobbe’s editor at the Echo and member of the Married Women’s Property Committee executive, Arthur Arnold termed it, became law.15 In ‘Husband and Wife,’ Cobbe tells the story of Mrs John Lawless Counsel in order to dramatise the deficiencies of the just passed legislation, deficiencies that would prompt her to join the Married Women’s Property Committee that same year. Two days after her marriage, the Australian Mrs Counsel gives her new husband a cheque for £925 to serve as part of the purchase money for a house to start him in business. Within days, Mr Counsel is bound for


England, having purchased three berths for himself and two men, Mr Dint and Mr Weston. They take with them the remainder of Mrs Counsel’s money: £825 worth of Australian sovereigns packed up in nine boxes. During the course of the voyage, the nine boxes ‘disappear.’ As Echo readers come to know, Mr Dint is responsible for its disappearance, having taken both Counsel and Weston for their money. Unluckily for Dint, the astute Mrs Counsel soon follows her husband to England and points an accusing finger at Mr Dint, who is brought up on charges of robbery where he is found guilty. Throughout her pithy, quick-paced telling, Cobbe draws on the language of the theatre and sensation fiction to lay out her version of pertinent events. Each ‘tableau’ in the case is presented: the curtain opens on the loving wife; the second tableau opens on the conniving Counsel, Dint, and Weston; a third, most dramatically, brings Mrs Counsel over to England to accuse Dint, and so the drama unfolds. Cobbe imagines the tale as sensation writer Charles Reade would present it; ‘What splendid headings we have for chapters,’ she enthuses, ‘The cheque is signed,’ ‘The flight,’ ‘The midnight theft,’ ‘The dream,’ ‘The pursuit,’ ‘The discovery,’ ‘Justice’ (19 August 1870). What interests Cobbe about this case is not Mr Dint, the ‘great wizard’ as she calls him, but that ‘so eventful a tale should yield no moral’ (19 August 1870). Though Dint is found guilty, ‘we should like to see a little justice done on Mr John Lawless Counsel.’ (19 August 1870). Under the revised Married Women’s Property Act, however, ‘Mr Counsel has not exceeded his lawful tether. He married Mrs Counsel first, and cashed her cheque afterwards. He has done no wrong; on the contrary, he is a husband exercising what are his undoubted rights over his wife’s property’ (19 August 1870). Cobbe’s theatrical and sensational language, however, persuades her readers that they already know how to read this narrative, and that the drama and moral clarity of sensation offers the truer interpretation. If the Married Women’s Property Act cannot call Mr Counsel to account for his behaviour, readers of the Echo are certainly able to follow the more applicable rules of sensation and call him ‘a fool. His foot was taken in his own snare very cunningly. He took his wife’s money, and his accomplice robbed him. He had not even wits enough to guard his very lawful gains’ (19 August 1870). As with many of her leaders, Cobbe’s humorously pointed plotting of a case


just adjudicated in the court deliberately intervenes to present such activities as moral crimes that her readers can readily identify, even though – because of the eviscerated Married Women’s Property Act – they do not constitute illegal actions. Her leader concludes with a prediction which, though based on the rules of sensation drama and so seemingly far-fetched, have been newly legitimated under the Act. What will he do now that the wizard, his ‘guide, preceptor, and friend,’ is confined in that cruel ‘stone jug’ from which not even the most skilful of wizards can escape. The answer is soon given. Mrs Counsel has £500 a year settled on her, and Mr Counsel is, of course, ‘going back’ to the wife whom he has robbed and deserted only two days after marriage. ‘“But is this law?” we ask with the clown in Hamlet. “Ay, marry; is’t,” is the answer. An Englishman can no more rob his wife of £900 than can the King of England do wrong’ (19 August 1870). Nimbly rewriting the new married women’s property law as the author of domestic scripts worthy of the most eminent sensation fiction writers, Cobbe excoriates a legal system that, as she frames it, all readers can readily understand as defiantly, even complacently, unjust. A second leader, published sixteen months later on 19 January 1872, is one of many leaders in which Cobbe returns to the need to amend the Married Women’s Property law. In ‘Cries of the Victims’ Cobbe takes a different tack than the one she pursues in ‘Husband and Wife,’ here choosing to package the need for further reform of the Married Women’s Property Act with other pressing needs for legal protection. The tactic deliberately bundles what many readers may understand as a stand-alone legal problem, requiring separate redress if any, with grievances perhaps less likely to be perceived as distinct or in no way symptomatic of larger political wrongs. In ‘Cries of the Victims,’ Cobbe lays out the legal predicament of Mrs Shillitoe of Selby who entered marriage with £500 which, though her own, had not been settled separately on her. A few months after marriage, Mrs Shillitoe ‘discovered to her astonishment that Mr Shillitoe was in pecuniary difficulties, and she accordingly, at his request, drew out the £500 upon a cheque’ (19 January 1872) to pay the quarter’s rent. Before payment could be made, Mr Shillitoe suddenly died and creditors took possession of his effects, including Mrs Shillitoe’s £500. The subsequent court case, in


which Mrs Shillitoe sought to defend ‘what common sense taught her to be her rights’ (19 January 1872), found against her or, as Cobbe’s leader puts it, ‘served to exemplify the well-known rule of English law, that marriage in a woman is “a felony to be punished by forfeiture of all her property”’ (19 January 1872). Though the Vice-Chancellor overseeing the trial admitted ‘that the law was “very hard”’ (19 January 1872), it was also ‘only too clear. The money when taken home to Mrs Shillitoe’s house became ipso facto the property not of Mrs Shillitoe, but of her husband. That was the law of England’ (19 January 1872). Cobbe’s point of comparison for the Married Women’s Property Act, in ‘Cries of the Victims,’ is the Life Assurance Act, which seeks to shield policy holders from the collapse of their insurers and had just been amended to do so. The story told is that of a writer, with wife and children, who for twenty-five years had regularly paid his £52 10 s premium for life insurance only to read of the catastrophic failure of the European Assurance Society and the subsequent loss of his money. Cobbe’s goal in her leader is to point to the failure of poorly written law in both instances. ‘Mrs Shillitoe’s fate,’ she drily asserts, ‘is but the common risk of all wives’ (19 January 1872). Likewise, the failure of the European Assurance Society is but one case of such failures under English law. ‘[I]n each case,’ the leader maintains, ‘it is the law which is in fault, for it is well that women should have money and that fathers of families should resort to Life Assurance’ (19 January 1872). The point of the parallel between these seemingly unconnected failures of law lies in the very different responses of the government. The failure of the European has yielded a measure to ensure that such crashes will not be repeated. With that government measure, ‘a repetition of the great crashes we have witnessed is rendered impossible’ (19 January 1872). Yet, the failure of the Married Women’s Property Act to protect Mrs Shillitoe’s property cannot find similar solace in the prospect of an amendment. ‘To the defects which mar and disfigure the Married Women’s Property Act we have repeatedly called attention,’ Cobbe despairs: Lawyers, of course, assure us that all that is necessary is that the property of a married woman should be protected by adequate settlements. The very existence of such settlements is the best


possible proof of the iniquitous nature of the law which they enable us to evade. And it is monstrous that a complicated and expensive system of settlements should be required to protect any human being in what is undeniably his or her own and absolute property. (19 January 1872) Parcelling married women’s property law and life assurance law together in this way asks Echo readers to resist seeing ‘the Woman Question’ as a social concern set apart or as one side of a debatable question. Rather, ‘Cries of the Victims,’ like ‘Husband and Wife,’ requires readers to interpret the seemingly ‘special’ status of women’s property law through readily-available cultural frames: Mr Counsel, though he remains unpunished, is instantly recognisable as the greedy villain of sensation fiction; the unjust legal anomaly disfiguring what Mrs Shillitoe knew was commonsensical about property rights is similarly despicable. The editorial conceit is that the consensus on what to do about married women’s property law already exists, at least in women’s everyday knowledge, that it is readable in the government’s ready response to financial crashes, and requires only a government willing to act. Cobbe took yet another approach to the need to amend the Married Women’s Property Act five months later, in a 14 May 1872 leader, ‘The Hardships of Husbands.’ The details of the action tried before the Court of Exchequer are convoluted. Mrs De Niceville brought a fortune of some £5800 to her husband upon marriage, settled a goodly portion of it on him for his exclusive use, and made over even more money to him in trust so that he could live off the interest it generated. Her single sister, likewise in possession of a modest fortune, gave over the management of her money to Mr De Niceville. A voluntary separation between Mr and Mrs De Niceville in 1867 left Mrs De Niceville running a boarding-house and singly supporting her son and daughter, whilst Mr De Niceville, a surgeon, claims never to have been able to earn any money since his separation, and so reduced to living off the interest of his wife’s trust. Enter a Regent-street draper who sues Mr De Niceville for £30, a sum owed to him by Mrs De Niceville, but claimable only through her separated husband under the Married Women’s Property Act that does not allow wives to be sued for their debts. The leader is careful to deplore ‘the spectacle of these


two sisters emptying their purses at the feet of the man who had undertaken to protect one of them through life. It would seem that they divested themselves of their property with alacrity and joy, as if it could only be safe in the possession of a male relation’ (14 May 1872) . As earlier leaders had maintained, the Married Women’s Property Act is bad law, and in this instance the De Niceville sisters’ eagerness to give up their financial autonomy is stated to be ‘the direct outgrowth of the existing law’ (14 May 1872). But the leader’s focus is on Mr De Niceville as a way, once again, to suggest that the law made nonsense of the narrative in which he found himself: The power to incur debts which another person is responsible for is singularly liable to abuse. Mr De Niceville … might contend, for instance, that the assumption on which the law was based was entirely inapplicable to his case. The theory was that the wife was always dependent on the husband, whereas the contrary had been his own experience, and that of many other husbands beside. When the lordly dignity conferred on him by law, which had never corresponded with the facts of his relation to his wife, is found to entail obligations such as the payment of tradesmen’s bills, Mr De Niceville may naturally, and not altogether without reason, feel inclined to grumble and complain. (14 May 1872) Not all husbands earn more than their wives; not all wives are entirely dependent upon their husbands. Yet the Married Women’s Property Act did not recognise women as financially autonomous agents able to sue and be sued. And so the law is ‘a grievous muddle. Women can hold their earnings free from their husband’s control. This is as it should be. But there is no power of suing the woman for her debts. This is one of several remaining blots upon the law’ (14 May 1872). Upholding the rights of women and their corresponding responsibilities, the leader calls for equality in the names of all – drapers and husbands – who seek to do business with women as equals in law. Married women’s property law, like divorce, was frequently addressed in Cobbe’s leaders during her years at the Echo. A third subject, domestic violence, was also regularly editorialised, and would become the subject of Cobbe’s hugely influential periodical


essay, ‘Wife Torture in England,’ three years after she stepped down from the Echo. In these newspaper leaders we can see Cobbe gaining skill in presenting the sickening details of specific cases before the court and perfecting the forceful direct language that would characterise her later periodical piece. Where ‘Wife Torture in England’ concentrated on making legal options for separation and maintenance available to abused women, the Echo leaders focus on the punishment of male offenders as a sign of the low regard for justice in domestic violence cases. A very early leader, written just one month into Cobbe’s tenure and deploring the disproportionately light sentences given to crimes of cruelty, initiates a larger appeal to change the legal and social response to violence within domestic relationships that runs through Cobbe’s leaders throughout her time at the Echo. This early leader, ‘Even-Handed Justice,’ shows Cobbe supporting a legal punishment for domestic violence (the lashing of the husband) that she would reject in ‘Wife Torture in England,’ but the larger comparative framework of the article is one we recognise from such leaders as ‘Cries of the Victims.’ In ‘Even-Handed Justice,’ Cobbe’s point of comparison is the differential treatment of ‘respectable’ and working-class men and women brought up for sentencing for the courts. A curious logic underpins this early leader, suggesting that Cobbe hasn’t quite settled how best to invoke comparisons to frame domestic violence cases as she wishes. Forty Surrey tradesmen found guilty of using false weights and measures receive a paltry fine that amounts only to the profits gained by the weights in one week of illegal trade; Miss Susannah Pringle steals a collar from a shop, but her fashionable hat and jacket means she is let off lightly with one month of labour when an ‘ordinary shoplifter would have had six months’ imprisonment with hard labour’ (19 January 1869). The question, as the leader poses it, is how to ‘prevent Justice from smiling on broadcloth and frowning on fustian, [in order that] there be truly one law for rich and poor alike’ (19 January 1869). The case of Susannah Palmer, recently charged with wounding her husband in a scuffle, both opens and ends this leader, written only four days after the Palmer case came to court. It is clear that Palmer is invoked to point to the damage consequent upon inadequate punishment of wife abuse: ‘Why is it … that the ruffians who throttle gentlemen on the highway receive (very properly) a flogging, while


the far worse brutes who beat the women whom they happen to have sworn to “love and cherish” get off with, at most a few weeks’ hard labour?’ (19 January 1869). Palmer’s husband had been ‘“repeatedly in custody” for aggravated assaults upon her, while the evidence showed that for twelve years he had kept up a continued practice of the most diabolical outrages and cruelties against her and her children’ (19 January 1869). The leader avers that ‘Had Palmer when he first knocked out his wife’s five front teeth and blackened both her eyes been treated with the lashes which so cowardly a hound so richly deserved’ (19 January 1869), then the circumstances leading to his wounding would have been avoided. The moral is, as the leader concludes, ‘that our criminal code of punishment needs revision, to which great work we would contribute the opinion that cruelty can only be repressed by fear of retaliation, and robbery by punishment – not by fine’ (19 January 1869). The conclusion neatly ties the forty Surrey tradesmen, Susannah Pringle and Susannah Palmer together in the name of revising the criminal code of punishment. But the leader is nonetheless garbled; if punishment for property crime is scandalously determined by the class of the offender, the ineffectual punishment of domestic violence cases, as evidenced by the working-class Mr Palmer’s light sentences, takes on a rather different concern. A leader published nearly one year later, ‘The Right to Beat A Wife,’ addresses the concern with legal response to domestic violence much more concisely. Importantly too, Cobbe augments her interest in the proper punishment of domestic violence with a dramatised analysis of the larger social patterns she sees promulgated by domestic violence, and their effect on perpetrators, witnesses, the legal system, and the readers of the Echo. ‘The Right to Beat A Wife’ takes up the case of police officer William Smith who intervenes in the battery of a woman by her husband, only to be charged with assault upon the husband. Cobbe assures her readers that Smith’s decision to strike Patrick Macgovern as he knocked his wife about in the street was ‘too hasty’ (17 January 1870) and that he should have followed police protocols before intervening in this way. Paying lip-service to the procedures that would have seen Smith arrest the offender, blow his whistle for help if he was unable to do so, or let him go if he could not legally take hold of Macgovern, the leader is much more interested in representing


Smith’s behaviour as socially necessary in a way that the legal system is unable to comprehend: In these days of the ‘decay of public sentiment’ he actually thought and felt as brave men used to feel at the sight of a trampled woman, and he laid Mr Macgovern in the same mud wherein that meek and unoffending person had rolled his wife. (17 January 1870) Cobbe’s approval of Smith’s action is part of a broader concern with public indifference to domestic violence that she pursues relentlessly in her leader writing for the Echo. This time she hones in on a comment made by the magistrate presiding over the case who, in sentencing Smith to one month’s prison labour, reiterates an accusation lodged by Macgovern the wife-beater against the police offer, and concludes that ‘[t]he assault was unprovoked, brutal, and unjustifiable’ (17 January 1870). The ominous implications of the magistrate’s statement are made strikingly clear in the leader: The sight of a woman in the gutter is … henceforth to be understood to be no ‘provocation’ at all to the passers by; nor the brutality of the man who thrusts her there any ‘justification’ of the Quixote who may be so foolish as to take her part. (17 January 1870) If married women’s property court cases are ones which progressive Echo readers can readily interpret as forcefully telling the need for amendment, domestic violence cases expose the horrifying collusion of public opinion with legal indifference. When the magistrate can agree with the violent husband, the leader writes, ‘women’s claims to protection from violence in the streets are of the most doubtful kind’ (17 January 1870). If ‘English magistrates and English public opinion’ conspire to suggest that husbands have the right to beat their wives, England’s single women are similarly vulnerable: ‘Are single women who may need at any moment the aid of a constable to set up flags in their bonnets … inscribed with the word “Unmarried,” so that the police may know that nobody has the right to knock them down …?’ (17 January 1870).


The incongruity of the image points to Cobbe’s determination to jolt her readers (and the legal system) into new ways of reading domestic violence. Where Cobbe strategically presents the new Married Women’s Property Act as defying available, commonsensical understandings about individual property rights, her editorials on domestic violence emphasise their lurid strangeness, the degree to which domestic violence requires perpetrators, bystanders, and readers to depart radically from everyday scripts shaping relationships and social justice. Barbara Onslow has argued that the split between higher journalistic debate, in which we see Cobbe participate in her writings for such journals as Contemporary Review and Fraser’s Magazine, and hack journalism’s reliance on sensationalist detail in reportage is a false one. Newspapers, like the Echo, could provide both titillation and debate.16 Importantly, Cobbe is careful to present sensationalist detail as part of a narrative script she strives to identify as aberrant. ‘The Right To Beat A Wife,’ its title distilling the startling script the leader will detail, begins by quoting an Irish popular song, which describes how a drunken young Irish lad sits outside his lover’s door to pour out his love for her. In brutal contrast to popular song and all that it encodes about love, Patrick Macgovern ‘“had some words,” – those kind of “words,” no doubt, of which the normal sequence is an impact of the stronger body on the weaker, in a shape which may be variously rendered as a “push,” a “blow,” or a “beating”’ (17 January 1870). Approaching the same dissonance between everyday expectations about safety and public responses to domestic violence, Cobbe draws on feminist orientalist strategies to label as ‘unEnglish’ the social laws which allow witnesses to violent assaults to stand by and do nothing: Week after week we record stories of husbands beating their wives, and often actually killing them, and dragging their corpses about while the neighbours stand by quiescent, as if a wife came under the old Mosaic law concerning slaves, and her master was not to be punished for killing her, ‘for she is his money.’ (17 January 1870) The leader closes with the pained suggestion that the current legal indifference to women’s safety from assault requires a rewriting of an old police adage: ‘we shall find a variation of good old Dogberry’s


gold rules about thieves established among the new police – “When you see a woman maltreated, show yourselves good constables, and walk in the opposite direction”’ (17 January 1870). A leader written about six weeks later, ‘Am I My Brother’s Keeper?,’ extends this argument that social attitudes to domestic violence defy commonly held rules of social obligation, and can in no way be understood by everyday scripts. Reporting on the murder of a woman by her soldier husband who also killed himself, Cobbe is aghast to find that the murder-suicide occurred ‘in the lower room of a cottage in a town,’ ‘in the presence … of several men, not one of whom had the common humanity to interfere” (3 March 1870). The leader tries several ways to make sense of this uninterpretable fact. ‘“Several men!,”’ Cobbe repeats, ‘Not one old or sick man or feeble boy … Neither was it a group of terrified women … Nothing of all this, but “several men,” with one demented homicide between them and his bleeding victim rushing out into the street, pursued, dragged back, and finally, effectually slaughtered like a sheep or a fowl before their eyes’ (3 March 1870). The leader is full of questions: ‘How is this horrible phase of public sentiment to be met? How can its unmistakable increase of late years be arrested? Who shall direct the feeling of the masses in a healthier and opposite channel?’ (3 March 1870). Cobbe’s answers stress the creation of new ways to mark social ties and new narratives about domestic violence. Proper legal punishment is one answer, but the leader imagines other possibilities. ‘Can we devise no method,’ Cobbe urges, ‘with all our machinery of associations and rewards, and prize essays and distributed pamphlets, and, above all, our annual fifteen millions of sermons, to touch the consciences or rouse the dormant sense of honour of our countrymen?’ (3 March 1870). ‘Am I My Brother’s Keeper?’ insists upon the obviousness of the answer to the question it poses in its headline, even as it documents the ways in which that answer is strangely debatable in the legal field of domestic violence. It also contends that the machinery, the social structure, for generating new social ties already exists. Imagining medals for people who come to the aid of the victims of assault, the leader also imagines a different social response to the perpetrators themselves: Can nothing be done … to affix a stigma of shame on the miserable brutes who stand by and never stir a finger to defend the


weak or raise the fallen? … they ought … to be marked men for the rest of their lives. (3 March 1870) Later leaders return repeatedly to dispute how violent domestic assaults can be read in any way other than as a grievous sign of social and legal turpitude and to document the extraordinary fact that they are. ‘Even-Handed Justice’ compares the wildly disproportionate punishment of a young carter found guilty of gaming on a Sunday (two months hard labour) to a man who beats his wife so severely that she dies days later in the workhouse (eight months imprisonment). The leader stresses the jarring dissonance of a judge able to conclude, despite hearing about a woman ‘”on her hands and knees, moaning fearfully, bleeding from the mouth and eyes”’ (18 August 1870) from her husband’s assault, that ‘he “has no doubt he did not intend to kill his wife?”’ (18 August 1870). The leader’s fury is palpable: ‘In Heaven’s name, we ask, what does a man intend to do, who stamps on a woman’s breast and assaults her afresh while she is vomiting blood?’ (18 August 1870). Again and again, the leader intervenes in the story told by the court transcripts of the trial to question interpretation. ‘We read,’ Cobbe points out, ‘he was “seen dragging his wife by the hair of her head” – does anybody quite realise what this process means?’ (18 August 1870). Other interjections clarify the full horror of what the transcript presents as the facts of the case: the beating appears to have taken place in public; despite being near death, neighbours did not intervene. ‘Violent Assault Made Easy’ similarly excoriates a legal process that accepts the narrative offered by a perpetrator of domestic assault and so punishes lightly. Thomas Moore, who kicks and hits his wife as he attempts to throw her out of the window with their newborn child, tells the court that ‘“He was drunk … or he should not have done it,” to which matchless plea he added something or other about “only once” and “never do it again.”’ (15 September 1871). The punishment of one month’s imprisonment is deplored as an utter degradation to justice. In each of these leaders, as in the dozens upon dozens she wrote on domestic violence, we see Cobbe exploiting the leader’s capacity to interrupt and challenge the legal and popular culture narratives surrounding domestic violence in the moment of their circulation. Reframing court transcripts, re-creating the drama of the assault from written records, insistently intervening in the legal narrative


lines that yield inadequate punishment, Cobbe’s leaders challenge a cultural and social apparatus that fails to protect women from bodily assault, and seek to demonstrate a world in which everyone realises vividly what it means to attack a woman, knows too the appropriate punishment to be meted out. The same persuasive power of serial repetition is brought to bear in leaders on women’s role in municipal affairs, the meaning of women’s suffrage, the need to improve women’s educational and employment opportunities. Cobbe’s daily (or thrice weekly) application of feminist logic to the day’s news uses the space made available through the editorial to insist on feminisms’ relevance, its stake in the daily lives of men and women. From the stories of Mrs Shillitoe, Mrs Hayter, John Lawless Counsel, Susannah Palmer, and Mr Kelly to the successes of Elizabeth Garrett, Lydia Becker, Mary Carpenter, Emily Davies – the compelling stories of individual women and men assert the power of feminism to imagine the world differently. This is a distinctive contribution made all the more significant because it takes place in a non-feminist identified textual space. The column does not appear in the minutes of a Married Women’s Property committee meeting nor in the pages of the Englishwoman’s Journal, but in the pages of a half-penny evening daily paper read by those who we cannot assume were already feminist-identified or interested in becoming so. The serial leader asks its readers to see feminist ideas and demands not as pressure-group politics but as political tools for everyday use, responding to day by day realities. At a time when there were no feminist daily papers, the dailiness of Cobbe’s leaders embody in their material form the value of feminism as an everyday practice. Over and over, Cobbe repeats the basic tenets of Victorian feminism: women are autonomous agents; marriage cannot be the sole aspiration of a woman’s life; women are political subjects; women are not men’s property in marriage. Cobbe’s ability in her editorials to imagine feminism as an everyday tool in understanding the day to day occurrences in men’s and women’s lives demonstrates that feminism is not simply a demand for change to the sphere of women’s actions, but is a part of every reader’s thoughtful, engaged attention to political, social, and legal news, and so an integrated perspective from which to assess the world’s problems.17

5 Making History with Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian feminism, domestic violence, and the language of imperialism

Writing in 1878 on the question of what she termed ‘Wife Torture in England,’ Frances Power Cobbe stated that ‘the whole relation between the sexes in the class we are considering is very little better than one of master and slave’.1 Through her invocation of the master and slave analogy for women’s position in marriage, Cobbe draws upon a thirty-year history of Victorian feminist critique in which the representation of marriage as a form of slavery was a central rhetorical and conceptual framework. Yet though she has this history immediately available to her as an authorising source, Cobbe is very careful to distance herself from it: I have always abjured the use of this familiar comparison in speaking generally of English husbands and wives, because as regard the upper orders of society it is ridiculously overstrained and untrue. But in the ‘kicking districts,’ among the lowest laboring classes, Legree himself might find a dozen prototypes, and the condition of the women be most accurately matched by that of the negroes on a Southern plantation before the war struck off their fetters. (137) Cobbe footnotes this statement: Let it be noted that while they were slaves, these negroes were daily subjected to outrages and cruelties of which it thrilled our 125


blood to hear. Since they have been emancipated their white neighbors have learned at least so far to recognize them as human beings, that these tortures have become comparatively rare. (Note 4, 166) From this point in its argument, ‘Wife Torture in England’ freely uses the master and slave and related Orientalist metaphors for violent marriages: The wrongs of abused women ‘can only be paralleled by the oppressions of a dominant caste or race over their helots’ (137); the readiness of abused women to defend their abusers is ‘culminating proof of how far the iron of their fetters has eaten into their souls’ (140); wife abuse itself is an old abuse, ‘having its origin in the remotest epochs of barbarian wife-capture and polygamy, [and] yet lingers in the dark places of the land.’ (140) Utilising this range of master/slave and Orientalist metaphors, Cobbe’s article participates in a journalistic commonplace of Victorian literary culture. The master and slave trope was frequently invoked by periodical writers and political commentators throughout the Victorian period, in the service of a range of causes, from the Ten Hours Movement, Chartism, to the conditions of the criminal classes.2 But, though such language is not unique to feminist writing in this period, Cobbe’s article must also be set alongside a massive collection of feminist periodical writings, pamphlets and oratory that rely upon the ‘women of the East’ and the fettered black slave to articulate its demands for British women.3 So massive is this archive that Antoinette Burton can rightly claim that the ‘colonial female Other was one of the conceptual foundations of Victorian feminist thinking’.4 Cobbe has, it would seem, simply written these feminist narratives into the Victorian mainstream or established press. What strikes me, however, are not simply the parallels between Cobbe’s use of these imperialist and abolitionist metaphors in the mainstream and their use in separate feminist periodicals. It is not their visibility as such that is significant. Rather, I am taken by both the timing and the terms of their entry into the mainstream press as part of an avowed feminist intervention. To explore these issues further, I will first map out a framework of the use of these imperialist strategies that will better allow us to assess the meaning – in a very broad sense – of their feminist implementation in the mainstream. For brevity’s sake, I will use the term

Making History with Frances Power Cobbe 127

‘imperialist’ as shorthand for the range of rhetorical tropes using, variously, the abolitionists’ black slave, the Indian woman, and the generalised Oriental woman, that are on display in Victorian feminist writing. I follow Burton in using the term ‘imperialist,’ rather than ‘orientalist,’ despite the potential for confusion that choice represents. It is important to distinguish between the discursive tropes I discuss here and explicit political support for empire that becomes an increasingly prominent feature of 1890s English feminism, and is present earlier in Victorian feminist circles. Of course, discursive use and political conviction are linked. But it is critical that Cobbe’s imperialist language looks back to abolition rather than out to empire. The slippage between these particular figures seen in Cobbe’s ‘Wife Torture in England’ is a historically-specific one, displaying the ideological force of a homogenised idea of the Other woman in these writings. Though it is the American black slave who figures most prominently in this article, the ease with which she moves from the figure of the black slave to the helot, and so on to questions of caste and polygamy, signals the easy associations at work in her writing to unite these historically and culturally distinct figures under the generalised category of Other. Though Burton’s impressive work on British feminism deals expressly with the work of the ‘Indian woman’ in Victorian feminist and imperialist culture, its overarching argument about the ideological work of imperialist tropes, and its use of feminist periodicals from the period, is central to the process we can discern in Cobbe’s work. Drawing on the work of scholars of the Victorian press, Burton argues that Victorian feminist periodicals were first, a public, political act in their very establishment; second, a public space in which Victorian women actively worked out their theoretical claims; and, third, through these actions, a public, highly visible, ‘instrument of power and legitimacy’.5 With this definition of the feminist press in place, Burton reads that press in order to delineate the strategies by which Victorian feminists transformed Indian women into an imperialist trope. As she argues, this imperialist trope serves two primary functions. It produces an image of the unemancipated, enslaved woman as the primary sign of a degraded race. This sign in turn both pointed to the risks of denying emancipation to English women and urged emancipation for English women in the name of their very difference from this now-dismissed figure. Secondly, it


represents Indian women as the object of humanitarian compassion, and so the object of humanitarian intervention by English feminists. This intervention grounded itself in sisterhood and was used to prove the necessary role of English women in the work of Empire, thus making the argument for English women’s political rights.6 These then are the defining terms of the use and circulation of imperialist tropes in Victorian feminist periodicals. Simply put, imperialist tropes are conceptually foundational to Victorian feminisms from the 1860s on. Cobbe’s careful framing of the use of these same standard tropes in 1878 suggests, nonetheless, that however commonplace in Victorian journalism, however defining or constitutive they may be of feminist self-representations within Victorian feminist culture, they are not readily mainstreamed as feminist markers in this same period. The contradictions are intriguing. If, as Burton’s work argues, feminists were part of the shapers of Britain’s imperialist ideologies, surely such strategies would find themselves at home in that same imperialist culture’s established periodical press? After feminists, too, had achieved a notable, if by their own account limited, success in the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 and had successfully claimed the municipal franchise, we might anticipate that what Burton identifies as a central strategy of feminist self-identification could circulate more widely. Without wanting to reduce the complex cultural process of mainstreaming to a single dimension – that of time – let me present a kind of pre-history of the use of imperialist tropes in Cobbe’s mainstream writing in an attempt to discover what such strategies, if read differently, might reveal about the ongoing production and negotiation of a public identity for feminisms in the established Victorian press in this period. In some ways, Cobbe’s claim in ‘Wife Torture in England’ to have ‘always abjured’ the familiar comparison of master and slave is disingenuous. In ‘Celibacy v. Marriage,’ her 1862 article for Fraser’s Magazine and one of Cobbe’s earliest pieces on the Woman Question for the mainstream press, Cobbe’s analysis of the debilities of marriage closes with this rhetorical flourish: The Englishman of the twentieth century will abandon those claims of marital authority, whose residue he inherits from days


when might made right, and from lands of Eastern sensuality, where woman is first the slave of her own weakness, and then inevitably the slave of man. (83) In ‘What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?,’ also published in Fraser’s Magazine that year, Cobbe refers both to the ‘moral Suttee’ (91) that, in her view, shapes the narrow lives of English widows, and utilises the master and slave analogy in her arguments for women’s improved access to education: To cramp every faculty and cut all large interests, and then complain that a human being so treated is narrow-minded, and scandal-loving, is precisely an injustice parallel to that of some Southern Americans whom we have heard detail those vices of the negroes which slavery had produced, as the reason why they were justified in keeping so degraded a race in such a condition. (‘What Shall We Do,’ original italics, 102) In her 1868 article for Fraser’s Magazine, ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors,’ Cobbe peppers her argument with the following: we, in our day, are perplexed and well nigh overwhelmed with the difficulties presented to us. What ought the Americans to do with their Negroes? What ought we to do with our Hindoos? What ought all civilized people to do with their women? (110) The parallels evoked here are self-conscious in Cobbe’s article, intended to point to the absurdity of there being a problem with civilised, English women in the same way that ‘Negroes’ and ‘Hindoos’ have proved difficult to handle. The force of the imperialist metaphor is, thus, fully displayed and consciously invoked. Similarly, comparing the legal abilities of English husbands over their wives, Cobbe asks: ‘[w]hat was the law which gave to that reckless savage [an Englishman who had abused his wife] a power the same as that of a slave-holder of the South over his slave?’ (117) Elsewhere in ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors,’ Cobbe rhetorically agrees for the purpose of argument that ‘it is a noble Oriental metaphor, to describe a wife’s relation to her husband as “bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh”’ (122).


The appearance of these strategies in Cobbe’s work in the Victorian established press can be read as signs of Cobbe’s negotiations of these terms of analysis. Their emerging ubiquity can be read as Cobbe’s gradual acceptance of the relevance and usefulness of such comparisons. In the case of ‘Wife Torture in England’, the appearance of potentially volatile metaphoric comparisons between slaves and English women in Cobbe’s work at a late stage in her writing career could also be read as a sign of the power of her own name as a rigorous writer on controversial topics: the fully established Cobbe is able in 1878 to signal more openly her indebtedness to the conceptual terms of analysis of that political community to which she has long belonged.7 Alternatively, we could read her work primarily as reflecting changes or re-negotiations in Victorian feminist thought throughout the period, represented by these writings in which a similar process makes clear their usefulness and newly charged valence in thinking through the specific problems of Victorian women. Then again we could argue persuasively that the very invisibility or casualness of the woman as slave comparison in Cobbe’s work is itself a sign of its conceptual centrality in feminist thought. I do not dismiss any of these readings out of hand. But, all of these readings fall somewhat short of the mark, specifying the significance of those negotiations in ways that insufficiently respond to the relation between the high-profile established press location of Cobbe’s writing and its effects and do not take into full account the historical record as Burton outlines it. Certainly, imperialist rhetoric in feminist thought has a much longer history than the mere sixteenyear history represented by Cobbe’s work.8 What then, if anything, can we say about Cobbe’s deliberate use of this comparison in 1878, and her bid to draw specific attention to its use in a prominent article on domestic abuse? Part of the answer is to understand the back-history to Cobbe’s article since, as Sally Mitchell has shown, it was part of a carefully planned campaign of publicity aimed at putting as much public pressure on Parliament to pass new legislation as possible. The ‘Wife Torture’ chronology begins in the summer of 1877. That July Cobbe reported on the case of Cadwallader Jones, accused of hacking his lover to death, in the six-penny weekly Truth. In August of that same year, Cobbe wrote again about the Jones case, this time a brief


note for Lydia Becker’s Women’s Suffrage Journal. A letter to the Spectator, 6 October 1877, calls for reforms to the Married Women’s Property Act in response to the case of a woman starved to death by her husband. Just before Christmas that same year, the Times reports on three cases of wife assault in response to which Cobbe writes once more to the Spectator: If we, the women of England, possessed constitutional rights, the very first exercise of our power of political pressure would undoubtedly be to compell the attention of our representatives in the Legislature to the prevention of the crimes of wifebeating and wife-murder. Can you, men of England, wholly acquit your consciences, while you tie our hands and never lift your own?9 The Spectator carried a response so extreme in its language and so useful in its outrageousness that Mitchell ‘cannot help wondering whether she wrote it herself.’10 A second Truth article, ‘Wife Torture,’ published anonymously on 17 January 1878, lays out the key provisions of a bill on domestic assault that Cobbe had drafted by Matthew Davenport Hill, with advice from Lord Chief Justice Coleridge. The Women’s Suffrage Journal summarised ‘Wife Torture’ in its next month’s number, during which time Cobbe was penning her full-length piece for the Contemporary Review. She had prepublication offprints of the Contemporary Review article readied in March for lobbying the government. Another part of the answer to the question of Cobbe’s use of imperialist language draws upon what we know about Cobbe’s prior journalistic work on domestic violence in the Echo. Her leaders there show us that Cobbe took deliberate care to present feminist demands overall as ‘unexceptional.’ Her leaders on married women’s property and divorce, as we have seen, urged again and again that the answers to the problems that divorce court trials revealed lay not in extraordinary logic and intervention, but in the application of already existing arguments and institutions for human rights and responsibilities to women’s circumstances. Her leaders were adept in showing precisely how contorted is the social logic, and so how misshapen the legal structures, that denies women essential property and legal rights.


Her leaders on domestic violence, however, unfolded quite differently. First, they show that Cobbe did not rely upon the imperialist language she comes to employ in ‘Wife Torture.’ Several early leaders, including ‘The Right to Beat a Wife’ (17 January 1870) and ‘Violent Assault Made Easy’ (15 September 1871), refer economically to wives as slaves, but the analogy is not prominent in the extended analysis of the leader. As often, leaders compare wife abuse to animal abuse, wondering in the case of Mr Kelly, for example, whether he had mutilated frogs, flayed cats, beat donkeys and set fire to oiled rats. Rather, the leaders embody Cobbe’s decision to represent domestic assaults as an exceptionally telling degradation of women that demands intervention and exceptional language. As the leaders repeatedly insist, domestic violence requires the deliberate unmasking of the public collusion in social narratives or public sentiments that perpetuate domestic violence: the bystanders who repeatedly decline to help assaulted women; the magistrates whose inadequate punishment of convicted assailants reveals a legal acceptance of the relative smallness of the crime. Yet, another part of the answer must address the specific highprofile periodical in which Cobbe places this work.11 Cobbe’s April 1878 article was her fourth to appear in the Contemporary Review, following substantial pieces on vivisection, women’s healthcare and a reply to criticism of the latter.12 It appeared alongside articles on India, John Stuart Mill, miscarriages of justice and a theological symposium, entitled ‘Future Punishment.’ From her first 1877 publication, ‘Mr Lowe and the Vivisection Act,’ to a 1900 obituary for James Martineau, Cobbe wrote a total of fifteen articles for the Contemporary Review. Eight of the articles took up a range of theological and philanthropic issues, four articles dealt with vivisection, with the remaining three (including the reply) taking up feminist concerns. The Contemporary appears to be the primary venue for Cobbe’s periodical writing during this period. Several factors affect our understanding of this choice of venue. Cobbe’s long-standing publishing relationship with the Theological Review ended in October 1877 when that periodical was in the midst of what would be a long winding down period, finally folding in 1879. She had written twenty-one pieces for the Theological on theological and philanthropic concerns, some of which, like ‘Fitness of Women for the Ministry’ and ‘Women’s Work in the Church,’ brought a femi-


nist analysis of women’s work forward to that periodical’s audience. Cobbe’s work as leader writer for the London daily Echo had also ended in 1875 with the selling of that paper, and it may well be that she was looking for new sources of income.13 Another similarly long-standing relationship with Fraser’s Magazine, which began in June 1861 and ended in March 1870, produced twenty-seven articles, including many of those which brought her national attention and for which she is now bestknown. ‘What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?,’ for example, caught the attention of Barbara Leigh Smith and the ladies of Langham Place. Her work for the Contemporary Review, then, in the thirteen-year span of her involvement, constitutes a significant portion of her periodical output. ‘Wife Torture in England’ is, indeed, her last substantial periodical piece on women in her long writing life.14 Interestingly, Cobbe’s writing in the Contemporary falls sharply away starting in 1884, as indeed it does across all the periodicals to which she still contributed.15 That was the year in which Cobbe received a £100 annuity, raised by anti-vivisectionist friends, and retired to Wales, where her life partner, sculptor Mary Lloyd, had a life-interest in a family estate. A second legacy of £25,000 in 1891 from a fellow anti-vivisectionist enabled Cobbe and Lloyd to move to the estate’s manor house, from which Cobbe continued her writing and anti-vivisectionist activism at a slower rate, publishing corrected reprints of earlier work and writing her autobiography.16 The history of the Contemporary Review in 1878 is also important background for any reading of Cobbe’s article. Laurel Brake has identified the controversy surrounding the Contemporary as an ‘eruption of the press in which the constituent elements were momentarily hyper-visible and palpable’.17 Certainly, 1877 marks a turbulent time in the periodical’s history that frames ‘Wife Torture in England’ in compelling ways.18 Long distinguished as an open platform journal, a ‘new species of religious periodical literature’19 with a history of courting controversy, the Contemporary Review in 1878 was only just emerging from a protracted period of highly public and bitter restructuring, both financial and editorial, that saw the ousting of its editor and a change in ownership. Alexander Strahan, the journal’s publisher and primary owner, lost two-thirds of the shares of his periodicals and his position as business manager.20 A very public debate of the effects of these changes on the


Contemporary’s literary merit between the various camps involved in the whole mess intensified the scrutiny. The ousted editor, James Thomas Knowles, who ran the journal from 1870 to 1876, was responsible for much of the high regard the Contemporary enjoyed, bringing Tennyson, Cardinal Manning and other members of the Metaphysical Society, Gladstone, Arnold, and T.H. Huxley, amongst others, into its stable of writers, and increasing its circulation from 2000 to a reputed 8000 readers.21 It was Knowles too who had the eye for controversy and a gift for timing. Under his guidance, the Contemporary Review became an important venue for debates on culture, evolutionary theory and scientific materialism. His famous October 1874 issue, which went through 10 editions, gave space to Arnold to respond to objections to his recent ‘Literature and Dogma’ essay, and revelled in Gladstone’s attack on the doctrine of papal infallibility in ‘Ritualism and Ritual.’ By December 1877, however, Knowles was out, the victim of Strahan’s interminable financial troubles and facing accusations that, under the influence of T.H. Huxley and Tyndall, he set about to transform the Contemporary into ‘an atheistic organ’.22 This accusation was part of a larger strategy by Contemporary Review publisher, Alexander Strahan, to raise new funds for the journal from Evangelical backers and so regain financial and editorial control of the journal. Yet it also generated considerable problems for Strahan; potential backers worried that the open platform, controversial style that had made the Contemporary so successful was about to be harnessed in the name of orthodoxy. Strahan and Knowles exchanged letters in the Times bitterly presenting their versions of recent events, with Strahan vehemently denying rumours that the Contemporary was to be made ‘properly orthodox’: ‘The Contemporary will keep on its own course … free from narrowness, bigotry and sectarianism’.23 Patricia Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan’s biographer, suggests that the Contemporary Review never fully recovered from Strahan’s poor financial management and Knowles’ departure. For Srebrnik, the Nineteenth Century, which Knowles goes on to found and edit, assumes the high position that the Contemporary once claimed through a similar mix of open platform editorial policy, high-profile writers and controversial content. In contrast, the Contemporary’s efforts to consolidate its position as a leading monthly periodical are deemed to be ineffectual overall, with the Nineteenth Century the


clear front-runner in the race for periodical supremacy. More specifically, she suggests that the falling off of the Contemporary can be charted, not simply in declining circulation figures, but also in its noticeable deficiency in famous names and its turn to such hobby horse writers as the duke of Argyll on natural and spiritual law and Cobbe on vivisection. It is possible to see this moment as one of the most conservative in the Contemporary Review’s run. If we choose to use attention to the Woman Question, however, as one gauge of political position, the Contemporary Review under Knowles and then Strahan looks remarkably consistent, if not slightly improved after Knowles’ departure. The Contemporary Review before Knowles provided limited space for writings on the Woman Question. Under his editorship, between 1870 and 1883, it published seven articles on the Woman Question, five of which were signed by women. But from 1873 to 1877, when Knowles left, no other identifiably feminist, or women-centred, writings were published. With Knowles’ departure, the Contemporary Review appears to have made some changes that opened up its platform a bit more widely to women. Laurel Brake notes the larger space allotted to literature and the arts in the Contemporary Review after 1877, increased attention that Brake reads as multiplying opportunities for women as writers and readers of the Contemporary Review (57–58). Srebrnik ends her account of Alexander Strahan’s publishing life noting the continued inclusion of the Contemporary Review in contemporary lists of weighty, authoritative periodicals. The Contemporary Review then, for all this public wrangling, remained an established, relevant periodical, treating theological, social, and political topics with authority. But the ‘eruption of the press,’ signified by the conflict over issues of ownership, editorial policy, and the importance of controversy to periodical platforms, is an important context for Cobbe’s article. At one level, Strahan’s turn to a figure like Cobbe can be read as a continued effort to court controversy by inviting high-profile writers to contribute articles on difficult, sensational topics. Though Srebrnik dismisses Cobbe the anti-vivisectionist as a hobby-horse writer, Cobbe in fact wrote on this topic and others for journals, like the Fortnightly Review, that similarly aimed for heterogeneity in coverage of issues. If ‘Wife Torture in England’ is an intentionally provocative choice for the Contemporary, elements of the essay – such as Cobbe’s turn


to imperialist rhetoric or her case catalogue of torture – can, perhaps, be read as part of the journal’s provocative address. To shift focus slightly, we need also to consider the benefits to Cobbe, in particular, and Victorian feminism more generally, that the Contemporary Review might confer at this moment in its history. Certainly, as an anti-vivisectionist, Cobbe would have found the old Contemporary Review under Knowles a less than congenial address. Its attention to evolutionary theory and scientific materialism may well have signaled adherence to a set of principles which Cobbe saw as the root of vivisection’s scientific ascendancy. That said, she was always one for debate based firmly on knowledge not knee-jerk reaction. It would be, I think, simplistic to read her arrival at the Contemporary Review as merely a result of the absence of those topics from its pages.24 Nevertheless, the revamped Contemporary Review with its newly invigorated evangelical remit might well appeal to Cobbe for the very conservatism that others lament.25 It is, of course, very much in Cobbe’s interest to have domestic violence represented as primarily a moral and spiritual issue, perhaps even a conservative one, rather than merely a sign of one’s progressive politics. Though the mechanism Cobbe favours for redress is legal reform, her comparison between the slave and the abused, workingclass English woman appeals to a long established, powerful history of evangelical support for abolition. Certainly, the larger feminist community cheered Cobbe’s intervention, without any apparent concern that she had distorted or limited Victorian feminist analysis of domestic violence in staking her position. In her Life, Cobbe identifies her efforts against domestic violence as ‘[t]he part of my work for women … to which I look back with most satisfaction’.26 She also quotes a letter from ‘a very energetic and prominent woman-worker with whom I had slight acquaintance,’27 which ends: ‘You have love and gratitude from our hearts, I assure you; we live wider lives and better for your presence. I have ventured to write freely on a subject some would find wearisome, but your heart is big and will sympathize; and I am always longing for you to know the active result of your achieved work. This: that poor battered, bruised women are relieved – are safer – and bless you, and so do I, from a full heart’ (541).28 The Englishwomen’s Review, too acclaimed Cobbe’s role in the domestic abuse debate.29


These contexts for reading Cobbe’s article are, it seems to me, plausible, compelling, and necessary. But they too require supplemental context if we are to assess the full range of Victorian feminisms’ constitution and participation in the broader Victorian culture. To that end, what strikes me as additionally necessary is to compare in a very specific way the use of imperialist rhetoric in Cobbe’s establishment writing and its use in the feminist press. In Victorian feminist publications the figures of the Oriental and the enslaved black woman stand on one side of a binary in which those figures are negatively balanced by either the degraded English woman who betrays the Orientalist infiltration of English culture or the civilised English feminist whose emancipation she guarantees through her racialised difference. The figure of the black slave had, in this structure, the particular force of a degradation successfully opposed, a battle already won. In English feminist thought, as Cobbe’s initial footnote in ‘Wife Torture in England’ makes clear, the torture and violence of slavery in America is a thing of the past – a sign of past shame now nearly vanquished from history. As Burton reminds us, the implied comparison in both permutations (the present state of the Oriental woman, the past torture of the black slave) is also the English feminist whose quest for freedom is thus rewritten so as not to threaten but to embody, and indeed accomplish, English advancement and progress, writ large.30 This would seem also to characterise Cobbe’s earliest, and seemingly most fleeting, use of imperialist language. In ‘Wife Torture in England,’ however, the dichotomous relation between the degraded English woman and the Oriental woman and the black slave underpins an argument that is intended to generate a much more specific benefit or effect. The mainstream article uses a foundational feminist metaphor not to make a foundational political point about the condition of English women and progress in general, but to argue for a specific legislative intervention into married, working-class women’s lives. A draft bill outlining the terms of that intervention is attached to the article. Most significantly, Cobbe does not connect her request here to a substantial argument about women’s political rights (though she does point to what she considers to be the natural changes to legislative reform once women are accorded the vote). Nor does she stake out an overt claim or a connection to a role in the Empire more largely, a role


that imperialist rhetoric underwrote in the separate feminist press in the same period. Cobbe’s political terrain is narrowly domestic. Importantly, Cobbe’s consensus-building language, so much a part of her earliest writing on the Woman Question, is strategically adjusted to her tightened domestic focus. There is no slow build-up of agreement, no debating style beginning that might grant a range of views about domestic violence for the sake of argument and that will be shown to be logically flawed. This is argument aimed at ensuring that a specific legal intervention is secured, rather than an engagement with opponents’ opinion in a debating forum (where, of course, change is also the desired end). Cobbe tackles public sentiment and the damage it causes women head-on. She begins by stating simply that various forms of assault are hierarchised in English culture: we must discriminate between assaults of men on other men; assaults of men on women who are not their wives; and assaults of men on their wives. I do not think I err much if I affirm that, in common sentiment, the first of these offences is considerably more heinous than the second – being committed against a more worthy person …; and lastly that the assault on a woman who is not a man’s wife is worse than the assault on a wife by her husband. Towards this last or minimum offence a particular kind of indulgence is indeed extended by public opinion. (133) She charts, too, the manifold ways in which cultural practices, including Punch and Judy shows and the popularity of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, allow domestic violence to be understood as a natural, even jovial, part of English culture. ‘Wife Torture in England’ insists on rebuttal not consensus, primarily of the figure she terms the ‘Ideal Wife-Beater.’ After noting what she understands from her research to be the primary incitements to domestic violence (including alcohol, prostitution, and the sheer friction of cramped, squalid living conditions), Cobbe focuses her rhetorical energies on rebutting the ‘explanation’ for domestic assault commonly supplied, she contends, by public opinion: that the wife had somehow provoked her husband, and so deserved her beating, if not her murder. The ideal wife-beater, ‘the sober, industrious man goaded to frenzy by his wife’s temper or drunkenness’ (145) of public sentiment, does not exist.


Cobbe’s language throughout this section is intriguing. She will not, she writes, ‘venture to affirm that the Ideal Wife-beater is as mythical as the griffin or the sphinx, but I will affirm that in all my inquiries I have never yet come on his track’ (145). Like much of this section of the article, Cobbe here highlights her position as carefully researched and considered, a matter of rational fact-gathering and judiciously weighed conclusions – a contrast to the illogic of a public sentiment that can assert the veracity of a type, the ideal wife-beater, whose existence court trials, government studies, and newspaper coverage does not support. The opening pages of ‘Wife Torture in England’ is brimming with terms that accent the process of thinking through the problem of domestic violence in contrast to the unthinking illogic of those who seek to excuse and explain it away. I italicise here the following words as samples of the terms of rational deliberation and assessment that characterise Cobbe’s article: ‘Thus it comes to pass, I suppose’ (134); ‘In this little anecdote I think lies a compendium …’ (132); ‘I do not think I err much if I affirm’ (133); ‘I imagine’ (134); ‘I believe’ (134); ‘I reckon’ (135); ‘I am convinced’ (137); ‘I consider’ (138). The process of deliberation and assessment of the Ideal Wife-beater yields a firm position. ‘I have insisted much on this point,’ Cobbe writes plainly, ‘because I think it has been strangely overlooked, and that it ought to form a most important factor in making up our judgment’ (145). Her use of the master and slave analogy in ‘Wife Torture in England,’ and the care she takes to explain its use, then, is not designed to kickstart philosophical debate on the felicity of the analogy when used to describe English marriage, as her own comment on its use makes as clear as possible. Cobbe had researched the question, deliberated on her material, and come to her conclusion. The master and slave analogy does not seek to persuade uncertain readers. It is a deliberately piercing representation, aimed at galvanising legislative action by claiming the painful necessity of its use. In other words, her first extended use in the established press of a critique common to the separate feminist community since the 1860s is utilised to insist upon a specific, domestic intervention, not to launch wider arguments. Where separate feminist periodicals increasingly claimed the work of empire as proof and incitement to political rights for English women, Cobbe’s political work in this article is much narrower, though based in the same authorising


language. Conversely, her earlier writings would seem to be a case for arguing that though imperialist thinking overtly structured Victorian feminist analysis of domestic questions, its relative absence in the writings of a figure like Cobbe suggests that despite the generative role of that thinking, the risks seemed high in representing imperialist thinking as part of feminism to the Victorian public. Though the degradations of slavery are imaged as a thing of the recent past, the success of its vanquishing cannot be attached, it would seem, to a larger political platform. That said, it is also important to stress the degree to which domestic missionary work – intervention in working-class women’s lives – is authorised through the force of the imperialist metaphor. The ‘land of darkness […] ugly sounds […] nauseous odours and […] hideous sights’ (136) that is Cobbe’s working-class England is a primitive land yet to be conquered. What then are the specific risks of imperialist language – particularly the abolitionist slave – to a Victorian feminist analysis of domestic violence? One way to register the complexity of the tension between the apparent restraint and the specific application in Cobbe’s usage is to compare her work here with the coverage of domestic violence in the feminist journals. Lydia Becker’s Women’s Suffrage Journal, for example, reported in graphic detail the kinds of assaults and abuses that women suffered, drawing frequently on an imposed parallel between the situation of British women and black slaves.31 In this self-consciously feminist textual space, the full force of the slavery analogy is central to the rhetorical shaping of the demand for large political change. Feminist journals like Becker’s Women’s Suffrage Journal argue forcibly for the political efficacy in feminist-identified communities of the repeated use of a parallel so mildly used in Cobbe in the more mainstream Contemporary Review. But more importantly for my purposes here, the terms of this explicitly feminist usage go some way to providing a more nuanced sense of Cobbe’s specific intervention and importance. Part of what circulates within the trope of the black slave and the Oriental woman for Victorian feminist communities is a political conviction about what structures and characterises the intimate relations between English men and women of all classes.32 It is here, I think, that we find a compelling context for Cobbe’s reticent use in the Contemporary Review of a powerful, and troubling,


imperialist trope, and a nuanced sense of the specific risks she saw herself taking in ‘Wife Torture in England.’ For Victorian feminist communities, the particular strength of the analogy of the female black slave is its ability to voice a feminist critique of sexual intimacy between men and women. As Sanchez-Eppler has argued, the metaphoric link forged by nineteenth-century feminists between the figure of the bound and silent slave and the white woman argued for their shared position as property, as bodies that could be bought, sold and owned. Within this symbolic economy, the figure of the identifiably female black slave further designates what is at issue. Enslaved women’s sexual vulnerability becomes a sign of what is understood but largely unarticulated in feminist communities: the inability of the free white woman to own her own body in marriage.33 For the Victorian feminist, such a sign also implicitly points to the desire to argue for an understanding of sexual and bodily integrity that includes women’s sexual expression. The double power of the figure of the enslaved black woman in nineteenth-century English feminist discourse – to speak the ‘truth’ of English women’s status as property and to embody English feminists’ anxiety about women’s physical and sexual vulnerability – makes the trope dangerously necessary to Cobbe’s argument for legislative intervention.34 She needs to harness the power of the figure to deplore English women’s status as property, so miserably clear for Cobbe in the abject plight of the abused working woman. But she needs to invoke that figure of affronted womanhood for her established press audience without also invoking the figure’s power to articulate a feminist argument for English women’s right to sexual autonomy, an argument she does not want to put into explicit play in this specific context.35 Cobbe’s legislative intervention is to bring together in one act some of the forms of legal redress theoretically available to all women. In particular, her focus is to make locally available to working women the same forms of redress currently obtainable only through the Divorce Court in London.36 This extension and reconfiguration of available law is primarily effected through suggestions for bureaucratic machinery at the local magistrate level, to which Cobbe gathers already available procedures for gaining child custody and maintenance orders. Her contribution is to collect some of the disparate legal procedures available to women, streamlining the process whereby an assaulted


wife could petition for legal separation (known as divorce a mensa et thoro), custody of her children and maintenance support.37 Importantly, Cobbe explicitly does not, at this point, challenge current legislative grounds for legal separation rather than divorce. The beaten wives relieved by her proposed bill would not be permitted to marry again. Indeed, Cobbe worries both that the quasi-legal separation she proposes leaves ‘the separated man and woman liable each to fall into vicious courses since marriage is closed to them’ (164) and that divorce proper (legally termed divorce a vinculo) could ‘act as an incentive to commit the assault in the case of a husband, and an incentive to provoke one in the case of the wife’ (164). Unsurprisingly, then, the enslaved figure in Cobbe’s text is not identifiably female. The physical autonomy of the freed, English slave in this narrative consists in freedom from bodily assault, from physical torture, not the freedom of sexual expression. The issues of women’s bodily integrity and sexual autonomy, and their place on a feminist agenda, was at the centre of Victorian feminist discussion.38 As Barbara Caine argues in English Feminism, the split between feminists like Millicent Fawcett and Elizabeth Wolstoneholme Elmy was one between those, like Fawcett, who considered women’s admission to the suffrage as the mechanism whereby all women’s disabilities – social and sexual – would be addressed, and those like Elmy who saw the suffrage campaign as simply one part of a larger feminist campaign for women’s autonomy that took on marriage and criminal law reform, domestic violence, and issues surrounding child custody as specific, central initiatives.39 For Fawcett and others, the potential sexual controversy surrounding some of these issues muddied the suffrage waters, making it difficult to keep organised feminisms’ forward march towards the all-powerful vote on course. For some feminists like Elmy, these other initiatives, however controversial, were given priority over suffrage in the name of an ‘embodied’ notion of the citizen in which improvement to the social and sexual terms of women’s lives was the material pre-requisite for women’s full participation in the life of the citizen.40 Cobbe’s article on wife-torture circulates within this contested, often divided, space. Making the feminist commitment to women’s bodily and sexual integrity visible to a different public, Cobbe also drastically curtails the full force of that commitment in this space,


pulling back both from a feminist assertion of women’s sexual autonomy and a feminist insistence on women’s political rights. To read these strategies as manipulations or containments that, through their very functioning, may be full of political force but emptied of political meaning for the community from which it originates may well be possible. But much of the feminist historical work available to us tells us that strategy cannot be so neatly severed from feminist analysis.41 The differences between a Fawcett and an Elmy – between a gradualist approach to the erosion of male ownership of the vote, and a refusal to leave married women behind in the fight for suffrage – are analytical and conceptual differences, a range of fine distinctions and blunt oppositions that altogether constitute the field of Victorian feminisms. Frances Power Cobbe making a feminist argument to a non-feminist identified audience – constricting the power of the strong political trope of slavery here, letting it flow powerfully there – is likewise part of that field, with contradictions and dissonances intact.


6 ‘A Crisis in Woman’s History’: Duties of Women and the practice of everyday feminism

In the 1881 preface to Duties of Women, Frances Power Cobbe looked at the women’s movement around her, and pronounced ‘a crisis in woman’s history’: greatly as I desire to see the enfranchisement and elevation of women, I consider even that object subordinate to the moral character of each individual woman. If women were to become less dutiful by being enfranchised, – less conscientious, less unselfish, less temperate, less chaste, – then I should say: ‘For Heaven’s sake, let us stay where we are! Nothing we can ever gain would be worth such a loss.1 Noting a looseness or slipperiness to the cultural meaning of suffrage, and the emancipated woman who would claim it, Cobbe presents herself as compelled to step into the fray in order to offer a strict definition of emancipated womanhood and of who could rightfully claim the vote. Her book, Duties of Women, parses that definition and argues for the careful comportment of all feminist women in a period of great transition. This chapter explores the ways in which Cobbe’s six-part lecture series in 1879, and the printed text of Duties of Women published two years later, grapples with the new challenges facing the feminist movement. Rather than simply read her text as an early example of the negotiations over the meaning and direction of late nineteenth-century feminism, I explore the particular force of Cobbe’s text that gathers from her unique role as a journalist of mid-Victorian feminism who wrote 145


regularly for non-feminist identified audiences. It is not only Cobbe’s concerns about the definition of feminism or emancipation that are significant. It is also Cobbe’s determination to convey this strict definition in her role as a ‘mainstream’ writer on feminist issues that is most crucial for us to note. Importantly, in Duties of Women, the ‘mainstream’ writer addresses a self-identified feminist audience, and one that is as diverse as the term ‘feminist’ is capacious. As Cobbe herself recognises, the audience for her lectures includes ‘old friends’ (191) as well as those who ‘were before unknown to [her] … [but who come] conscious of meeting for a good intent, – that of studying our common duties’ (191). The ways in which Cobbe negotiates audience, how she uses her signature style of address and her reputation as a writer, are central to the ways in which she patrols the representation of emancipated womanhood and the meaning of suffrage. Duties of Women, text and lecture series, is one part of a larger ‘management’ of the meanings and circulation of feminisms that she conducted throughout her long writing career.2 Frances Power Cobbe spoke regularly on suffrage platforms and published pamphlets arguing the case for women’s political rights. Both Why Women Desire the Franchise (1869) and Our Policy (1874), for example, went through multiple editions from the time of their initial publication by the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage through to the end of the century.3 Yet her ideas on suffrage have not attracted widespread attention. Duties of Women has been read primarily as one of Cobbe’s most thorough expositions of her thoughts on women’s duties to themselves and others, placed as a kind of capstone or great summation at the head of her writing on women for twenty years. As Caine suggests, it is the ‘continuity of her ideas’4 on women’s moral autonomy over some thirty years of writing that this text is seen most clearly to exemplify. In many ways, a ‘continuity’ of ideas arguably generates Cobbe’s marginalisation in histories of feminism. Such histories locate the roots of modern feminism in the organising efforts of the 1860s, in which Cobbe was a central player, but move to focus overall on the period, beginning in the 1890s, that saw suffrage emerge as the defining demand of late nineteenth-century feminisms.5 In this context, Cobbe’s Duties of Women and its seeming rejection of suffrage, written when she was nearing sixty years old, can be read as a

‘A Crisis in Woman’s History’ 147

call for a return to a prior formation of feminist identities and organisation. Though Cobbe’s preface suggests that she would willingly risk suffrage for women’s moral character, her statement is a provocative rhetorical gamble, a gesture of confidence in the essential compatibility of suffrage with womanly behaviour that her lectures will demonstrate. At the time of the delivery of the Duties of Women lectures, Cobbe was actively involved in the suffrage campaign. When she brought a shorter version of her successful London lecture series on the duties of women to Bristol in the spring of 1880, Cobbe combined her lecturing with a speech at a local suffrage meeting.6 She also determined not to reprise those lectures in London in order to concentrate, with Mary Lloyd, on working ‘tooth & nail at the Election – putting the screw on all the Candidates in our reach’7 in the 1880 election that saw the return of Gladstone’s Liberals to power. ‘The screw’ is, of course, the screw of declared support for women’s suffrage. Her agitation for women’s political representation and her ideas on women’s duties co-exist in time. Duties of Women is not a ‘suffrage text’ per se, not immediately comparable to one of her many suffrage speeches or pamphlets. Nevertheless, it is a strategic entry into the debate on suffrage, a recapitulation of key Victorian feminist ideas that Cobbe presents as necessary because of the slow emergence – evident in the early 1880s as this text attests – of suffrage as the defining feminist demand. It is Cobbe’s sense that ideas such as she espoused need recapitulation precisely because ‘a crisis in woman’s history’ looms large over the everyday practice of women’s moral autonomy, a practice that critically authorises all of feminism’s larger political and social demands. Cobbe gave suffrage prominence in her autobiography, presenting the vote as the catalyst to her many feminist activities when she comes to write up her life in 1894. Her activities in the 1860s, however, show an ambivalence towards a large-scale suffrage campaign at this time.8 Her writing during this period, including ‘What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?’ and ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors,’ also suggests that celibacy and women’s moral autonomy are the key spurs to Cobbe’s galloping entry into feminist activity, not an interest in suffrage as she would later claim in the autobiography.9 Cobbe’s prefatory claims, in Duties of Women, that there are conditions framing her support for suffrage, then, are part


of an ongoing negotiation over the meaning of suffrage in her narrative of political self-formation and as a necessary public sign of feminist activism. In her reading of Cobbe’s Life, Caine’s suggestion that suffrage was not the motivating factor in Cobbe’s embrace of feminist activism is, then, in many ways a moot point. Caine is right to see Cobbe’s autobiography as a response to changes in the women’s movement that compel her to alter the contours of her own awakening feminist consciousness in this formative period in order to locate herself more securely within a movement that had come by 1894 to see suffrage as the legitimate point of entry into feminist activism. As Caine writes, ‘[w]omen’s suffrage had become the central issue in the women’s movement by the mid 1890s, and it is this which explains the prominence which Cobbe gave it in her book.’10 If Cobbe’s Life ‘misrepresents’ the causal links between suffrage and her conversion to feminism, her lecture series in 1879 forms one part of a much larger story about the meaning of suffrage to the women who claimed it. It is how suffrage signifies, rather than the chronological accuracy of its evocation, that matters. We can approach Duties of Women as part of the ongoing negotiation of the representation and the strategic value of suffrage, both within feminist communities and in the ways that feminism is represented and understood by a non-feminist public. Significantly, Cobbe’s Duties of Women stresses how ‘suffrage’ looks to outsiders and the potentially damaging effects of a ‘misperception’ of emancipation on a range of feminism’s political and social goals. Cobbe’s concern with how the demand for suffrage looks to non-feminists was consistent throughout her long political career, and one she would return to after Duties of Women. Writing in 1884 to the American Woman’s Tribune, Cobbe notes that [t]he idea that the possession of political rights will destroy ‘womanliness,’ absurd as it may seem to us, is very deeply rooted in the minds of men; … these fears are futile and faithless, but there is nothing in them to affront us. To remove them, we must not use violent words, for every such violent word confirms their fears; but, on the contrary, show the world that while the revolutions wrought by men have been full of bitterness and rancour … we women will at least strive to accomplish our great emancipation calmly and by persuasion and reason.11


Cobbe’s lecture series and book, Duties of Women, is in effect a conduct book for the appropriate daily ‘performance’ of progressive womanhood – for the practice of an everyday feminism – produced when significant changes in feminist practice, such as the increasing emphasis on suffrage, endangered the large public perception of that movement in her view. The place of suffrage in British women’s history has an extensive literature. Writing about the larger patterns of early models of suffrage history in order to explore the legacies inherited by current suffrage historians, Sandra Stanley Holton identifies and rejects the organisation of British women’s history that tends to see women’s participation in formal politics, such as the suffrage campaign, as separate and distinct from the history of sexuality and reproduction and the history of domestic life. Holton insists that suffrage campaigns, like women’s campaigns for reproductive control or improved education, are always ‘site[s] of gender contestation, where stereotypes of conventional femininity were challenged and overturned, and feminised conceptions of political life and radical protest were promoted.’12 Holton’s earlier work suggests that the roots of the split that she sees in British women’s history lie in ‘the abstract notion of the ‘average,’ or ‘ordinary’ or the ‘typical’ woman’13 who could not possibly also be a suffragist campaigner. One consequence of this split is the loss of connections – what Holton terms the ‘mesh’ – between the sexual and gender politics of home and work and women’s formal political activity, a mesh that was strongly felt by the women who have become our historical subjects. A second consequence relevant here is a diminished understanding of the cultural meaning of the vote to women campaigners. It is Holton’s contention that if current historiography’s focus on the vote limits women’s history, it is because we understand the vote in a restricted way rather than the inherent limitations of the vote itself. For women like Cobbe, a suffragist, the vote was one way to ‘challenge both prevailing understanding of what it meant to be a woman, and the ideology that asserted the separateness of domestic and public life by arguing the significance of values associated with domestic roles for a reordering of society in general’.14 In this context, reading Duties of Women primarily as a continuation of ideas first articulated twenty years earlier, an 1881 articulation of ‘out of date’ feminism that stresses ‘duty,’ overlooks what the lecture series and text can tell us about the mesh between


women’s political and domestic lives in this period. Changing protocols in calling for the vote, alongside changing conventions for marking emancipated behaviour, clearly threaten to rend apart the mesh as Cobbe experienced it, even as she retains her belief in the value of the goal. Those changes – the growing split over the enfranchisement of married women, the calls to alter the forms of political protest – obscure what Duties of Women can tell us about our understanding of the complex meanings of suffrage to the very women who called for it so loudly and for so long. That Cobbe’s text went through three English and eight American editions suggests that these complexities of suffrage are ones she shared with many others. Her lecture series aims to strengthen the connections, as she understood and lived them, between women’s political action and their domestic lives. Holton’s work on the current historiography of British women’s suffrage, in which Cobbe is a bit player and which has no place for Duties of Women, offers one way that might explain our impulse to categorise Duties of Women as a text out of time, a lecture series out of step with what we know to be the coming changes in late nineteenth-century feminist activism. Cobbe’s awareness of suffrage as a site of gender contestation, as an arena wherein collaborators and opponents alike compare and confront different meanings of womanliness and its relation to political emancipation, compels her to publicise her framework for feminist practise, and so produce a handbook for what feminists look like and what they do. If Cobbe opens Duties of Women by asserting a limit to the allure of suffrage she nonetheless takes great care to map out the meaning and the utility of the vote. It is a meaning suffused with a belief in the powers of womanly influence – that central value born from women’s domestic roles – as a political tool. With women seemingly poised on the brink of rejecting their domestic duties – very astutely enlarged and broadened through Cobbe’s six lectures – comes the potential loss of that political tool just as women are starting to taste its powers in the municipal franchise, and see it – as they will time and time again until 1928 – as nearly within their grasp.15 Insisting on the potential for damage in a suffrage won by wrong-headed tactics, Cobbe provocatively uses the increasing emphasis on suffrage to remind her feminist audience of the larger meanings framing that political claim, offering her audience her understanding of just why it all matters so much.


Cobbe originally delivered Duties of Women (1881) as a course of six lectures in London and Clifton, outside Bristol. In London, the lectures took place at the Westminster Palace Hotel, a public-speaking and entertainment venue used for a range of political causes and social entertainments. That Cobbe spoke there is proof of her high public profile and her ability to pull an audience. Approximately 150 people attended the talks by Cobbe’s own reckoning.16 In Clifton, a town with a long and venerable history as a suffrage and abolitionist centre as well as home to many of Cobbe’s most long-standing friends from her Bristol days at the Red Lodge with Mary Carpenter, a shorter version of the lecture series was hosted by suffragist Agnes Montgomerie Beddoe.17 The organisation necessary to pull off such a series is prodigious, if also second-nature to an activist in feminist and anti-vivisectionist campaigns. In her comprehensive biography of Cobbe, Sally Mitchell suggests that the impetus behind Cobbe’s lecture series was at least in part financial. Living in London with Mary Lloyd was expensive, and Cobbe insisted always on paying her full share of the costs of their life together. Her last well-paid piece of writing had been ‘Wife Torture in England’ in April 1878. However motivated, Cobbe drew upon her well-honed journalistic skills and her thriving network of feminist friends and contacts to put the series together. On 4 October 1879, the following advertisement appeared in the Spectator, a daily newspaper where Cobbe wrote occasional reviews: MISS FRANCES POWER COBBE proposes to give (to Ladies only) next month in London, a Series of ADDRESSES on the DUTIES OF WOMEN. Each address to be followed by a free Discussion. Tickets for the course, £2. For Prospectus and Tickets, apply to Miss GREEN, 80 Upper Gloster Place, N.W.18 A week or so later, on 15 October 1879, the Englishwoman’s Review made a further appeal for subscribers to Cobbe’s ‘Lectures to Ladies,’ noting that ‘unless there is a sufficiently general response to the project it will be relinquished.’19 Still later in the Woman’s Suffrage Journal, edited by her old friend Lydia Becker, Cobbe baits the hook by inviting any woman ‘who may feel inclined to debate anything which I may advance … [to] speak freely on the subject at the close of each address.’20


This last invitation stamps Cobbe’s lecture series with the spirit of collaboration and debate that is so much a part of her writing in the established press. The changes that Cobbe makes to her lecture transcripts in subsequent editions of the lecture series bear witness too, as we shall see, to the seriousness of the call. If the announcement in the Woman’s Suffrage Journal was good marketing, it was nonetheless marketing that drew upon recognisable, indeed signature, elements of Cobbe’s writing persona. The invitation reminds us, then, that Cobbe’s address to ‘Ladies’ on a series of winter nights in 1879 can be placed alongside her writings to non-feminist identified audiences in the established press. She anticipates debate, perhaps dissent, however orderly; the promise of her invitation is the promise of a writer who knows well how to engage an audience on contentious subjects. Though the Westminster Palace Hotel audience was overwhelmingly feminist – as the advertisements, a later review in the Woman’s Suffrage Journal, and Cobbe’s own address in Duties of Women makes clear – Cobbe uses all that she knows as an established writer to persuade her audience. Significantly, her powers of persuasion are brought to bear on what she chooses to highlight as her contentious views on suffrage. The very title of Cobbe’s series, Duties of Women, may well be a deliberate strategy to court controversy, of however decorous a kind, in her addresses. Cobbe’s invitation to debate her audience highlights her awareness that, for all that she shares a feminist consciousness and activity with her audience, she is nonetheless addressing an audience that may not agree – with her lectures, her position on the performance of progressive womanhood or, indeed, with each other. Cobbe’s answer to her preface’s opening gambit on the suffrage lies in the clear ‘problematic’ that structures her presentation of material. ‘There can be no doubt,’ she writes, ‘that a great change is passing over the condition of women everywhere in the civilized world’ (23). That change is the result of increasingly successful pushes to reform women’s political, social, and economic place in society. ‘An immense wave is lifting up women all over the world; … we shall find in almost every country of the globe … a new demand for education, for domestic freedom, and for civil and political rights, made by women on behalf of their sex’ (22). Cobbe’s task, however, is not to recount those campaigns or successes, nor is it to rally new converts to the cause of organised


Victorian feminism. Despite Cobbe’s larger conviction that progress is inevitable, she nonetheless characterises 1881 as a year of ‘crisis in woman’s history’ (26). In 1879, Victorian feminists could point to the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act and the 1878 Matrimonial Causes Act, the opening of Girton College in 1873 and the admittance of women to degrees at the University of London (1878) as key passages in their movement, as well as the successful election of 9 women to the London School Board in the very month of her 1879 series. Nonetheless, Cobbe lectures in warning rather than celebration. From her letters, we know that Cobbe was concerned that she would not live to see the vote achieved: ‘I have very little hope left to live to see our suffrage carried. Gladstone has been our ruin’.21 The crisis, as she sees it, has its roots in the potential derailment of the women’s movement by the inappropriate conduct of women who claim to seek political redress for their wrongs, and the unacceptable display or spectacle of emancipation. Cobbe’s sense that the feminist movement is undergoing a ‘great transition’ (25) is the basis for a series of lectures that places front and centre the daily practice of feminism in individual women’s lives, insisting on the vital political significance of women’s private life and of practising an emancipation that is not defined solely by the well-known forms of government agitation, petitioning, and memorialising. Outlining the protocols for the acceptable display and appropriate embodiment of emancipated womanhood, the Duties of Women serves as a handbook for women on the cusp of a great transition, detailing the rules and regulations of daily engagement for ‘progressive’ women. The published account of the lecture series, Duties of Women, retains the six-part organisation of the spoken series. A detailed introduction is followed by a chapter on the ‘Personal Duties of Women’ (by which Cobbe means duties which women owe themselves), and moves on through to the ‘Social Duties’ of women. This latter category constitutes the bulk of the series, with four chapters devoted to social duties ‘arising from relationship,’ duties ‘bounded on contract,’ duties of women as ‘members of society,’ and ending with the duties of women ‘as citizens of the state,’ each having one lecture or chapter. The overall structure suggests the idea of progression from smaller to larger duties; but Cobbe’s intent is to convey the inextricable links between these arenas of duties. She argues for


the everyday duties of women as the foundation for all other duties women are bound to perform – especially the duty to seek the vote. Less overtly marked, but central to Cobbe’s argument, are the three female figures discussed in Duties of Women who are to varying degrees capable of performing their duties and whose (in)capacities mark the territory and type of feminist activism. These women are: first, the servile woman, the still lingering product of an unreformed mid-Victorian domestic ideology, who is called to domestic, social and political competence in the course of these lectures; second, the pseudo-emancipated woman, whose moral laxity endangers feminism’s political reputation and efficacy, and makes her ineligible to respond to Cobbe’s call to competence; third, the true feminist woman, like Cobbe herself, whose own competence is self-evident and whose purpose it is to call others to duty and competence and so mount the case for feminism. These three figures weave in and out of Cobbe’s text as she argues for an everyday practice of feminism that stringently insists upon the difference between a selfless, dutiful woman without the courage or competence for political activism and a selfish feminine Bohemian who lacks a commitment to the collective political undertaking that distinguishes the true feminist. Cobbe’s introduction begins, as befits a text claiming a crisis in women’s history, with a brief overview of what she identifies as three ages in the history of women. She names, first, the Savage Age, in which women were beasts of burden for men; second, the Heroic Age, in which women were ‘not only as free as they now are in England, but specially honoured’ (18); and, third, the age of the ‘claustration’ or abjection of women in the East and South and what Cobbe distinguishes as a ‘subjection severe and stringent’ (22) of the women of Europe.22 The present is named an age of uplift. But, the ‘immense wave [now] lifting up women all over the world’ (22) gathers to it such ‘social disorder’ (24) and such ‘dangers all around us’ (24) that the ‘course toward a free and ennobled womanhood is by no means a secure and safe one’ (24). Cobbe thus insists that ‘the conduct of women themselves during the great transition’ (25) will determine the outcome. The language of this introductory lecture is significant. Recognising that neither retaining the ‘old moral restraints’ (26) nor flinging them all aside is feasible, Cobbe proposes that the


application of [eternal] principles to practical duties must be revised and reconsidered as the conditions of life are altered … Women … have hitherto been treated as minors, and have been taught the duties of minors, – unquestioning obedience and a childlike ductility. Now they are to be Human Beings of the Mother Sex (that is the best definition I can find for them), and their duties must be human. (26) The task Cobbe sets for herself is to ‘adjust all the problems of practical womanly life to this higher and truer view of woman’s nature and obligations’ (27). And though she murmurs appropriately that she ‘wish[es] that some one better fitted for it than I had first undertaken the task’ (27), she nonetheless deems it ‘well that some woman should commence the work; and, for lack of one better qualified, I have attempted it, with a very keen sense of my own presumption in so doing’ (27). Cobbe here draws on her own reputation (in feminist circles and elsewhere) as a thinker or philosopher. Finding it impossible to state the whole ‘Theory of Morals on which [she] proceed[s]’ (27) in this course of lectures, Cobbe directs her listeners to her former publications on ethics. Her readers get, in addition, a footnote listing her publications, Essay on Intuitive Morals (1855), Darwinism in Morals (1872), and Hopes of the Human Race (1874), with the notation that these publications critique the ‘doctrines of the most recent school of moralists’ (28) which categorises moral thinking as an evolutionary adaptation. This gesture to public reputation is part of a signature strategy in Cobbe’s writing – building consensus in debate – here adapted in a critical way. ‘I assume,’ she states, ‘those who hear me to accept the following fundamental beliefs, without which much which follows would be baseless’ (28). Cobbe builds consensus here not by appealing to logic or by ‘admitting,’ for the sake of debate, a set of definitions, as we see her doing elsewhere in her writing. Rather she explicitly identifies herself as adhering to a set of principles that she identifies with her own earlier work, and places that work within a tradition of debate and exchange. The tactic adapted for this overwhelmingly feminist audience, in other words, aims to create consensus by explicitly naming itself as invested, and as political, in its stance.


Her assumptions are, first, ‘that you accept the fact that there is such a thing as DUTY’ (28). Again, Cobbe is careful to demarcate the assumption precisely. She expressly leaves aside the questions of how individuals come to a sense of duty, how individuals know what is their duty, and how individuals exercise free will. But that individuals have a sense of duty and choose whether or not to fulfil it ‘are postulates of which acceptance is indispensable to any moral discussion’ (28). Second, she assumes ‘that you believe in God and in a life for the soul of man beyond the grave’ (28). Interestingly, she records her concession that these beliefs are not ‘absolutely indispensable to the erection of a theory of morals’ (29), but notes that she will refer to them as ‘accepted truths’ (29). The arena of debate, of what is and is not up for discussion, is clearly marked. Third, she assumes ‘that you will grant readily that the Motive of Virtue must always be Virtue itself, and not any ulterior reward, here or hereafter’ (29). Characterising these assumptions as ‘the outline of a very old-fashioned system of morals’ (29), Cobbe pauses only to remind her audience that such working assumptions are a requisite part of any debate without which exchange of ideas is impossible: ‘For the present, you will please accept them, at least provisionally, as the scaffolding of the practical part of our subject which is to follow’ (29). The next few pages of the introductory lecture continue to build consensus with this feminist-identified audience by marking clearly the lecturer’s own investments. The ‘I believe’ and ‘I assume’ of the opening framework is accompanied by some fine-tuning: ‘I cannot ask you to accept [this] without some further explanation, but which I earnestly hope you may be willing to adopt’ (31); ‘According to my faith’ (33); ‘Accept then, again I beg of you, – provisionally at least, while we thus confer on our duties, – this doctrine (or hypothesis, if you will not admit it to be more’ (33); ‘I must explain this doctrine more fully’ (40); ‘Let me, if I may without presumption, speak’ (46). Such phrases are the tactics of a writer accustomed to having to create consensus where likely none exists who here addresses an audience that shares general goals for improving women’s lot (education; marriage reform; the suffrage) but which perhaps comes to those goals from very different locations. Cobbe’s consensus-making here does not need to show logical flaws in a position – the flaws in arguments from expediency, prejudiced claims purporting to be


claims from justice, for example – in order to argue for different ends. Rather, at a time when she sees feminism as on the verge of transition, such phrases are a way of saying, ‘These beliefs underpin my choices. You need to know them, and knowing them, you can choose whether or not to validate my concerns about what faces us now. My prescription for feminist conduct is rooted in these beliefs. You should know – if not share – what they are from the start.’ Having established her working assumptions, Cobbe works methodically through the arenas of duty she has identified. In these chapters, her strategies range from considering and rejecting women’s current daily behaviours through to a ringing endorsement of one of the larger goals of her lecture series, which is the transformation of society through the reform of women’s personal and social behaviours. Cobbe combines what she calls ‘practical caution[s]’ (65) with larger political analyses of the social meanings of certain postures and behaviours. As she does so, Cobbe also switches the female figures whose practices ground her political analysis, from the shrinking servile woman incapable of self-duty to the pseudo-emancipated woman whose interpretation of self-duty falls short of Cobbe’s stringent definition. As a result, we can trace the emerging shape of the figure that endangers feminism, and note Cobbe’s strategies for response. Cobbe’s stress throughout Duties of Women is on weighing the relative importance of the areas of duties she has named, and identifying the misshapen products of the wrong ‘mix’ of duties. For her, the personal duty to ‘pursu[e] … the proper end of our being’ (38) is paramount. The relations she establishes between arenas of duty insists on women’s duty to themselves in order to ‘correct’ what she feels is the most common error that women make: ‘there are,’ she writes, ‘millions of women throughout the world whose freedom is wholly robbed from them, and who for all moral purposes are little better than slaves, and who submit patiently to this [slavery] under the notion that it is a duty to husband or father’ (42). Cobbe vehemently insists that the current view of women’s duty makes only for ‘an aimless and unmeaning patience,’ (15) producing the kind of servile woman who is a threat to women’s very being. Cobbe similarly rebukes women for lying (69), valuing their weakness and affecting a lack of courage (75), and for succumbing to the temptation to manage husbands and screaming (123). ‘There is,’ she


writes, ‘… a terrible want of esprit de corps among women…an unmeaning readiness to smile…a base and servile willingness to flatter men’ (152). These behaviours are together understood as ‘vice[s] of a servile sex’ (70), proof positive that the social conditions of women’s lives, particularly the primary condition of marriage, is ‘irreconcilable with the fundamental basis of morality’ (131). Marriage, as currently conceived, produces grotesque figures, ‘domestic Mrs Machiavelli[s]’ (124) whose obedience within marriage is a form of ‘moral suicide’ (134). Cobbe’s interest in the servile woman produced by midVictorian domestic ideology returns to a concern that, by 1881, had long constituted a signature theme in her work. Her insistence on women’s moral autonomy and her rejection of what she calls the theory of ‘Woman as Adjective,’ characterises her earliest essays, such as her 1862 ‘Female Charity, – Lay and Monastic,’ which rejects organised philanthropic sisterhoods for women because of their imposition of external rules and regulations on women’s moral and philanthropic lives, and her contribution, ‘The Final Cause of Woman,’ in Josephine Butler’s 1869 collection, Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture, which propounds a theory of ‘Woman as Noun’ – as an end to themselves – to combat theories of women as adjectives or as ‘relative’ creatures. Cobbe’s analysis of feminine servility is accompanied by a range of ‘practical cautions,’ which seem at odds with the larger analysis in its almost ridiculous detail. If women are enjoined to ‘Regard screaming as a lise-majeste against womanly dignity’ (83), they are also given a practical plan of action: ‘practise courage, I beseech you, at least as diligently as you practise the piano…Make it a point of honour to be cool, collected, self-reliant…Do all this only for a few years, and you will be surprised to find that, after all, in the small concerns of our smooth English lives, bravery, like cleanliness, is a cheap virtue’ (88). Women are similarly to ensure that there is always water in the dog’s bowl (145),23 and to ‘pay such attention to the position of the chairs and sofas of the family dwelling-rooms as that every individual may be comfortably placed, and feel that he or she has not been left out in the cold’ (148) in the name of women’s agitation for the vote. Cobbe’s instructions here can be at least partly explained by the lecture format. The printed text retains some of the vestiges of the


asides, anecdotes, and examples that peppered Cobbe’s delivery of the lectures. And certainly, for all the jarring impact that such moments have in a text presenting itself as a scientific enquiry into women’s social and political duties, such moments seemingly did not jar Cobbe’s contemporaries. Writing in the Woman’s Suffrage Journal, which had earlier advertised Cobbe’s lecture series, an unnamed reporter attempted to convey her sense of the impact of Cobbe’s voice and lecturing style after hearing two of her lectures. ‘It is vain,’ the reporter writes, ‘to try in short space to give adequate impression of this noble address. The voice now of intense earnestness, now of deep pathos, now of sparkling humour, as Miss Cobbe lights up her subject with some incident or parable, is ringing in our ears as we write, reminding us that reproduction is impossible.’24 But if Cobbe’s practical cautions did not jar her feminist audience, it is also partly because the rhetorical strategy builds on an existing feminist tactic. Reversing the mid-Victorian feminist tactic of picturing women’s entry into the public sphere as an extension of their work in the home, Cobbe exhorts women to strive after domestic competence in the name of political emancipation: ‘If we cannot perform these well, if we are not orderly enough, clear-headed enough, powerful enough, in short, to fulfill this immemorial function of our sex well and thoroughly, it is somewhat foolish of us to press to be allowed to share in the great housekeeping of the State’ (151). And yet, though the rhetoric is one we recognise, I would point also to the particular contribution that Cobbe is making. For her, it is the daily practice of women that both must undergo change, and must be the everyday arena for proving women’s readiness and fitness, as well as pointing to their existing occupation of political spheres of action. An emancipated, non-servile comportment is the primary sign of and the qualification for women’s political life. Though it might seem hard at first to locate Duties of Women in the ‘celebration of womanhood’ that has been labelled the most distinctive feature of her feminism,25 it is a celebration to the degree that it dismisses female incompetence as an insult and degradation to women. Importantly, too, Cobbe’s rhetoric points to the vital role that class-privileged women must play in her conception of feminism, and so the profoundly negative impact on feminism that occurs when such women fail to display the domestic competence that should authorise entry into public fields of endeavour.26


It is Cobbe’s argument throughout Duties of Women that the smallest individual action by a woman weighs heavily in the overall balance of arguments for and against women’s enfranchisement. All of women’s pursuits, in this argument, authorise the organisation for political change precisely because all pursuits speak to the viability of ‘womanly influence’ as a foundational argument in the fight for the vote. Women who scream, gush, or otherwise fail to perform the kind of womanhood Cobbe agitates for, endanger not just their own moral stature, but the larger political movement for emancipation. For Cobbe, like other mid-Victorian feminists, it is woman’s scrupulous moral character that is both a core belief and a central strategy in women’s emancipation. The vote is sought, in the terms of this argument, precisely because it is seen as a mechanism for influence: ‘the individual power of one vote in any election seems rarely to affect any appreciable difference; but…for, little or great, if we can obtain any influence at all, we ought to seek for it; and the multiplication of the votes of women bent on securing conscientious candidates would soon make them not only appreciable, but weighty… the direct influence of a vote is but a small part of the power which the possession of the political franchise confers: its indirect influence is far more important’ (181). Cobbe’s Duties of Women participates in the celebration of female competence that is a signal theme of her, as of many other mid-Victorian feminist, writing. If the continuing existence of servile woman is one part of the crisis in women’s history, the pseudo-emancipated feminist is the other. Like servility, pseudo-emancipation is detected in the daily behaviours of women. Drinking is one such behaviour that Cobbe is particularly keen to dissociate from feminism’s public image. Accordingly, she offers both a social analysis and a word of ‘practical caution’ on women’s temptation to drink. Such temptation is traditionally understood as ‘the prostration of the will’ (68) and a loss of self-control, something that the servile woman must regain. But Cobbe is more concerned that it is the ‘fashion just now to say that women are learning to drink to excess’ (68), a fashion she understands as part of a ‘wholesale slander’ (64) of women that is politically suspect. She calls on all who ‘have the progress of women at heart’ (64) to refuse to participate in such slander. Here Cobbe tackles both what she sees as a politically pernicious pursuit of self-


fulfilment on behalf of ‘emancipated women’, and rejects any attempt to circulate this figure as a representation of feminism’s political goals. There is in this concern a heightened sense of the ways in which political women are scrutinised and the ways in which any and all negative female behaviour – whether political or not – will be used against feminism’s claims. Interestingly, this analysis does not prevent Cobbe from offering a ‘practical caution’ on the topic of drink: ‘Whatever may be the oscillations of your spirits or strength,’ she intones, ‘I entreat you never to strive to level them up by what men now call ‘nips,’ which are, in plain language, drams. It is these ‘nips,’ taken at odd times, or in secret, which create the craving wherein lies the peril’ (66). The pseudo-emancipated feminist is also the figure around which Cobbe most strongly marks her awareness of the contentiousness of her views, and strives simultaneously to argue the necessity of her analysis. In her discussion of chastity as a duty to one’s own person, for example, Cobbe begins by observing that the women in her audience, ‘women to whom the temptation of a worldly marriage for themselves or their daughters is almost the only form in which an offence against the great duty of chastity is likely ever to present itself as a temptation’ (61–2), are likely ‘to speak very gently and pitifully of the falls of their sisters’ (60). She warns them, however, that the womanliness of their pity is dangerously naïve for feminist community: ‘the growing sense of the duty of such merciful treatment of the fallen is leading not a few in our day to speak as if there was really no “fall” at all, – no change worth mentioning in a woman’s life when she has descended from the pedestal of her maidenly or wifely purity.’ (60) Believing absolutely that ‘the most vice-enthralled poor wretch, reeling out of a ginpalace, will cast off, some time or other in the blessed future, all pollution as a snake casts its slough’ (61), she nonetheless insists that ‘it is no mercy to any misguided woman, nor to the community, to speak as if it were a small matter for the crown of womanly purity to be cast in the mire’ (61). That small aside, ‘nor to the community,’ makes clear that part of Cobbe’s concern in tracing the difference between the proper gentle pity owed ‘fallen’ women and mistaken absolution, ‘as if there was really no fall at all,’ now increasingly on offer, is the effect on the feminist community of women she addresses.


This brief discussion of chastity is the first of several points at which Cobbe links concerns surrounding the sexual ‘fall’ of women, the feminist community’s response to such women, and the potential connection she sees being made between feminism and unchaste behaviour. In a discussion of chastity as a social duty formulated in the marriage contract, her exhortation is strongly worded: Many of you will think me harsh for saying it; but it is my deliberate opinion that when a woman has committed the enormous double crime, personal and social, of violating the law of chastity, and doing her husband the mortal wrong of breaking her marriage oath [of fidelity], it is fit and right that the society which she has outraged should close its doors to her hereafter. (120–21) She returns to insist more precisely on the particular need for feminist women to be seen to reject marital infidelity. ‘You must awake,’ she exhorts her feminist audience, ‘if you mean to be the pioneers of a nobler career for your sex, to the charge which lies on you not to use your liberty for a cloak for license.’ (135) The stakes are, she makes clear, very high: There are women who call themselves ‘emancipated’ now, who are leading lives, if not absolutely vicious, yet loose, unseemly, trespassing always on the borders of vice, – women who treat lightly, and as if of small account, the heinous and abominable sins of unchastity and adultery. For God’s sake, my young friends, beware of such women! Shun them, and repudiate them as representations of any emancipation which you desire to share. Whether in the highest ranks, among ‘fast’ ladies of fashion, with their indecorous and undignified habits (smoking with the men of their society at night in smoking-rooms, and so on), or in the middle class, the Bohemianism which, to young girl-students, seems so enchanting after the plodding ways of home, – in both, this pseudo-emancipation is equally to be condemned and denounced as having absolutely nothing in common with the movement for the true progress of women (135–36).


Importantly, Cobbe’s depiction of ‘false emancipation’ – the drinking, smoking and Bohemianism she vaguely names – does not posit alternative political understandings of women’s agitation for political rights. Nor does she see such women as products of an ideology gone awry, as is the case with servile women. The women who threaten Cobbe’s Duties of Women are not ‘different kinds’ of feminists offering different models of emancipated womanhood. Instead, these women move through Duties of Women as representations that must be entirely dissociated from feminism itself, and presented as signifying only what non-feminists have come incorrectly to believe about feminism or a narrow opportunistic grab at what feminism’s entry into nineteenth-century political life has opened up for women. They circulate outside of feminism as it is constituted in Cobbe’s text. The resulting strategy is to empty such women’s behaviour of any claim to political meaning, stressing instead the dangers to suffrage agitation that lies in pseudo-emancipation. If the servile woman, sufficiently fortified, can become the true feminist Cobbe advocates, the pseudo-emancipated woman cannot. Her inappropriate pursuit of her duty to herself seemingly negates any possibility of participating in feminism’s progress. These women are, simply, the enemies of feminism. Though the pseudo-emancipated woman receives less textual space than the servile woman in Cobbe’s text, I would argue that she nevertheless looms largest over Duties of Women. The political stakes in the public mis-recognition of feminism in that figure are higher.27 Pseudo-emancipation cannot be seen to be a possible off-shoot of true feminist agitation. Cobbe implores her audience: to aid with all our power of example and voice to show that liberty now, for the women of England, shall have a different result … . And let us … take uttermost precaution that we adopt no habits, assume no freedoms, which, even if they might be safe for ourselves individually, might be unsafe for other women. Better to forego for a time some of the privileges which our sex shall hereafter enjoy than imperil by any laxity, any want of caution and wisdom now, the whole character of this great reformation (178). It is clear from this excerpt that the behaviour itself is not antifeminist or even unworthy of being claimed as feminist. Note that


Cobbe suggests that some of these habits and freedoms are indeed the privileges that feminists seek for all women in the future, and which are ‘safely’ enacted now by some individual women. It is the larger unprepared, uneducated and hostile public’s perception of these freedoms that must be actively shaped and secured by a strong repudiation of them now, a turning against them in the present. In many ways what is most important about Cobbe’s rejection of the Bohemian, pseudo-emancipated woman is its timing. In 1881, the year of Cobbe’s lectures and publication of the book, the New Woman had not been named, with Sarah Grand’s ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’ not appearing in the North American Review until 1894. Yet the genealogy connecting Cobbe’s Bohemian woman, the descendant of the 1870s ‘Girl of the Period,’ to the Revolting Daughters of the 1880s, and so to the New Woman is strong.28 Interestingly, many of Cobbe’s strategies in Duties of Women anticipate what will become signature tactics of rejection in the 1890s. As Barbara Caine has shown, part of the strategy of journals such as the Woman’s Signal in the 1890s (to which Cobbe contributed) was to recuperate the figure of the New Woman by redefining her behaviour in accordance with accepted principles whilst also condemning many portrayals of the New Woman as viciously false, as we see Cobbe doing here.29 What is particularly distinctive about Cobbe’s Duties of Women and the strategies of its critique of the pseudo-emancipated woman is her choice of textual/lecture address. She uses, amongst others, the form of the guide or manual that we now associate primarily with those who both advocated and produced the very domestic ideology of womanhood that Cobbe rejects as propounding a theory of ‘Woman as Adjective,’ and yet is also the source of the model of sexual difference that underpins Cobbe’s own political projects.30 The generic resonances with the hand-book or conduct book were certainly heard, and made explicit, by the wider audience of Cobbe’s book. The eighth (and last) American edition of Duties of Women, published by the Woman’s Temperance Publication Association in 1887, is the inaugural title in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s ‘Library for Local Unions’ series. Frances Willard explains the rationale behind the W.C.T.U’s decision to publish Cobbe’s book as part of a course of reading aimed at the workers in the movement who are seen to be at risk of becoming overly narrow


workers in the temperance cause, and so to need ‘education, information…to have a broader outlook, and a more intelligent insight into the great movements of civilization.’31 In her introduction, Willard makes clear that Cobbe’s book will circulate as a conduct book for the W.C.T.U’s membership: Ever since reading Miss Cobbe’s ‘Duties of Women,’ I had hoped to see it used as a text-book in the schools, and as our publishing house grew in power, it became with me an earnest wish that this noble book might bear our imprint, and thus go with added interest to our constituency in the mighty school of the W.C.T.U.32 Willard also claims the distinctiveness of this conduct book written for women by a woman. Noting that a ‘distinguished man [unnamed] said of it, this is “a veritable hand-book of noble living,”’ Willard insists that ‘we have here a unique volume, quite unlike those that men have written on the same theme for our behoof. To be sure it draws anew the “sphere of woman,” but makes the circle thereof large as the equator; nay, immense as the ecliptic; or, to be still more accurate, limitless as the sidereal heavens… . This is a book that could not have been written save on the threshold of the twentieth century. Individuality, balanced and benignant, as the prerequisite to successfully fulfilling all of life’s sacred relationships and solemn trusts, is the basis of its argument.’33 Cobbe’s determination to use a conduct book form is compelling in a number of ways. The genre, which arguably reached its fullest flowering in the 1840s, is a link back to Cobbe’s formative years as a young woman living on her father’s estate just outside Dublin. Though Cobbe makes clear in her autobiography that such conduct books would not have formed the staple of her own reading, they would certainly have been known to her. The complex interplay between this older text form and the content of Cobbe’s remarks is vital to understanding the intervention she is making. Certainly, the kind of woman who would theoretically emerge out of an complicit yielding to or engagement with conduct book teaching is the object of feminist analysis in the period between 1861 and the time of Cobbe’s lecture series. But, just as we can read the lectures and book as a reclamation of conventionally domestic feminine spheres of


influence to the feminist cause, so too can we see Cobbe reclaiming an earlier textual form strongly associated with that traditional sphere for the ends of feminism. Cobbe’s use of the form speaks to her particular ability as a feminist writer, whose work appeared regularly in the established non-feminist press, to adapt available textual forms for feminist ends. The move is analogous to the movement of feminists who sought to reclaim the New Woman by recasting the meaning of her behaviour alongside naming behaviours not ordinarily associated with that figure as New Woman-ish. Here the conduct book, with its attention to women’s domestic duties, is rewritten as a genre for feminists, in which women’s domestic activity is claimed as a guarantee of the rightness of feminist political activity. The move anticipates, in some sense, the ‘Suffragettes at Home’ photograph series published in The Vote between March and May 1910 that also reclaim the home as a site for meaningful feminist practice.34 In this comparison we can see the value of the conduct book form in appealing to those women who might not identify as feminists, just as The Vote’s photographic series was used, at least partially, to combat anti-suffrage smears of the suffragette as slattern. Indeed, Mitchell shows that Duties of Women became useful to feminist activists in both the United States and Great Britain because its form appealed to non-feminist identified readers. Julia Ward Howe reviewed the lecture series for the Christian Register; Louisa May Alcott used the book to help set up a suffrage club in the face of some reluctance; and the New York Times suggested that ‘it would help convince men ‘that the spectre of the female politician who abandons her family to neglect for the sake of passing bills in Parliament’ is an illusion.’35 It is as the writer of a conduct book for feminism that Cobbe figures prominently in her lecture series and book. The final figure in the trilogy of women who shape the argument in Duties of Women is the ‘true feminist,’ represented in text primarily by Cobbe herself. Authorising her own argument on who and what represents feminism is Cobbe’s own stature and position, her own being, as a successful feminist writer. Carefully placed along the argument’s way in Duties of Women are innumerable references to Cobbe’s own writing on women’s issues, her involvement in various reform campaigns. Cobbe refers to her work over a twenty year career on, variously, women’s health, women’s legal status, wife-torture, marriage


as a contract, the education of women, women’s religious duty, heteropathy (hatred and cruelty directed towards the suffering of others), vivisection and duties to animals more broadly. It is, in other words, Cobbe’s own display of emancipated womanhood, her unimpeachable public reputation as a respected fighter for the cause, that grounds Cobbe’s analysis and judgement of other women. She speaks as a woman well-known, admired, an old-timer who aims for the remembered phrase, and who claims to be counted amongst the figures of feminism to be remembered. And she ends her lecture series with an appeal to the authority – philosophic, political, social, generational – of her public stature. She notes I spent many a day and many a long night studying the science of ethics, and learning what the greatest minds of all ages have thought about it, years before many of you, here present, were born, and in years when you, who are my contemporaries, were perhaps more naturally engaged in dancing and playing, and thinking of love and marriage (192). Cobbe hopes that, as a philosopher of ethics, she has ‘succeeded in leading you [her audience] to think a little more distinctly than you have hitherto done on this great subject, and induced you to bring your more or less vague impressions into shape, and to test them by the larger principles of morality’ (192).36 Despite the valourising of her own stature, the status of Cobbe’s feminism is vulnerable to mis-recognition. She is aware that, at this moment of transition, her own place in that history is an uncertain one and takes precautions to secure it. The preface to Duties of Women, which sounds the clarion call to see women’s scrupulous practice of their moral autonomy as feminism, and is prepared to jettison the suffrage in the necessary pursuit of this feminist goal, also contains a clarification of Cobbe’s status as a feminist activist. Though her purpose in delivering and publishing these lectures is one she knows will ‘become sufficiently apparent as the reader proceeds,’ she wants also ‘to avoid the risk of any possible misconstruction’ (5) of her views. What follows is a plain declaration of Cobbe’s involvement and support with ‘nearly all the movement in England for the advancement of women’ (6–7).


Her audience at the lecture series itself seems to have supported Cobbe’s pronouncements, if the evidence from Cobbe’s autobiography can be trusted. Cobbe’s Life is characteristically sparing with details about this lecture series, as with so many experiences in her life. She tells us simply that her ‘auditors were very attentive and sympathetic, and altogether the task was made very pleasant’37 for her. But, the preface attached to the publication of those lectures indicates, perhaps, that there was something in the nights’ proceedings, something risky in the uncertain embrace of suffrage in her text, that required the unambivalent avowal of feminism it represents. Mitchell reports that there were some complaints about the moralising tone of the lecture series.38 Certainly, her audience had an impact on Duties of Women that is marked in the text’s revisions. Though it is hard to determine precisely, it seems that, between the presentation of the lectures in London and Clifton, Cobbe made some changes in response to her audience. In the published text of her penultimate lecture, Cobbe revisits the question of how to respond to those who have broken the ‘great laws of chastity or of honesty or of humanity’ (156). She had recommended ‘the high duty of women to discountenance, by driving out of society those who are guilty of them’ (156), but had found this recommendation criticised. ‘I have,’ she writes, ‘been greatly blamed for pronouncing this judgment; and, when I first delivered these lectures in London, more than one of my audience treated me as hardhearted’ (157). She quickly clarifies two misconceptions: I spoke of society exclusively as the scene of social amusements: my critics insisted on talking of the whole range of human intercourse. They thought of humble and repentant guilt; while I thought of the spectacle (alas! much more common) of triumphant and insolent vice, flaunting itself in every haunt of pleasure. (157) The matter is of such importance that Cobbe insists that her audience ‘must suffer me to speak upon it more at length’ (158). Once again, she returns to the sense of crisis in women’s history and her particular efforts to use scientific enquiry to guide women out of the crisis that generates Duties of Women: It was almost my foremost object, in undertaking the somewhat audacious scheme of addressing my fellow-countrywomen on our


duties, to do all that might be possible for me to separate the sacred cause of the social and political emancipation of women from certain modes of thought and action which it has been the business of false friends and open enemies to confound therein. (158) It is scientific method, the clear application of the moral framework that Cobbe presents, that solves the problem of dissent between speaker and listeners. ‘[M]y friends,’ she writes, ‘I do not think we need have recourse to this painful alternative between justice to society and mercy to offenders; because I hold with uttermost conviction that it is not mercy, this pseudo-charity, this easy condonation of enormous sin’ (159) Cobbe’s answer to her critics elaborates a détente. In her revisions, ‘quiet intercourse’ between women and the unchaste is now ‘very proper for those who believe they can thereby confer a benefit’ (160). Most strikingly, the definition of the offense is enlarged. In the text revised from her lecture series, Cobbe is not now ‘speaking exclusively of sins against chastity,’ (159), but includes ‘great sins of fraud, and also, emphatically, sins of cruelty’ (159). Only then does she return to consider the validity of the criticism: ‘Let us review, then, once more the question, ‘How ought society to treat person notoriously guilty of any enormous sin?’’ (159). The ‘review’ can now conclude with a thundering reaffirmation of Cobbe’s initial precept, made newly consensual by the clarification and expansion of terms: If I must smile at the smooth jests of the fraudulent director, and shake the hand which an hour ago was engaged in the devilish work of animal-torture, and treat as ‘hail fellow, well met,’ the profligate destroyer of the happiness of a family, – then society must be for me one huge sham … I will not, – I say it deliberately, – I will not, for any good-nature, or even any mercy … act a living lie, pretend to treat as friends the men and women whose deeds I loathe, and pay the semblance of honor to those to whom I know that honor is not due. I will not laugh and exchange the comradeship of an innocent jest with men over whose deeds angels might weep and God must frown. I will not pollute my hand by placing it, knowingly, in that of a villain. (162) If Cobbe’s signature throughout her writing career was built around consensus, these revisions show us that the consensus building works


both ways. Cobbe will alter terms and amend statements when the consensus she ordinarily wields so adeptly as a political tool eludes her. But her consensus building, as we see here, never entails an overall loss of point. Instead, Cobbe’s expansion of terms – from marital infidelity to the immense cruelty of vivisection – permits her to solicit consensus on new grounds that she presents as irrefutable. Cobbe’s focus in her revisions from lecture series to text is on the feminist consensus she deems indispensable to the continuing political efficacy and rightness of the Victorian women’s movement. Interestingly, the strategies that aimed to fashion a functioning accord within the heterogeneous feminist community did not always have effect of eliciting agreement in the world of readers outside that community. Certainly, the consensus building seems not to have had the intended effect on at least two readers. Reviewing the book of Duties of Women in 1881, Richard Holt Hutton, wrote coolly: ‘It does amuse us a little to hear her speaking with such vast indignation of the men who attack her sex generally, when there is a running fire of irony, and sometimes even subdued invective, against men, penetrating the whole substance of the book’.39 Hutton, the editor of the Spectator where Cobbe had placed advertisements for the series, was a fellow anti-vivisectionist, though never a political collaborator of Cobbe’s. He was resolutely anti-suffrage. Lord Shaftesbury, President of the Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection of which Cobbe was Honorary Secretary, admired her lectures and was sympathetic to women’s political emancipation. But, in a letter written 14 May 1880, which Cobbe reprinted in her Life, he also thought she tried ‘to make “the sex” a little too pugnacious’.40 A letter written a few days later on 21 May 1880, also reprinted in Cobbe’s autobiography, clarifies that Shaftesbury, like Cobbe herself, was much attuned to the effects that declarations of political positions can have on those not predisposed to share them: ‘Shall you and I have a conversation on your lectures on the “Duties of Women”?,’ he invites, ‘We shall not, I believe, have much difference of opinion; perhaps none. I approve them heartily, but there are one or two expressions which, though intelligible to myself, would be greatly misconstrued by a certain portion of Englishmen’.41


Duties of Women tells us that the place of suffrage in what ‘counts’ as feminism is very much up for debate in 1881, and that one can argue in the name of feminism for a kind of conduct that many feminists would reject as insufficient. Duties of Women is a feminist text that issues warnings, evaluates behaviours and agitates for the appropriate display of emancipation in order to maintain the viability of women’s fight for the vote. It is also a claim for inclusion and for relevance from a figure whose position as a working journalist on the border between nineteenth-century feminist communities and the wider non-feminist public, to which she addressed a substantial proportion of her feminist writing, means that she is attuned to the shifts in meaning of political actors and acts when they move across that border to circulate beyond the immediate control of feminism itself.42 Cobbe’s Duties of Women is an attempt to control the slipperiness of meaning that the emancipated woman could have in her culture, to patrol the dangers that such messiness might mean to the successful attainment of a specific political goal, by training the category of the ‘feminist’ or emancipated woman into avenues of expression and comportment that she finds acceptable and politically safe in a time of transition. The challenge of Duties of Women is the alternative dynamics of genre and audience, namely the kinds of places we, as contemporary literary and historical scholars, look for feminism. The range of suffrage texts is generous: pamphlets, speeches, committee minutes, plays, memorials, government petitions, letters, autobiography, journalism and novels. The ‘conduct book’ as feminist or suffrage genre requires more of a stretch. And yet, I would argue that Duties of Women is a feminist conduct book, advocating a range of practices and behaviours, put forward when the suffrage begins its emergence as the key feminist goal. Jane Rendall argues that ‘in the complex process of claiming the franchise for “women,” activists defined the different kinds of ways in which women voters might be citizens of the British nation.’43 For the author of Duties of Women, that period of transition necessitates the careful display of liberated womanhood, and for us as contemporary readers, requires an understanding of the many appearances of feminism.


Notes Chapter 1 1 2

3 4 5

6

7

8 9 10 11 12

13

Victorian Feminism and the Periodical Press

F.P. Cobbe, Life, p. 535. For further discussion, see B. Caine, ‘Feminism, Journalism and Public Debate.’ Another central suffrage figure, the Mancunian Lydia Becker, was also involved in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, advocated for girls’ science education, and had aspired herself to a profession in science. She printed Botany for Novices privately, though Star Gazing for Novices remained unpublished. See J.E. Parker, ‘Lydia Becker’s “School for Science”.’ See also A. Kelly, Lydia Becker and the Cause. S. Collini, Public Moralists, p. 53. S. Collini, Public Moralists, p. 55. S. Peacock, Theological and Ethical Writings, notes that Froude, editor of Fraser’s Magazine during Cobbe’s time there, tells her that they risk courting controversy over her theist pieces for the magazine, a salutory reminder that what constitutes risk taking has shifted considerably from 1862 to now. See also J.L. Larsen, ‘Where is the Woman in this Text?,’ who analyses Cobbe’s rhetorical style in Broken Lights as a form of feminist activism. B. Caine, ‘Feminism, Journalism and Public Debate,’ 110. The three volumes of E.K. Helsinger, R. Sheets Lauterbach and W. Veeder (eds), The Woman Question gives a very full sense of how thoroughly the question of ‘woman’ infused Victorian books, papers, and periodicals. For an overview of these points, see W. Houghton, ‘Periodical Literature and the Articulate Classes’ and L. Brake, Subjugated Knowledges. For a discussion of the rise of a professional intellectual class see T.W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life. Qtd in J. Johnston and H. Fraser, ‘The Professionalisation of Women’s Writing,’ p. 249. C.T. Christ, ‘“The Hero as Man of Letters”,’ pp. 19–31. See B. Onslow, Women of the Press. See J. Newton, ‘Engendering history.’ See S. Collini, ‘“From Non-Fiction Prose” to “Cultural Criticism,”’ pp. 13–28, for a discussion of the historical and disciplinary origins of the term ‘non-fiction’ prose and its implications for how we read a range of Victorian material. See L. Brake, ‘On Print Culture,’ for a discussion of the relationship between research tools and possibilities for research in the periodical press. 173

174 Notes

14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27

28

See M. Beetham and K. Boardman (eds), Victorian Women’s Magazines: An Anthology, pp. 1–7. See also M. Beetham, ‘Towards a Theory of the Periodical’ and M. Beetham, ‘Open and Closed.’ S. Collini, Public Moralists, p. 51. B.R. Parkes, ‘Review,’ 361. B.R. Parkes, ‘Uses of a Special Periodical,’ 258–59. See for example M. Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? and L. Brake, Subjugated Knowledges. B. Caine’s work on Cobbe is an instructive exception. Her chapter on Cobbe argues that her ‘ideas were probably better known than those of almost any other feminist’ (Victorian Feminists, pp. 104–5). Despite the prominence that Caine has assigned her, however, Cobbe remains a figure marginalised in much nineteenthcentury feminist scholarship, appearing in footnotes but rarely occupying the centre of the stage. Writing in 1992, B. Caine suggested that Cobbe’s status, and the absence of a definitive biography, can be partially explained by ‘the fact that she was not a great feminist activist’ (Victorian Feminists, 104). Sally Mitchell has recently published her important biography of Cobbe. But I would add that it is feminist definitions of activism that also requires attention, and assert that Cobbe’s feminist writing in the established press constitutes a vital form of feminist activism. P. Levine, ‘Humanizing Influence,’ 294. P. Levine, ‘Humanizing Influence,’ 305. P. Levine, ‘Humanizing Influence,’ 300. P. Levine, ‘Humanizing Influence,’ 294. P. Levine’s most recent work offers a framework for understanding this emphasis, suggesting that examinations of feminism have gone forward under the rubric of social, rather than political, history, with a consequent focus on the biographical and organisational. Levine et al. argue the need for history of feminism to re-embrace political history’s attention to political structures, and an attention to feminism as an international phenomenon. See I.C. Fletcher, L.E. Nym Mayhall, and P. Levine (eds), Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire, pp. xiii–xxii. See also M. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy. S. Herstein, ‘Langham Place,’ 25. S. Herstein, ‘Langham Place,’ 24. S. Robinson, ‘Amazed at Our Success,’ 159–72. S. Collini, Public Moralists, p. 4. The suffrage histories S.S. Holton discusses include M. Fawcett, ‘England,’ C. Biggs, ‘Great Britain,’ M. Fawcett, Women’s Suffrage, E. Pankhurst, The Suffragette, S. Pankhurst, The Suffragette movement, and C. Pankhurst, Unshackled. For discussion of the impact of Romantic conception of suffrage history on the broader definitions of politics in contemporary feminist scholarship on suffrage see S.S. Holton, ‘The suffragist and the ‘average’ woman’ and J.W. Scott, Gender and the politics of History, especially chapter one.

Notes 175

29

30 31 32 33

34

35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48

S.S. Holton, ‘Making Suffrage History,’ 27. Examples of the histories Holton discusses include D.J. Mitchell, The Fighting Pankhursts and his Queen Christabel. Attempting to bridge the gap between history of feminism’s focus on the turn-of-the-century suffragettes and late twentiethcentury forms of militant feminism, B. Harrison examines feminist activity in the period between the world wars in Prudent Revolutionaries. J.W. Scott, ‘Fantasy Echo,’ 293. J.W. Scott, ‘Fantasy Echo,’ 293. J.W. Scott, ‘Fantasy Echo,’ 293. Recent titles on the Pankhursts include A. Rosen, Rise up, Women!, T. Larsen, Christabel Pankhurst, J. Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, and B. Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst. See also M. Pugh, The March of the Women. For a later example of the ways in which the periodical press is both a site of feminist articulation and a place of feminist struggle, see the Fortnightly Review’s published exchange between Frederic Harrison (October 1891, 437–52) and Millicent Garrett Fawcett (November 1891, 673–85). F.P. Cobbe, Life, 535. See M.L. Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law, M. Doggett, Marriage, Wife Beating and the Law, and L. Holcombe, Wives and Property for further discussion of the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act. Cobbe’s presentation of her role in the passage of the 1878 act in her 1894 autobiography is itself shaped by changing emphases in the feminist community about the place of suffrage in feminism. See Caine, ‘Feminism and Biography,’ for a discussion of Cobbe’s presentation of suffrage at the centre of her feminism as a result of changes in 1890s feminism. S. Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe, pp. 186–228. M. Warner, ‘Publics,’ 50. M.W. Turner, ‘Periodical Time,’ 188. D. Liddle, ‘Who Invented,’ 5. D. Liddle, ‘Who Invented,’ 11. Greg, ‘The Newspaper Press,’ qtd in D. Liddle, ‘Who Invented,’ 12. For a discussion of anonymity in the Victorian newspaper press, see D. Liddle, ‘Salesmen, Sportsmen, Mentors.’ D. Liddle, ‘Who Invented,’ 13. F.P. Cobbe, Our Policy, 3. F.P. Cobbe, Life, 67–8. See S. Mitchell, The New Girl; C. Keep, ‘The Cultural Work of the Typewriter Girl.’ D. Liddle, ‘Who Invented,’ 15. F.P. Cobbe, Life, 76.

Chapter 2 1

‘She and I have Lived Together’

Her first article, ‘Workhouse Sketches,’ had appeared the previous year in Macmillan’s Magazine.

176 Notes

2 3 4

5 6 7

8 9 10

11

12

See Wellesley Index, Vol. 2, 303–19, for a general introduction to the magazine that also captures its flavour and style. The petition was presented to Parliament on 7 June 1866. Greg’s article was reprinted as a pamphlet in 1869. J. Worsnop argues that this reprint is part of a conservative response to contain the feminist call for change to women’s legal status in the Married Women’s Property agitation. See J. Worsnop, ‘A Reevaluation of the ‘Problem of Surplus Women.’ Greg’s essay was collected that same year in his Literary and Social Judgements. The fourth edition of that collection appeared in 1877. See Greg, Literary and Social Judgements. M. Vicinus, ‘Lesbian Perversity,’ 72. Wellesley Index, Vol. 3, p. 135. For a precise overview of the negotiations following the group’s failure to purchase the Westminster Review and the set up of what became the National Review, see Wellesley Index, Vol. 3, 135–46. Cobbe stops writing on the Woman Question in Fraser’s, but continues to write there on other topics and for the Theological Review, generally recognised as the successor to the National Review when it folds in 1864. Qtd in Wellesley, Vol. 3, 137. W.R. Greg, ‘Why are Women,’ 436. Further references will appear in the text. Greg’s statistical tables, drawn from the 1851 census, identify the ‘population’ of the North-American and Australian colonies, specifying the numbers of males and females and the ‘excess of males.’ (Greg, 442). These figures identify only the white population of the English colonies. Greg’s analysis of the ‘redundant’ woman problem begins with the imagined nation of Great Britain, interspersed over its geopolitical territories. As Greg’s own numbers indicate, where the question of male-female ‘proportion’ yields a redundant woman problem in Great Britain, those same figures indicate an ‘excess’ of men in the colonies. The Victorians did not discuss an ‘excess men’ question. The terms of the argument Greg sets forth allows us to see the way in which English men’s roles include the ‘burden’ of emigration to the colonies; such work in no way limits the full expression of English manhood. In contrast, emigration is not readily presented in Greg’s article as a woman’s task. Though Greg’s primary ‘answer’ to the redundant woman problem is the regulated emigration of some 440,000 English women to the North-American and Australian colonies, this answer is fraught with concerns: ‘to contrive some plan of taking out such a number of women, especially on a three months’ voyage [to Australia], in comfort, in safety, and in honour, is a problem yet to be solved’ (Greg, 444). For consistency throughout this chapter, page references for Cobbe’s periodical articles are to the collected essays published in Essays on the Pursuits of Women. As L. Merrill notes it was through the extended homosocial world of women artists in Rome that Cobbe met Mary Lloyd. Reminiscing in her

Notes 177

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autobiography, Cobbe tells us that ‘[o]ne day when I had been lunching at her house, Miss Cushman asked whether I would drive with her in her brougham to call on a friend … Then began an acquaintance, which was further improved two years later… and from that time, now more than thirty years ago, she and I have lived together.’ (Life, 392). Lisa Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, chapter 8. I note that Hosmer is at the centre of Cobbe’s ‘What Shall We Do?’ and that ‘What Shall We Do?’ is in turn the centrepiece to the continuous series. Structurally, then, Cobbe builds her series to set Hosmer and all she connotes as the lynchpin of her vision of women’s lives. See J. Newton, ‘Engendering history’ on the ‘able’ article for the established press. The third article in Cobbe’s continuous series, ‘Female Charity – lay and monastic,’ tackles the organisation of women’s philanthropy. It is a powerful rebuttal of Greg’s view that philanthropy is a misguided response to women’s redundancy, perpetuating where it should cure social disease. N.F. Cott, ‘Passionlessness.’ The most authoritative articulation of the normalcy of romantic friendship is L. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men. See also her Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers and C. Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual.’ See M. Vicinus, Intimate Friends, for a reconsideration of the ‘normalcy’ of romantic friendship. Cobbe’s autobiography retains the language of friendship as an adequate cover when representing her life with Mary Lloyd. C. Smith-Rosenberg, ‘Female World of Live and Ritual.’ M. Vicinus, ‘Lesbian Perversity.’ L. Merrill, When Romeo was a Man, 59. See also J. D’Emilio and E. Freedman (eds), Intimate Matters. For a thorough discussion of the gendered reception of Hosmer’s sculpture and her career, see J. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives. The gendered meaning and circulation of Zenobia has received ample treatment by such writers as J. Kasson and D. Cherry. J. Kasson, p. 144. For a full discussion of Hosmer as/and gender trouble, see J. Kasson. J. Kasson, pp. 155–6. J. Kasson and D. Cherry explore the accusations lodged against Hosmer in full. See Cherry, Beyond the Frame, 105–9; Cherry also notes that charges of plagiarism against Hosmer appear to have circulated for some time before the massive public furore over Zenobia. D. Cherry notes that some of the charges against Hosmer, which accuse her of marketing in mass-produced goods, invoke specific class distinctions that deny her the status of artist. The class politics of Cobbe’s defense of Hosmer are also well worth pursuing in a piece that explicitly sets out – as indeed does Greg’s – the particular dilemmas of the middle-class single woman. D. Cherry, Beyond the Frame, p. 114. D. Cherry, Beyond the Frame, p. 114.

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34 35

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37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50

See A. Burton, Burdens of History and B. Caine, English Feminism. D. Cherry, Beyond the Frame, 158. For more on Faithfull, see W. Fredeman, ‘Emily Faithfull and Victoria Press,’ J.S. Stone, ‘More Light on Emily Faithfull,’ and his Emily Faithfull, and M. Frawley, ‘Feminism, Format, and Emily Faithfull.’ A. Easley, ‘Authorship, Gender, and Power,’ 154. In other critical ways, Cobbe departs from the pattern Easley establishes. Cobbe’s writing in Fraser’s Magazine is not anonymous; her full signature, Frances Power Cobbe, identifies the work as by a woman. But she quickly packages and claims her signature as a woman writer identified with progressive causes, particularly woman’s causes. A September 1865 piece for the Theological Review includes ‘Woman’s Work in the Church.’ Except for this piece, none of Cobbe’s periodical pieces proclaim ‘woman’ in their title. Her feminist signature seems in suspension. On a separate note, the Theological Review is considered to be the successor to the National Review (in which Greg’s article appears) as the last in the three great Unitarian journals of the period. If Cobbe retreats from feminism and celibacy for a time, her writing in the Theological Review (and continuing in Fraser’s Magazine) tells us that she does not retreat from the power invested in her signature in these early essays. M. Vicinus, ‘They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong,’ 11. I am indebted to Vicinus, ‘Lesbian Perversity,’ for my summary of the Codrington divorce case. ‘Codrington v. Codrington and Anderson,’ Times (30 July 1864), 10. Qtd in M. Vicinus, ‘Lesbian Perversity,’ 75. ‘Codrington v. Codrington and Anderson, Times (18 November 1864), 8. Qtd in M. Vicinus, ‘Lesbian Perversity,’ 79. ‘Codrington v. Codrington and Anderson,’ Times (30 July 1864), 10. Qtd in M. Vicinus, ‘Lesbian Perversity,’ 81. ‘Codrington v. Codrington and Anderson,’ Times (23 November 1864), 11. Qtd in M. Vicinus, ‘Lesbian Perversity,’ 82. M. Vicinus, ‘Lesbian Perversity,’ 86. The trial began in July 1864, closed after three days, and quickly reopened in November. Joseph Parkes to Bessie Rayner Parkes, August 4, 1864, Girton College, Cambridge. Qtd in M. Vicinus, ‘Lesbian Perversity,’ 82. ‘But I do know that this year Mrs C & col. a. have been together at the Princess’ St. house.’ Joseph Parkes to Bessie Rayner Parkes, August 4, 1864, Girton College, Cambridge. Qtd in M. Vicinus, 81. Joseph Parkes to Bessie Rayner Parkes, November 23, 1864, Girton College, Cambridge. Qtd in M. Vicinus, 82. M. Vicinus, 82. M. Vicinus, 82. Joseph Parkes to Bessie Rayner Parkes, 2 August 1864, Girton College, Cambridge. Qtd in M. Vicinus, 81. Vicinus traces the resilience of Faithfull’s reputation for mannish appearance. In 1898, three years after

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55 56 57 58 59

Faithfull had died, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy – herself a sexual radical amongst Victorian feminists for her refusal to marry when pregnant – defended Faithfull against what she saw was a misrepresentation in the Woman’s Signal. The editor Florence Fenwick Miller ‘misrepresent[ed] Miss Emily Faithfull, who, she says, was the only one of the early workers who wore cropped hair and dressed in a mannish fashion. This Emily Faithfull never did. I believe for a very short period after an illness she had to wear her hair short till it had grown again.’ Elmy to Harriet McIlquham, 30 November 1898, British Museum, London. Additional MSS 47451, fol.271. Qtd in M. Vicinus, 85. Cobbe presented her own ‘plain’ dress as a matter of economy, noting that she eschewed high fashion in preference for those outfits sewn by her maid. Her attention to this issue suggests that women like Cobbe were under some pressure to ‘explain’ their seemingly unfeminine, because undecorated, appearance. During her time at the Echo, Cobbe was offered the opportunity to choose freely from couture dresses, and laughingly recounts how very unsuitable a recipient of such finery she would be. ‘The Extraordinary Codrington Case,’ Reynolds’s Newspaper (27 November 1864), 4. Qtd in M. Vicinus, 84. Joseph Parkes to Bessie Rayner Parkes, November 10 1864, Girton College, Cambridge. Qtd in M. Vicinus, 91. Emily Davies, ‘Family Chronicle,’ 338, Girton College, Cambridge. Qtd in M. Vicinus, 94. Robert Browning to Isa Blagden, 19 January 1865. Qtd in M. Vicinus, 92. Isa Blagden was a member of the community of women at Rome where Cobbe first met Mary Lloyd, and was known in her circle for her romantic friendships with women. Adelaide Proctor, the recipient of Faithfull’s ‘pretty specimen’ of a lie was a Victorian writer, celebrated in her day as an accomplished lyric poet. She was a best-selling poet, second only to Tennyson. She died unmarried, at the age of 38, from tuberculosis. M. Vicinus, ‘Lesbian Perversity,’ 87. E.K. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 3. M. Vicinus, ‘Lesbian Perversity,’ 94. E.K. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 3. J. Johnston and H. Fraser, ‘The Professionalisation of Women’s Writing,’ 234.

Chapter 3 1

2

The ‘force’ of sentiment

Cobbe published over fifty-nine titles in the years between Essays on the Pursuits of Women and the publication of ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors,’ including eight books, some of which reprinted her periodical materials. See S. Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe, for a complete listing of Cobbe’s writing in this period. J. Rendall, ‘The Citizenship of Women,’ p. 139.

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J. Rendall, ‘The Citizenship of Women,’ p. 138. After challenges in numerous registration courts, the final numbers of women voting in the 1868 election are small. Using the Minutes of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, Rendall reports ‘nine voting in Manchester, thirteen in Salford, twelve in Gorton, ten in Levenshulme and scattered individuals elsewhere, including two in Dublin,’ (‘Citizenship of Women’, p. 149). 9 October 1868, Englishwoman’s Review, 74. Qtd in J. Rendall, ‘Citizenship of Women,’ p. 149. Qtd in J. Rendall, ‘The Citizenship of Women,’ p. 152. See B. Harrison, ‘Press and Pressure Group in Modern Britain,’ pp. 261–95. See M.L. Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law. M.L. Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law, p. 53. Full details on all three acts can be found in L. Holcombe, Wives and Property. The reforms of the 1882 and 1893 Acts are detailed in ‘After the Acts,’ pp. 207–34. Using Elizabeth Wolstenholme and Millicent Garrett Fawcett as examples, P. Levine explores mid-century feminists’ ‘individual and private attempts to live their feminist practices within marriage’ (Feminist Lives, p. 43). See also P. Levine, ‘“So Few Prizes and So Many Blanks”.’ P. Levine, Feminist Lives, p. 42. See L. Bland, Banishing the Beast, particularly chapter four. D. Riley, Am I That Name?, p. 68. M.L. Shanley notes that Dickens’s All the Year Round also published essays on married women’s property law that represented working class women as particularly harassed by the Common Law (Feminism, Marriage, and the Law, p. 60). See for example, F.P. Cobbe, Our Policy, Why Women Desire the Franchise, and The Red Flag in John Bull’s Eye. Cobbe’s ‘Wife Torture in England’ also argues for a specific political change, as do many of her anti-vivisection pieces. Portions of Cobbe’s ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors,’ have been anthologised in C. Bauer and L. Ritt, Free and Ennobled and C.A. Lacey’s Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. The essay is also discussed in B. Caine’s English Feminism, M.L. Shanley’s Feminism, Marriage and the Law, and L. Holcombe’s Wives and Property. B. Harrison, ‘Press and Pressure Group,’ 285. B. Harrison, ‘Press and Pressure Group,’ 263. B. Harrison, ‘Press and Pressure Group,’ 284. B. Harrison, ‘Press and Pressure Group,’ 282. F.P. Cobbe, ‘Criminals,’ in S. Hamilton, Criminals, p. 108. Further references are to this edition and will appear in parentheses in the text. L. Holcombe, Wives and Property, p. 144. See L. Holcombe, Wives and Property, chapter 7, for a discussion of the presentation of reform in the House of Commons.

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Like Caroline Norton before here, Cobbe renders an obvious point memorable. Norton wrote, in English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century (1854), ‘ALL cases requiring legal interference, are exceptional cases; and it will scarcely be argued that a balance must first be struck in numbers, and instances of wrongs be reckoned by the dozen or the gross, before justice will condescend to weigh the scales’ (2). S.S. Holton, ‘Free Love and Victorian Feminism,’ 209. Qtd in Holton, Suffrage Days, p. 80. M.L. Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law, p. 62. Shanley’s evidence is drawn from writings that feminists such as Josephine Butler, Julia Wedgwood and Priscilla Bright McLaren circulated as part of larger debates on women’s suffrage and women’s place in English society. Some of those writings too, like Bright McLaren’s are from a much later date (1880 – in the lead-up to the passage of the second Married Women’s Property bill), and were published under the auspices of groups readily identified as progressive. The National Association for the Promotion of the Social Sciences, for example, whose Transactions for 1880 contain Bright McLaren’s remarks on the power question in marriage, provided the legal expertise that helped to draft the legislation on property law reform first debated in the House of Commons. Its sub-committee on Jurisprudence and Amendment of the Law produced the bill, drafted by Richard Pankhurst. Similarly, Butler’s Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture (1869) was, like Cobbe’s own Essays on the Pursuits of Women, published explicitly as a contribution to the Woman Question. The Butler collection included Wedgwood’s article on ‘Female Suffrage, Considered Chiefly with Regard to Its Indirect Results’ and Cobbe’s own ‘The Final Cause of Woman.’ M.L. Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law, p. 48. M.L. Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law, p. 68. P. Levine, Feminist Lives, p. 47. P. Levine, Feminist Lives, p. 47. See S.S. Holton, ‘Free Love and Victorian Feminism.’ See also Holton, Suffrage Days. Faderman points out that the jobs available to working class women in this period were unlikely to allow them to be self-supporting in the way that Cobbe imagines in ‘Criminals.’ Moreover, she suggests that it is not until the late nineteenth-century that the increase in employment opportunities for middle-class women would make such households more common. See L. Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, p. 18. Levine, Feminist Lives, 46. See the introduction to C. Hall, K. McClelland and J. Rendall (eds), Defining the Victorian Nation, particularly 25–6.

Chapter 4 1

‘Speaking in Fleet Street’

S. Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe, pp. 186–228.

182 Notes

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12 13

See B. Onslow, Women of the Press, for invaluable documentation of women’s work in the Victorian press. Both Eliza Lynn Linton and Harriet Martineau, among others, wrote for the newspaper press. Martineau’s work in the Daily News, writing on women’s education, political rights, health, marriage laws, etc., comes closest to the kind of work that Cobbe did. It is important to mark the key differences between them. B. Caine has noted the ways in which Martineau’s autobiography ‘reveals the power structures which brought such suffering in her life, and at the same time refuses in any overt way to see her life as in itself making a case for feminist rebellion’ (‘English Feminism, p. 71). She also points out, along with S. Hoecker-Drysdale, that most of Martineau’s newspaper work was written under a male pseudonym. Caine reads Martineau’s use of the pseudonym as emphasising ‘her disinclination to see herself or her own position as illustrative of the broader situation of women’ (English Feminism, p. 70), comparing this ‘lack’ to Josephine Butler’s upfront and ‘signed’ call to all women to join each other in the fight against sexual oppression. In comparison, Cobbe’s work on the Echo was anonymous, as were all leader-writers, whilst her work in the periodical press was variously signed, unsigned, and initialled as the value and meaning of ‘signature’ shifted over the great changes in the press during the period she worked. It is also important to stress that Cobbe’s autobiography includes a chapter, ‘The claims of women,’ that indicates her investment in representing her life, at least in part, as a ‘woman’s life’ and even, as the term ‘claims’ suggests, as a feminist life. My point is not to claim Cobbe as a more self-identified feminist than Martineau, though this may in fact be the case. Rather I would suggest that this range of writing practices by Victorian women engaged in the analysis of women’s lives indicates a need to be careful in claiming an absolute meaning for the significance of signed and unsigned work in the newspaper press. There are valuable case study approaches to the place of gender in the serial press. See L. Brake, ‘The Westminster and Gender at Mid-Century.’ P. Levine, Victorian Feminism, p. 1. Though the sample explored here is small, it is based on reading all of Cobbe’s leaders from 1868–1875. See M. Doggett, A.J. Hammerton, L. Holcombe, and M.L. Shanley. Anne Humpherys, ‘Coming Apart.’ See also M.L. Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law, pp. 22–48 and L. Holcombe, Wives and Property, pp. 88–109. Qtd in B. Leckie, Culture and Adultery, p. 64. Qtd in B. Leckie, Culture and Adultery, p. 64. For a thorough account of divorce law before 1857, see Holcombe. For a study of divorces obtained by private act of Parliament, see S. Wolfram, ‘Divorce in England, 1700–1857.’ See B. Leckie, A.J. Hammerton, and G. Savage. Cobbe’s unsigned leaders have been identified by a combination of stylistic analysis and cross-checking with Cobbe’s Echo scrapbook, dis-

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covered by Sally Mitchell (who has shared her work on them so generously with me) and now lodged in the National Library of Wales. The scrapbook, in which Cobbe kept her accounts of Echo earnings, presents a good, though not exhaustive, checklist for Cobbe’s leader writing. Since many pages are missing, the scrapbook has not been my sole guide for ascertaining authorship. As important has been stylistic analysis of the leaders, which combines looking for distinctive or ‘signature’ constructions, allusions to Cobbe’s known published work, and cross-references between the leaders themselves. Other items in the newspaper, particularly the Notes and Letters sections, have provided occasional clues to leader authorship. L. Brake, ‘Star Turn,’ 210. Holcombe, Wives and Property, p. 179. Holcombe offers an exhaustive account of the bill’s passage through Parliament. B. Onslow, ‘The Inside Story.’ The columns thus participate in what Philippa Levine as identified as Victorian feminism’s characteristic holistic orientation. See Feminist Lives in Victorian England.

Chapter 5 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

8

9 10 11

Making History with Frances Power Cobbe

F.P. Cobbe, ‘Wife Torture in England,’ in S. Hamilton (ed.), Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors, p. 137. References to Cobbe’s essays discussed in this chapter are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text. See, for example, C. Gallagher’s discussion of Yorkshire industrial reformer, Richard Oastler, in Industrial Reformation of English Fiction. M. Ferguson, First Feminists, defines all British anti-slavery writing as ‘intermittent feminist polemic,’ p. 27. A. Burton, Burdens of History, pp. 63–4. A. Burton, Burdens of History, p. 100. A. Burton, Burdens of History, pp. 63–74. Cobbe’s article, like most of her writing in the established press, was signed. See D. Liddle, ‘Salesmen, Sportsmen, Mentors,’ on the Victorian debate about anonymity and signature. See M. Ferguson, Subject to Others. M. Ferguson traces the meaning of Wollstonecraft’s use of slavery metaphors in ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery.’ See also J. Zonana, ‘The Sultan and the Slave,’ on feminist orientalism in the earlier Victorian period. Qtd in S. Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe, p. 257. S. Mitchell, p. 257. M.L. Shanley’s discussion of the movement of the draft bill through parliament is important here. Shanley argues that Cobbe’s focus on working-class men and women is part of a deliberate strategy appealing to Parliamentary bias. It is not Shanley’s task to explore the relation between Cobbe and other feminist activists, and so she does not analyse the differences in representations of domestic violence in

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Victorian feminist circles. She notes simply that Cobbe ‘brought the feminist interpretation before the general public’ (Feminism, Marriage, and the Law, p. 165). Titles and dates of these Contemporary Review pieces are: ‘Mr Lowe and the Vivisection Act’ (February 1877); ‘The Little Health of Ladies’ (January 1878); and, ‘Reply to Criticism’ (March 1878). Cobbe regularly earned in the region of £300 a year through her newspaper and periodical writing. The sum was roughly the equivalent of the patrimony paid out yearly from her father’s estate. See F.P. Cobbe, Life, p. 364. Cobbe publishes Duties of Women in 1881 when she is nearing sixty, arguably her last substantial contribution to the cause. The Wellesley Index indicates that Cobbe published only seven of a total of one hundred and four articles after 1884. The Wellesley Index remains the best indicator thus far of where women published their work, despite its somewhat narrow range. The bulk of this substantial estate was left to the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection. L. Brake, Subjugated Knowledge, p. 51. The best source for information on the Contemporary Review remains P. Srebrnik’s Alexander Strahan. See also P. Metcalf, James Knowles. Qtd in P. Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, p. 119. P. Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, p. 154. S. Mitchell points out that despite all of Cobbe’s accomplishments, she could not fully share in London’s intellectual life. A good friend of many of the members of the Metaphysical Society, including J.A. Froude, William Carpenter, James Martineau, and Richard Holt Hutton, Cobbe was deeply interested in precisely the subjects the group set itself to address, including the nature of conscience, the existence of God, and the logic of science. One member later wrote, ‘[I]f it was once resolved to admit ladies, I am sure that Miss Cobbe wd be elected by acclamation’ (S. Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe, pp. 190–1. P. Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, p. 153. P. Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, p. 160. For an example of Cobbe’s engagement with evolutionary theory, see her Darwinism in Morals. The chapter ‘London in the Sixties and Seventies’ in her Life recounts some of her frequent encounters, spirited skirmishes, and gracious respect for such eminent scientific figures as Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and John Tyndall, despite their very real, and for Cobbe painful, differences. See Life, pp. 440–4. We should not construe Cobbe’s rejection of scientific materialism as acceptance of religious orthodoxy. She was an ‘outspoken critic of established religion and believed that the ‘divine right’ of husbands and fathers should follow the divine right of kings – out of the realm of current belief’ (B. Caine, Victorian Feminists, p. 127). F.P. Cobbe, Life, p. 534. F.P. Cobbe, Life, p. 540.

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38

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41

The letter-writer is likely Arabella Shore, poet and activist, who had provided Cobbe with statistical information for her wife-torture article. See C. Bauer and L. Ritt, ‘A Husband is a Beating Animal,’ 114. A. Burton, Burdens of History, p. 73. Caine’s contention that Manchester feminists were both a less decorous lot, and more committed to a feminist political campaign that explicitly yoked together the various disabilities of women, suggests that the Women’s Suffrage Journal may well have been more open to a graphic style than other feminist journals in the period. See B. Caine, English Feminism, p. 118. In a note to the Women’s Suffrage Journal, Cobbe makes explicit feminist concern with sexual intimacy as a component in domestic violence. ‘Why are these particularly revolting murders always committed against women – women who have invariably borne to their cruel assassins those intimate relations on which are supposed to be founded so much of the tenderness of men for their sex?’ Qtd in B. Caine, English Feminisms, p. 111. K. Sanchez-Eppler, ‘Bodily Bonds,’ 29–34. See C. Midgley, Women Against Slavery on the importance of enslaved women’s physical and sexual abuse to women’s abolitionist writing. See M.L. Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law on the push to make marital rape recognised in law, which gains momentum in the late 1880s. See A.J. Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship, chapter 4. See M.L. Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law, L. Holcombe, Wives and Property and M. Doggett, Marriage, Wife-Beating and the Law in Victorian England. The unease surrounding Mary Wollstonecraft within Victorian feminist circles points to the difficult negotiations around sexual autonomy and expression. See B. Caine ‘Victorian Feminism and the Ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft.’ B. Caine, English Feminism, pp. 115–23. S. Holton, Suffrage Days, identifies Elmy as a ‘radical suffragist’ for whom the dissolution of coverture was as important a feminist goal as the achievement of the vote. The phrase ‘embodied citizenship’ is Holton’s (Suffrage Days, p. 28). S. Holton’s work in Suffrage Days on the Married Women’s Property campaign and the debates over married women’s right to vote is illuminating.

Chapter 6 1

2

‘A Crisis in Woman’s History’

F.P. Cobbe, Duties of Women, Authorised Edn (London: Williams & Norgate, 1881), p. 11. Further references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text. Management of the ‘public face of feminism’ is not limited to ‘mainstream’ spaces, though it is important to heed the shifting contours of

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established and ‘feminist’ spaces as the press undergoes rapid expansion in the latter part of the century, when Cobbe publishes Duties of Women. See for example, L. Delap, ‘Philosophical vacuity and polite ineptitude.’ Other suffrage publications by F.P. Cobbe include ‘Municipal Woman Suffrage in England’, and ‘Woman Suffrage.’ B. Caine, Victorian Feminists, p. 133. See, for example, J. Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism. S. Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe, p. 274. S. Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe, p. 274. B. Caine, Victorian Feminists, p. 113. Mitchell found that, when she brought Duties of Women to Clifton in 1880, Cobbe explicitly linked her Bristol experiences with Mary Carpenter to her conversion to the suffrage, as she would do in her 1894 Life. Tying together her earliest philanthropic work and the claims of feminism, then, the lecture series rehearses a connection between Bristol and suffrage that Caine rejects. Clifton is located just outside of Bristol. The linkage is an appeal to the local predilections of her audience, which registers Cobbe’s professional competence and, of course, her plain common courtesy. B. Caine, Victorian Feminists, p. 114. Qtd in F.P. Cobbe, Life, 217. S.S. Holton, ‘The Making of Suffrage History,’ p. 28. S.S. Holton, ‘The Suffragist and the “Average Woman.”’. S.S. Holton, ‘The Suffragist and the “Average Woman,”’ 13. For a discussion of women’s involvement in local government prior to the granting of the national franchise, see P. Hollis, Ladies Elect. See F.P. Cobbe, Life, p. 549 for Cobbe’s minimal account of the event. S. Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe, p. 272. On Clifton see J. Rendall, ‘The Citizenship of Women,’ p. 124. Qtd in S. Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe, pp. 268–9. S. Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe, p. 269. S. Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe, p. 269. B. Caine, Victorian Feminists, p. 127, notes that the letter came from Hengwrt, Mary Lloyd’s family home in North Wales, where Cobbe moved in 1884. J. Rendall, ‘The Citizenship of Women,’ discusses the ideas of history shaping feminist discourse in this period. Cobbe’s concern for the family pet must be placed within the larger context of her involvement in the nineteenth-century anti-vivisection movement (of which she was the acknowledged leader) and her animal welfare work more broadly. In particular, this ‘practical caution’ addresses late nineteenth-century concerns about ‘hydrophobia,’ the rabid animal’s aversion to water. Women’s domestic work is, in this context, politically vital at the most mundane level. S. Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe, p. 269. B. Caine, Victorian Feminists, p. 109.

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31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42

Cobbe’s ‘philanthropic feminism,’ in which privileged women speak on behalf of their oppressed sisters, utilises a strategy widespread in the mid-Victorian movement. See B. Caine, Victorian Feminists, p. 106. Cobbe made something of a career grappling with Eliza Lynn Linton’s ‘Girl of the Period’ essays, gleefully rewriting Linton’s anti-feminist caricature of an emancipated woman as the figure of woman disfigured by narrow domestic concerns. Cobbe’s previous exchanges with Linton form a vital part of the background to her strategies in Duties of Women, though that exchange is too large for the scope of the present chapter. For a discussion of Linton’s journalistic strategies, which oppose Cobbe’s in actively rejecting consensus-building, see A.L. Broomfield, ‘Much more than an Antifeminist.’ On Eliza Lynn Linton see, N.F. Anderson, Woman Against Woman and A.L. Broomfield, ‘Eliza Lynn Linton, Sarah Grand, and the Spectacle of the Victorian Woman Question.’ On Mona Caird, whose articles on marriage generated both great excitement and fears about a new ferociousness in England’s ‘revolting daughters,’ see, A. Heilmann, New Woman Strategies and A. Richardson and C. Willis (eds), The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact. The literature on the New Woman of the 1890s grows steadily. See, in particular, A.L. Ardis, New Women, New Novels and T. Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant. B. Caine, Victorian Feminists, p. 140. See B. Caine, Victorian Feminists, chapter 2, for a discussion of the productive relationship between Victorian feminisms and Victorian domestic ideology. F.P. Cobbe, Duties of Women. Eighth American Edition. Introduction by Frances Willard, p. 6. F. Willard, ‘Introduction,’ p. 6. F. Willard, ‘Introduction,’ pp. 7–8. See M. Joannou, ‘The Angel of Freedom.’. S. Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe, p. 270. Caine argues that Cobbe’s self-identity as a philosopher meant that she saw herself as able to write in very broad terms about women’s nature, their social roles and responsibilities. She also notes that some contemporaries saw Cobbe as a feminist thinker too: ‘excepting John Stuart Mill, she has done more than anyone else to give the dignity of principle to the women’s movement’ (Walter Lewin, ‘Life of Frances Power Cobbe,’ Academy 46 (1894), 321. Qtd in B. Caine, Victorian Feminists, p. 105. F.P. Cobbe, Life. S. Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe, p. 270. 15 January 1881 Spectator. Qtd in S. Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe, p. 271. F.P. Cobbe, Life, Vol. 2, 515–16. F.P. Cobbe, Life, Vol. 2, 516. Angela John, ‘“Behind the Locked Door”’ reminds us that the space on the threshold between feminist and non-feminist communities under-

188 Notes

43

goes profound shifts in political and cultural meaning in the period from 1863, when Cobbe first starts writing, to Sharp’s own journalism for The Nation and the Manchester Guardian and other papers in the first decade of the twentieth-century. Rendall, ‘Citizenship of Women,’ 129.

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Index Alexandria Magazine, 9 Arnold, Matthew, 8, 27 audience, 14, 18, 51, 70–1, 72, 76, 80, 81, 85, 87, 88, 104, 146, 152, 156, 168 Bagehot, Walter, 8, 27 Becker, Lydia, 62, 65, 92, 93, 173n2 and Woman’s Suffrage Journal, 15, 17, 131, 140, 151–2, 159 Beetham, Margaret, 8 Bland, Lucy, 66 Boardman, Kay, 8 Bodichon, Barbara Leigh Smith, 11, 64, 84 Boucherett, Jessie, 34 Brake, Laurel, 96, 104, 135 Bright, Jacob, 63 Bright, Ursula, 83 Browning, Robert, 56–7, 58 Burton, Antoinette, 126, 127–8 Butler, Josephine, 3, 11, 14, 158 Caine, Barbara, 5, 142, 146, 148, 164 Carpenter, Mary, 51, 151 celibacy and audience, 52, 88, 90 as challenge to Victorian gender roles, 27, 37–40, 42, 58–9 and Codrington divorce trial, 53, 57–9 as cover story for lesbianism, 45–6, 53, 57–8 as critique of marriage, 37–40, 87, 89–90 and emigration, 28 and passionlessness, 39–40 and signature, 40 Cherry, Deborah, 44, 45, 48–9

Christ, Carol, 6–7 Cobbe, Frances Power ‘Celibacy vs Marriage,’ 15, 35–40, 87; feminist orientalist language in, 128–9 Contemporary Review, 14, 131, 132 Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors, 15, 52, 61, 68, 71–94, 147; feminist orientalist language in, 129 Darwinism in Morals, 155 Duties of Women, 145–72; sense of history in, 145, 153, 154 Echo, 16, 95, 103–24 Essay on Intuitive Morals, 155 Essays on the Pursuits of Women, 25, 35, 50, 52, 57 ‘Female Charity, Lay and Monastic,’ 158 ‘The Final Cause of Woman,’ 158 Fraser’s Magazine, 4, 14, 133 Hopes of the Human Race, 155 ‘Journalism as a Profession for Women,’ 22 Life of Frances Power Cobbe, by Herself, 1, 16, 20–2, 136, 148, 168 Macmillan’s Magazine, 4 notion of sexual difference, 45, 46–8 Our Policy, 20, 146 as philosopher, 34, 155, 167 self-representation as feminist, 167 and suffrage, 146–8, 150 Theological Review, 52, 61, 132–3 ‘What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?,’ 30–60, 57, 147; feminist orientalist language in, 129 199

200 Index

Cobbe, Frances Power – continued ‘Wife Torture in England,’ 15, 16, 118, 125–44 Why Women Desire the Franchise, 146 class and celibacy, 29, 33 and masculinity, 78 and feminist strategising, 67, 76–8, 79, 84 Clerke, Agnes Mary, 7 Codrington divorce trial, 52, 53–6 and feminist signature, 52–3 Collini, Stefan, 4, 8, 12 Common Law, 73–5 conduct book, 165–7 consensus, 31, 32, 36–7, 46–7, 87–8, 138, 155–6, 169–70 Contemporary Review, 131, 132, 133–6 controversy as periodical signature, 135–6 contract and forms of intimacy, 86, 87, 88 and marriage, 83 Cott, Nancy, F. idea of passionlessness, 39 coverture, 83 Crowe, Jane, 34 Davies, Emily, 11, 56, 58, 62 Dawes, Alfred, 68 divorce, 52 court, 58, 60, 99–100 legislation, 64–5, 100–3 domestic violence in Echo, 118–24, 136 and women’s sexual autonomy, 142 see also wife torture Easley, Alex, 51 Echo, 95, 98, 103–24, 131 editorial, see leader English Women’s Journal, 11, 15

Englishwoman’s Review, 9, 11, 136, 151 Faderman, Lillian, 90 Faithfull, Emily and Codrington divorce trial, 52, 53–5, 56–8, 59 and Victorian Press, 34, 50 Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, 3, 11, 14, 142 feminism constitutionalist, 12–14 historiography of, 2–3, 5, 8–14 militant, 12–14 and sexual autonomy, 141–2 feminist readers, 17, 77, 81, 85, 86, 90, 140, 146 feminists, 27, 90 appropriate behaviour for, 153, 160 false emancipation of, 160–1, 163–4 middle-class, 29 and servants, 29–30 feminist orientalism, 121, 130, 132, 137, 139–40 as critique of heterosexual intimacy, 140–1 feminist signature, 48–9, 50–1 and anonymity, 105 and Codrington divorce trial, 52, 58–9, 60 feminist writing forms of, 14 pamphleteering, 63 periodicals, 69 strategies of, 98; consensus as, 31, 32, 36–7, 46–7, 72, 74, 75, 80, 138, 155–6, 169–70; class-specific figures of womanhood, 76–8, 79, 84, 90; conduct book, 165–7; extension of domestic sphere, 159 Fortnightly Review, 135 Fraser, Hilary, 60

Index 201

Fraser’s Magazine, 25, 32, 50, 52, 61, 75, 80, 81, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90 Froude, James Anthony, 27 Gore, Catherine, 6 Grand, Sarah, 164 Greg, W.R., 19, 26 ‘Why are Women Redundant?,’ 26, 27–30, 38, 41 Hall, Catherine, 91 Harrison, Brian, 68–71 Herstein, Sheila, 10, 11 Holcombe, Lee, 76, 100 Holton, Sandra Stanley, 12–13, 149, 150 Hosmer, Harriet, 35, 41–6, 47, 48, 49, 56 accusations of fraud against, 42 challenge to gender conventions, 42 Cobbe’s defense of, 42–3, 46 Zenobia, 41, 43 Humpherys, Anne, 99 Hutton, Richard Holt, 27, 170 imperialism feminist orientalism, 121, 125, 127–9, 137; as critique of heterosexual intimacy, 140–1 language as feminist strategy, 128, 130, 137, 139–40 Johnson, Judith, 4, 60 Kasson, Joy, 41, 42 Kinnear, John Boyd, 68 Knowles, James Thomas, 134–5 Lacey, Candida Ann, 10 Langham Place, 11, 25, 26, 50, 97 reactions to Codrington divorce trial, 54, 56 Larsen, J.L., 173n5 Lawrance, Hannah, 7 leader, 96, 98, 104, 106, 110, 123–4

Leckie, Barbara, 60 Lee, Vernon [Violet Paget], 6 lesbianism, 48 Cobbe’s sexual identity, 35 and Codrington divorce trial, 54, 56–8, 59 and cover story, 35, 39–40, 57–8 and the ‘mannish woman,’ 58 and periodical signature, 40 Levine, Philippa, 10, 11, 66, 86, 97 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 6, 187n27 Lloyd, Mary, 35, 133, 145, 151 marriage celibacy as critique of, 37–40, 87, 89–90 companionate idea of, 83, 84, 92 domestic violence in, 118–24 feminist critique of, 66–7, 79, 81, 83, 89, 103, 110–11 as feminist practice, 86 ideals, 81, 83, 84–6 risks of ideal, 85, 86 as slavery, 126 Matrimonial Causes Act (1878), 16 married woman critique of role of, 37 law of coverture, 83 as problem in nineteenth-century feminism, 67, 73, 82–3, 91, 93 Married Women’s Property Law, 84, 112–13 reform of, 64, 74, 108, 116–17 Married Women’s Property Law Committee, 63, 65, 66 members of, 64 Martineau, Harriet, 6, 182n2 Martineau, James, 27 McClelland, Keith, 91 Merrill, Lisa, 35 Mill, John Stuart, 8 and 1867 Reform Act, 61 Mitchell, Sally, 17, 130, 131, 151, 166, 168

202 Index

National Review, 27 Nestor, Pauline, 10 Newman, Francis William, 27 newspapers influence of, 20–1 leaders, 16, 29, 20–1 Nineteenth Century, 134 non-fiction prose, 4 Norton, Caroline, 84, 181n25 Oliphant, Margaret, 6 Onslow, Barbara, 121 Ouida [Marie Louise de la Ramee], 6 Pankhurst, Emmeline and Christabel, 14 Parkes, Bessie Raynor, 9–10, 34, 54, 64 Parkes, Joseph, 54–5, 58, 59 passionlessness and celibacy, 39–40, 48 and romantic friendship, 53 Peacock, Sandra, 173n5 periodicals Cobbe’s sense of influence of, 20–1 established, 5–6; numbers of women writing in, 6–7 forms of, 8 periodical time, 18–19 separate or feminist, 5, 10–11, 69, 96, 127 as site for feminist activism, 14–15, 17–18, 69–71, 96–7 pressure group writing, 63, 68–71 prostitution, 26, 30 publicity public sphere, 18–20 redundant women, 26, 31 and emigration, 28, 32–3 and Hosmer, 42–3 and statistics, 28–9 Reform Act (1867), 61–2 Rendall, Jane, 62, 91 Riley, Denise, 67, 69 Ritchie, Lady Anne Isabella, 6

Robinson, Solveig, 11 romantic friendship, 53 Rye, Maria, 34 Sanchez-Eppler, Karen, 141 Scott, Joan W., 13–14 sculpture authenticity and professionalisation, 42, 44 erotic response to, 44–5, 46–8, 49 status of women in Victorian sculpture, 43 Sedgwick, Eva Kosofsky, 57, 58, 59 sentiment, 20, 78, 80, 85, 111, 122 and domestic violence, 120 seriality, 100 and social bonds, 18 Shaftesbury, Lord, 170 Shanley, Mary Lyndon, 83, 84, 85, 100 single women, 26, 52, 82–3, 89–90 feminist representation of lives of, 37–40 and passionlessness, 39–40 Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, 11 Spectator, 131, 151 Spencer, Herbert, 27 Srebrnik, Patricia, 134, 135 Strahan, Alexander, 133–4 Stephen, James Fitzjames, 22 suffrage (women’s) argument from moral autonomy, 82–3 exclusionist arguments, 82 political strategies, 93 status in feminist campaign, 149 site for gender contestation, 150 Thompson, Nicola Diane, 4 Times, 76, 81 Turner, Mark, 18 Vicinus, Martha, 26, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59 Victoria Magazine, 11 Vote, The, 166

Index 203

Warner, Michael, 18 Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 6–8 Willard, Frances, 164–5 Wolstenholme, Elizabeth, 13, 83, 86, 142, 179n50 Woman Question, 4, 14, 15, 26, 28, 50, 51, 52, 76, 84, 98, 116, 128, 135, 164

Woman’s Suffrage Journal, 15, 17, 131, 140, 151–2, 159 Wood, Ellen, 6 Worsnop, J., 176n4 writing and community consensus building, 31, 32, 36–7, 46–7, 72, 74, 75, 80, 87

Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism

Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism

Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics

Campo Frances

Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism

Frances Waldeaux

Frances Burney

Why Feminism Matters: Feminism Lost and Found

Why Feminism Matters: Feminism Lost and Found

From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism

Feminism and World Religions

Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory

Feminism, Objectivity and Economics

Politics and Feminism

El Mal Frances

Feminism and War

Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness

Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis

Philosophy, Feminism, and Faith

Feminism and Deconstruction

Feminism and science

Feminism and Ecological Communities

El Mal Frances

Victorian Literature and Finance

Burnett, Frances Hodgson - Esmerelda

Victorian Literature and Finance

Victorian Literature and Finance

Victorian literature and finance

Victorian Literature and Finance

Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism