Definition
Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) was an acclaimed Anglo-Irish journalist whose exploration of sexual difference and focus on women’s private lives has made her ideas newly appealing to twenty-first-century readers. As a journalist and writer for the established press, Cobbe did not figure prominently in the histories of nineteenth-century feminism that first brought its ideas and people to light as part of the political and intellectual excitement of twentieth-century “second-wave” feminism. Transformed scholarly frameworks that vigorously reshaped twenty-first-century feminist history-making, revitalized interest in the Victorian Woman Question, and generated new approaches to the Victorian periodical and newspaper press have reframed our understanding of her significance in important ways. She is now understood as a writer whose distinctive, spirited style and compelling ideas are an integral part of our understanding of nineteenth-century feminism, journalism, and reform.
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References
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Cobbe, Frances Power. 1862. What shall we do with our old maids? Fraser’s Magazine 66: 594–610.
———. 1868. Criminals, idiots, women and minors. Fraser’s Magazine 78: 777–794.
———. 1870. Our policy: An address to women concerning the suffrage. London: National Society for Women’s Suffrage.
———. 1878. Wife torture in England. Contemporary Review 32: 55–87.
———. 1894. The life of Frances Power Cobbe: By herself. 2 volumes. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin.
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Hamilton, S. (2019). Cobbe, Frances Power. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_89-1
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