Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as told by herself / with additions by the author, and introduction by Blanche Atkinson

by Frances Power Cobbe

George Eliot I did not know, nor, as I have just said, did I ever meet Harriet Martineau. But with those two great exceptions I think I may boast of having come into contact with nearly all the more gifted Englishwomen of the Victorian era; and thus when I speak, as I shall do in the next chapter, of my efforts to put the claims of my sex fairly before the world, I may boast of writing with practical personal knowledge of what women are and can be, both as to character and ability.

The decade which began in 1880 brought me many sorrows. The first was the death of my second brother, Thomas Cobbe, of Easton Lyss. I loved him much for his own sweet and affectionate nature; and much, too, for the love of our mother which he shared especially with me. I was also warmly attached to his beautiful and good Scotch wife, who survived him only a few years; and to his dear children, who were my pets in infancy and have been almost like my own daughters ever since. My brother ought to have been a very successful and brilliant barrister, but his life was broken by the faults of others, and when in advanced years he wrote, with immense patience and research, a really valuable History of the Norman Kings (thought to be so by such competent judges as Mr. William Longman, and the Historical Society of Normandy, which asked leave to translate it), the book was practically killed by a cruel and most unfair review which attributed to him mistakes which he had not made, and refused to publish his refutation of the charge. If this review were written (as we could not but surmise) by an eminent historian, now dead, whose own book my brother had, very unwisely, ignored, I can only say it was a malicious and spiteful deed. My brother’s ambition was not strong enough to carry him over such a disappointment, and he never attempted to write again for the press, but spent his later years in the solitary study of his favourite old chronicles and his Shakespeare. A little later my eldest brother also died, leaving no children. I must be thankful at my age that the youngest, the Rector of Maulden, though five years older than I, still survives in health and vigour, rejoicing in his happy home and family of affectionate daughters. I trust yet to welcome him into the brotherhood of the pen when his great monograph on Luton Church, Historical and Descriptive, sees the light this year.

I lost also in this same decade, my earliest friend Harriet St. Leger; and a younger, very dear one, Emily Shaen. Mrs. Shaen and her admirable husband had been much drawn to me by religious sympathies; and I regarded her with more heartfelt respect, I might say reverence, than I can well express. She endured twenty years of seclusion and suffering, with the spirit at once of a saint and of a philosopher. Had her health enabled her to take her natural place in the world, I have always felt assured she would have been recognised as one of the ablest as well as one of the best women of the day, and more than the equal of her two gifted sisters; Catharine and Susanna Winkworth. The friendship between us was of the closest kind. I often said that I went to church to her sick-room. In her last days, when utterly crushed by incessant suffering and by the death of her beloved husband and her favourite son, she bore in whispers, to me, (she could scarcely speak for mortal weakness,) this testimony to our common faith: “I sent for you,—to tell you,—I am more sure than ever that God is Good.”

All these deaths and the heart-wearing Anti-vivisection work combined with my own increasing years to make my life in London less and less a source of enjoyment and more of strain than I could bear. In 1884 Miss Lloyd, with my entire concurrence, let our dear little house in Hereford Square to our friend, Mrs. Kemble, and we left London altogether and came to live in Wales.

CHAPTER
XIX.
CLAIMS OF WOMEN.

It was not till I was actively engaged in the work of Mary Carpenter at Bristol, and had begun to desire earnestly various changes of law relating to young criminals and paupers, that I became an advocate of “Women’s Rights.” It was good old Rev. Samuel J. May, of Syracuse, New York, who, when paying us a visit, pressed on my attention the question: “Why should you not have a vote? Why should not women be enabled to influence the making of the laws in which they have as great an interest as men?”

My experience probably explains largely the indifference of thousands of women, not deficient in intelligence, in England and America to the possession of political rights. They have much anxiety to fulfil their home duties, and the notion of undertaking others, requiring (as they fully understand) conscientious enquiry and reflection, rather alarms than attracts them. But the time comes to every woman worth her salt to take ardent interest in some question which touches legislation. Then she begins to ask herself, as Mr. May asked me; “Why should the fact of being a woman, close to me the use of the plain, direct means, of helping to achieve some large public good or stopping some evil?” The timid, the indolent, the conventional will here retreat, and try to believe that it concerns men only to right the wrongs of the world in some more effectual way than by single-handed personal efforts in special cases. Others again,—and of their number was I—become deeply impressed with the need of woman’s voice in public affairs, and thenceforth attach themselves to the “Woman’s Cause” more or less earnestly. For my own part I confess I have been chiefly moved by reflection on the sufferings and wrongs borne by women, in great measure owing to the deconsideration they endure consequent on their political and civil disabilities. Whilst I and other happily circumstanced women, have had no immediate wrongs of our own to gall us, we should still have been very poor creatures had we not felt bitterly those of our less fortunate sisters, the robbed and trampled wives, the mothers whose children were torn from them at the bidding of a dead or living father, the daughters kept in ignorance and poverty while their brothers were educated in costly schools and fitted for honourable professions. Such wrongs as these have inspired me with the persistent resolution to do everything in my power to protect the property, the persons and the parental rights of women.

I do not think that this resolve has any necessary connection with theories concerning the equality of the sexes; and I am sure that a great deal of our force has been wasted on fruitless discussions such as: “Why has there never been a female Shakespeare?” A Celt claiming equal representation with a Saxon, or any representation at all, might just as fairly be challenged to explain why there has never been a Celtic Shakespeare, or a Celtic Tennyson? My own opinion is, that women en masse are by no means the intellectual equals of men en masse;—and whether this inequality arise from irremediable causes or from alterable circumstances of education and heredity, is not worth debating. If the nation had established an intellectual test for political equality, and admission to the franchise were confined to persons passing a given Standard; well and good. Then, no doubt, there would be (as things now stand) fifty per cent. of men who would win votes, and perhaps only thirty per cent. of women. So much may be freely admitted. But then that thirty per cent. of females would obtain political rights; and those who failed, would be debarred by a natural and real, not an arbitrary inferiority. Such a state of things would not present such ludicrous injustice as that which obtains,—for example,—in a parish not a hundred miles from my present abode. There is in the village in question a man universally known therein as “The Idiot;” a poor slouching, squinting fellow, who yet rents a house and can do rough field work, though he can scarcely speak intelligibly. He has a vote, of course. The owner of his house and of half the parish, who holds also the advowson of the living, is a lady who has travelled widely, understands three or four languages, and studies the political news of Europe daily in the columns of the Times. That lady, equally of course, has no vote, no power whatever to keep the representation of her county out of the hands of the demagogues naturally admired by the Idiot and his compeers. Under the regulations which create inequalities of this kind is it not rather absurd to insist perpetually, (as is the practise of our opponents,) on the intellectual inferiority of women,—as if it were really in question?

I hold, however, that whatever be our real mental rank,—to be tested thoroughly only in future generations, under changed conditions of training and heredity,—we women are the equivalents, though not the equals, of men. And to refuse a share in the law-making of a nation to the most law-abiding half of it; to exclude on all largest questions the votes of the most conscientious, temperate, religious and (above all) most merciful and tender-hearted moiety, is a mistake which cannot fail, and has not failed, to entail great evil and loss.

I wrote, as I have mentioned in Chapter XV., a great many articles, (chiefly in Fraser and Macmillan,) on women’s concerns about the years 1861–2–3: “What shall we do with our Old Maids?”; “Female Charity, Lay and Monastic;” “Women in Italy in 1862;” “The Education of Women;” “Social Science Congress and Women’s Part in them;” and, later, “The Fitness of Women for the Ministry of Religion.” These made me known to many women who were fighting in the woman’s cause; Miss Bessie Parkes (now Madame Belloc), Madame Bodichon, Mrs. Grey, Miss Shirreff, Mrs. Peter Taylor, Miss Becker, and others; and when Committees were formed for promoting Woman Suffrage, I was invited to join them. I did so; and frequently attended the meetings, though not regularly. We had several Members of Parliament and other gentlemen (notably Mr. Frederick Hill, brother of my old friend Recorder Hill and of Sir Rowland), who generally helped our deliberations; and many able women, among others Mrs. Augusta Webster, the poetess; and Lady Anna Gore Langton, an exceedingly sensible woman, who also held Drawing-Room Suffrage Meetings (at which I spoke) in her house. We had for secretary Miss Lydia Becker; a woman of singular political ability, for whom I had a sincere respect. Her premature death has been an incalculable loss to the women of England. She gave me the impression of one of those ill-fated people whose outward persons do not represent their inward selves. I am sure she had a large element of softness and sensitiveness in her nature, unsuspected by most of those with whom she laboured. She was a most courageous and straightforward woman, with a single eye to the great political work which she had undertaken, and which I think no one has understood so well as she.