Making History with Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminism, Domestic Violence, and the Language of Imperialism

In an 1864 editorial in the English Woman's Journal on the legacy of the journal, then coming to the end of its run, editor Bessie Parkes argued for the necessity of the "special," feminist periodical:

Had it from the first any hope, any expectation, any wish to come forward in the same field with the able monthlies, which contained the best writing of the day? To this question an emphatic no must be given. [. . .] If it had been wished to start a brilliant and successful magazine, some eminent publisher should have been secured and persuaded to undertake active pecuniary interest and risk; and all the best female writers should have been engaged, "regardless of expense", and then--good- bye to the advocacy of any subject which would have entailed a breath of ridicule; good-bye [. . .] to the results which have sprung up around the small office where so many workers collected together, because the purpose and the plan were honestly conceived and carried out. ("Review" 361)

Later that same year as editor of the new Alexandra Magazine, Parkes reiterated her contention that a special interest periodical was crucial to the success of organized feminism:

[T]here is something in a reiterated effort which far outweighs the effect of the separate thoughts. It is not this or that number of a magazine, this or that article from a given pen, which does the work: it is partly the effect of repetition--line upon line-- and partly the knowledge that there is in the world a distinct embodiment of certain principles. [. . .] Even if this embodiment be in itself far from mighty, it serves to sustain a great amount of scattered energy, and may be a rallying point of much value to the whole of the field. ("Special Periodical" 258-59)

The writing of the history of Victorian feminisms has to a great degree followed Parkes's lead in determining that it is the "distinct embodiment" of feminist principles in the Victorian feminist press that most deserves our historical attention. Sheila Herstein, Philippa Levine, Pauline Nestor, and other scholars of the Victorian feminist press, for example, have argued eloquently for the importance of such vehicles to the production of a shared feminist culture, a "distinct embodiment" of community and collectivity, in this period. Histories of nineteenth- century feminism have productively emphasized the establishment and internal workings of the separate culture of Victorian feminisms, particularly as represented by the network of feminist organizations and the separate feminist periodical press. Consequently, little attention has been paid to those texts that do not circulate primarily within identified feminist circles or feminist cultures, but which are located at the point of feminism's perceived entry into the public written discourse of the mainstream or of those in power (see Rendall, "Nineteenth-Century Feminism"). Paying attention to such texts, however, has profound consequences. As I hope to show, an inquiry into the complex interactions of Victorian feminisms and the mainstream, established press will allow us a more adequate and ample understanding of Victorian feminisms themselves as it also complicates our knowledge of the Victorian public sphere. No less important, such study will invite a reconsideration of the categories of acceptable, historical identities for feminists; and this reconsideration, in turn, raises key questions about the shaping impact of those categories on the ways in which histories of Victorian feminism are written. In this way, our own relations to the feminisms of the past are at stake.

My entry into these issues here will be the periodical writing of Frances Power Cobbe, and its complex, perhaps even contradictory status in Victorian feminism. The essay at the center of this paper, "Wife Torture in England" (1878), has been chosen precisely because it has been selected to represent her in the few critical investigations of her work by historians such as Shanley, Caine, and Bauer and Ritt. Its concern...