‘A crisis in woman's history’: Frances power cobbe's duties of women and the practice of everyday feminism

Abstract

The article explores the ways in which Cobbe's Duties of Women grapples with new challenges facing the late nineteenth-century feminist movement, with an emphasis on the particular force of Cobbe's text that results from her unique role as a mainstream journalist of mid-Victorian feminism to non-feminist-identified audiences. It argues that Duties of Women participates in the ongoing negotiation of the representation of suffrage, both within feminist communities and in the ways that feminism is represented and understood by a non-feminist public. Specifically, the author argues that Cobbe's lecture series and book are generically linked to the conduct book. They offer advice for the appropriate daily practice of emancipated womanhood at a time when significant changes in feminist practice, such as the increasing emphasis on suffrage, threatened, in Cobbe's view, the larger public perception of that movement.