Frances Power Cobbe

Frances Power Cobbe (b. 1822–d. 1904) was an Anglo-Irish journalist, religious writer, feminist activist, and leading antivivisectionist. She was among the best-known feminist writers and thinkers of her day. She was a prominent spokeswoman for the improvement of Victorian women’s educational and employment opportunities; a witty defender of so-called redundant women; an incisive critic of the Victorian idea of marriage; and a passionate advocate for women’s suffrage and right to bodily integrity. She published essays on these topics in prestigious periodicals and wrote over twenty books on Victorian women, science and medicine, and religious duty, as well as innumerable essays, pamphlets, and tracts for the antivivisection movement. She was a pioneering journalist who wrote the second-leader for the London Echo on the same wide variety of social and cultural topics that animated her highly regarded signed work in the periodical press. She founded two antivivisection societies, the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection (known as the Victoria Street Society) in 1875, and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) in 1898. Both societies comprised nationally organized branches that undertook campaigning, demonstrated against institutions that licensed vivisection, and produced and distributed mass publications, many of them by Cobbe herself. She brought her considerable journalistic know-how to her extensive work as leader of these organizations, evident especially in the productivity she was able to sustain over decades of activism and her success at placing essays in leading periodicals. She was instrumental in the passage of the Cruelty to Animals Act (1876), which created a regulatory framework for the use of live animals in scientific research, which she came to see as facilitating abuse rather than protecting animals. She advocated for improved legal protections for laboratory animals until her death. She also wrote carefully to advance the Matrimonial Causes Act (1878), which created new mechanisms for granting child custody and maintenance orders to wives separated from violent husbands, and continued to advocate for women’s autonomy in marriage and as mothers. Based in London for much of her career, Cobbe moved to Wales with her life companion, Mary Lloyd, in 1884 after receiving a substantial legacy from an antivivisectionist supporter. There she continued to write and publish, primarily on her antivivisection causes. She is buried with Lloyd in a double grave at Llanelltydd, Wales, in Lloyd’s family churchyard. Cobbe’s journalism, particularly on domestic violence, was at the center of the scholarship that first brought her writing to the forefront of feminist knowledge in the 1990s. More recently, scholarly frameworks that have reshaped feminist history-making, a revitalized interest in the Victorian Woman Question, and compelling new explorations of LGBTQ identities and life experiences, as well as new approaches to the Victorian periodical and newspaper press, have reframed our understanding of her spirited style and compelling ideas. Scholarship on Cobbe in sexuality studies remains limited, perhaps owing to the scant archival sources. New explorations of LGBTQ2S identities and life experiences may well spur new research into Cobbe’s life and relationships. She is increasingly an integral part of informed understanding of 19th-century feminism, journalism, and reform. Vitally, too, Cobbe’s central role in the antivivisection movement, which had long given her a global popular prominence in animal welfare and rights history, has made her writing and activities of growing academic interest in the field of critical animal studies.

Hospitable Friendship

Chapter 1 sets up the theoretical questions of female friendship across race, nationality, and gender. It establishes exclusivism in the philosophical discourses of friendship and hospitality and their political and ethical implications demonstrated by Jacques Derrida. It then discusses the practical challenges the three Victorian women travellers to Meiji Japan—Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes—pose to the male homosocial model of friendship with their praxis of friendship and hospitality through their writing. It highlights the aporias of male philosophical theorizations and addresses them with female literary representations of real-life instances of cultural exchange and congress in a non-Western context. Drawing on feminist theorizations of open subjectivity and affective relationality, it presents alternative models and paradigms of friendship, which the book terms hospitable friendship, and argues for particular political affordances of literature for cross-racial female solidarity.

Clothing Inventions as Acts of Citizenship? The Politics of Material Participation, Wearable Technologies, and Women Patentees in Late Victorian Britain

This article is about clothing inventions, material participation, and acts of citizenship. I explore how pioneering Victorian women at the turn of the last century inventively responded via clothing to restrictions to their (physical and ideological) freedom of movement. While the bicycle is typically celebrated as a primary vehicle of women’s emancipation at that time, I argue that inventive forms of clothing, such as convertible cycling skirts, also helped women make claims to rights and privileges otherwise legally denied to their sex. I ask: Do clothing inventions create possibilities to act differently? Can they be thought of as wearable technology, and in what ways do they (and their invention) enact political concerns? Might convertible cycling skirts be considered “acts of citizenship?” Throughout, I mobilize concepts of multiplicity, in-betweenness, and ambiguity to make a case for the relevance of clothing research for science and technology studies.

Gender, fashion and representation in nineteenth century British art

This Major Research Project (MRP) examines the artistic production of British culture in the second half of the Nineteenth Century from 1850–1900, while critically engaging with existing nineteenth century art and literature, in order to deepen the understanding of the immense role played by fashion in the lives of Victorian women. I have approached this research study not through the examination of actual dress in its materiality, but instead, through its visual representation in paintings. These sartorial embodiments of women’s dress could help extend our understanding of artworks that are rooted in visual narratives—both literally and figuratively. Thus, this project aims to re-imagine histories of art through the analysis of the clothed body of women in nineteenth century paintings—for it is through their sartorial choices that women defied the Victorian ideals of femininity and femaleness.

Victorian women and the hand-embellished photograph album : a case study of the Bouverie album

The Bouverie album, held in the photography collection at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film is a hand-embellished photographic collage album from the late Victorian period. The volume contains over 200 albumen prints (mainly form un-mounted cartes-de-visite) that have been trimmed from their backgrounds and mounted into elaborate and fanciful scenes. Family members and friends star in comical tennis matches and tours of ruins and trimmed portraits are suspended from plants like fruit or surrounded by bouquets of highly detailed flowers. The time that was invested into the creation this object is incredible and the skill and attention to detail make it a rare and valuable object, to both photographic and cultural historians. This thesis explores the hand-embellished photograph album as its own genre, studying its influences, precursors and role within Victorian society. The album also offers clues to the role of women, evidence of the concept of florigraphy and, as many family photograph albums do, offers an interesting look at family roles. The following paper considers each one of these elements, and examines the album in comparison to other types of photo albums and personal books such as commonplace and scrapbooks. The similarities and differences between this genre of album and its precursors, and the peculiarities of this one in particular are discussed. I also closely examined several of the scenes, unpacking some of the historical and cultural information held within. This thesis demonstrates the historical importance of objects such as this one. The mixed media used means they require careful handling and preservation techniques particular to their structure in order to ensure that they will be available to future researchers. The final chapter of this thesis makes storage and handling suggestions in order to ensure the preservation of objects such as this one, including a discussion of surrogates and a description of an album housing (a modified clam shell box) that reduces the amount of handling the object receives.

Gender, fashion and representation in nineteenth century British art

This Major Research Project (MRP) examines the artistic production of British culture in the second half of the Nineteenth Century from 1850–1900, while critically engaging with existing nineteenth century art and literature, in order to deepen the understanding of the immense role played by fashion in the lives of Victorian women. I have approached this research study not through the examination of actual dress in its materiality, but instead, through its visual representation in paintings. These sartorial embodiments of women’s dress could help extend our understanding of artworks that are rooted in visual narratives—both literally and figuratively. Thus, this project aims to re-imagine histories of art through the analysis of the clothed body of women in nineteenth century paintings—for it is through their sartorial choices that women defied the Victorian ideals of femininity and femaleness.