Dubbed the 'great sunbeam' by her contemporary Louisa May Alcott, Frances Power Cobbe, the social reformer, feminist and anti-vivisectionist, was a lifelong rights campaigner: for women, for the poor and for animals. Brought up a gentlewoman in nineteenth-century Dublin in an age in which convention ruled, Cobbe's reforming spirit started in her rejection of a life of domesticity and accepted femininity. She earned her living as a prolific writer of books and articles for newspapers and periodicals, and became famous for casting off her corsets, an act of defiance for the time that remains symbolic of her willingness to flaunt convention. Her preference was for public work alongside the English factory reformer and philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury and philosopher/reformer John Stuart Mill, and for engagement in ruthless polemic with the likes of prominent figures such as Charles Darwin, William Ewart Gladstone and Emily Davies, whom she counted among her friends and acquaintances. She may have been more strong minded, arrogant and acerbic than many of her contemporaries, unwilling ever to compromise, but her belief in God and in herself made her one of the most respected public figures of her time.
Cobbe's reformist zeal was inspired by an association with the English educationalist and reformer Mary Carpenter, leading to her active support of Carpenter's work with street children in Bristol. Cobbe was famous for her strident opposition to the Poor Laws and the workhouse. Her campaigning spirit was subsequently directed at change for women, exhibited not so much in her desire to cast off her corsets as in her more radical beliefs in the fundamental rights of women and in education in particular, in which regard she allied herself with Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. She was crucial to a change in the law that allowed beaten wives to separate from their husbands, who had then to provide for their maintenance. From 1863, after reading a newspaper article about the inhumane treatment of animals in a French veterinary school, Cobbe devoted her energies to animal rights. The passion she brought to the fight against cruelty to animals makes her the spiritual ancestor of today's animal liberationists; it is a passion that endures in the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection (SPALV) and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV), two of Britain's foremost anti-vivisectionist organisations, both of which she founded.
Using as a catalyst Cobbe's own thoughts and activities, as well as new and original research and a range of historical sources, Power and Protest explores what most concerned her: protest, reform and hierarchy, the relationship of men to women, of humans to animals. In this biography of Frances Power Cobbe, Lori Williamson reveals the fascinating complexity of one of Victorian England's most vocal and controversial women and, through her, notions of ideology, power and gender.