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.

“Asking the Woman Question” in Case Study Research

Case study research provides the researcher with the opportunity to decide the most convincing epistemological orientation. Such versatility is nonetheless embedded in the assumption of objectivity contends G. Griffin in Difference in View: Women and Modernism, which speaks of an “abstract masculinity” intended here as the assumption of universal humanity where men's and women's experiences are melted into one experience. Case study research, this contribution contends, even when about women, hinders the experience of women, an experience that is always situated, relational, and engaged. In other words, ontologically, it is argued here, the reality of women's lives is absent from the domain of case study research because the language adopted when framing case study research is still very much a language that talks about women, but it does not allow women to speak.

Travelling Wives and Unprotected Women: Representing the Female Traveller in Tom Taylor’s mid-Victorian Comedies (1860)

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain would boast of an economic and social prosperity, improving both national and international transport and tourism. However, certain social issues such as the Woman Question, or the altercations in the colonies raised questions about the Empire’s stability. In London, galleries, museums, and theatrical stages, would reproduce images of the colonies to satisfy the people’s appetite for the foreign. In these, mobile women were usually reduced to stereotypical characters. Thus, we can find a clear categorization of the female traveller: on the one hand, the faithful wife who accompanies her husband, and, on the other, the wild, undomesticated female (Ferrús 19). This article scrutinises women’s position and representation as travellers during the Victorian period. With this purpose in mind, we analyse two comedies written by English playwright Tom Taylor (1817-1880) for London’s stages: The Overland Route (Haymarket 23 February 1860) and Up at the Hills (St. James’s Theatre 22 October 1860). The plays’ setting (colonial India) offers us the opportunity to further discuss gender ideology and its relationship with travel during the mid-Victorian period.

The Story of Stenka Razin and the Persian Princess in Direct and Inverse Projections: Yevgeny Zamyatin and Anna Barkova

The article considers two cases of the creative reception of the legend about Stenka Razin and the Persian princess in Russian literature of the 1920s – in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s tragedy Atilla (1925–1928) and screenplay Stenka Razin (1932–1933), on the one hand, and in the play by A. Barkova Nastasya Kostyor (1923), on the other hand. The direct and inverse projections of Razin’s plot are represented: in Zamyatin’s case the roles of Razin and the princess are distributed in the traditional way, as they are typical for the long history of this plot in Russian culture – both in folklore and in literature, and in Barkova’s case these roles are reversed in the gender aspect. This peculiarity is considered as connected to Barkova’s interest toward “woman question”, the problem of female emancipation, women’s equality. The plot of Stenka Razin and the Persian princess is analyzed in the article together with another one – the plot featuring the woman warrior, since they are closely interrelated in Russian literature of the 1920s. The hypothesis is that this relationship is due to the active demolition of the old gender order during this period.

Professor David Tuesday Adamo's Biblical Scholarship on Women: Reflections from an African-South African Mosadi

One of the prolific writers in the discipline of African Biblical Hermeneutics is the Nigerian Old Testament (OT) scholar, Professor Tuesday David Adamo. In his tireless efforts to unlock the OT reality for African contexts, persuaded by his commitment to decolonise the subject of Biblical Studies, Adamo has made successful efforts to reflect on the African presence in the Old Testament. The present study seeks to engage Adamo's concept of African Biblical hermeneutics in order to investigate whether the author sufficiently discussed the theme of gender in his discourses. This research attempts to respond to the following two main questions in view of Adamo's discourses: (1) In Adamo's concerted effort of confirming the presence of Africa and Africans in the Hebrew Bible, does the woman question feature? (2) If so, how does Adamo navigate the question?

Performing the Female Alternative in Victorian Popular Drama: The “Girl of the Period” and the “Fast Girl”

During the nineteenth century, theatregoing became the favoured entertainment of both the lower and upper classes in London. As Davis (1994, 307) suggests, the plays were a “mirrored reflection” of society, and they had the ability to reflect important socio-political issues on stage, while also influencing people’s opinion about them. Thus, by turning to the popular stage of the mid-century we can better understand social issues like the Woman Question, or the tensions around imperial policies, among others. As such, this article scrutinises the ways in which Victorian popular drama influenced the period’s ideal of femininity by using stock characters inspired by real women’s movements. Two such cases are the “Girl of the Period” and the “Fast Girl”, protofeminists that would go on to influence the New Woman of the fin-de-siècle. We analyse two plays from the mid-century: the Adelphi’s Our Female American Cousin (1860), by Charles Gayler, and the Strand’s My New Place (1863), by Arthur Wood. As this article attests, popular plays like these would inadvertently bring into the mainstream the ongoing political fight for female rights through their use of transgressive female characters and promotion of scenarios where alternative feminine identities could be performed and imagined.