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

Abstract

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.