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

Abstract

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