English writer and leader in reform movements, daughter of Charles Cobbe, a lieutenant in the Nineteenth Light Dragoons, who fought at Assaye; born at Newbridge House, County Dublin, Ireland, on the 4th of December 1822; and educated at Brighton. Miss Cobbe was attracted by the radical Unitarian and rationalistic views of Theodore Parker during the brilliant career of that clergyman in the closing years of his life and labor, and adopted his views in a great measure, so much so that all her writings will be found to be tinged with that minister’s views of matters pertaining to the mental and spiritual part of man. A general trend of thought, which took its rise from the writings and public utterances of Theodore Parker, may be discovered running through nearly all her publications, which include the following: An Essay on Intuitive Morals (1855); Religious Duty (1857); Pursuits of Women (1863); Cities of the Past (1863); Broken Lights (1864); Italics (1864); Studies, Ethical and Social (1865); Hours of Work and Play (1867); Drawing Lights (1868); Alone, to the Alone (1871); Darwinism in Morals (1872); Hopes of the Human Race (1874–80); Re-Echoes (1876); False Beasts and True (1875); Duties of Women (1880); The Peak in Darien (1881); A Faithless World (1885); The Scientific Spirit of the Age (1888); The Modern Rack (1889); The Friend of Man (1890).
In addition to these, Miss Cobbe wrote and issued a great number of less pretentious works in the form of pamphlets, in the interest of various reforms to which she was devoting herself, among which may be mentioned The Workhouse as a Hospital (1861); Friendless Girls, and How to Help Them (1861), which was an account of the original Preventive Mission at Bristol; Female Education (1862), a plea for the granting of university degrees to women; and a large number of pamphlets and leaflets opposed to vivisection, against which practice she was opposed strongly and uttered some of her strongest protests.
To further her work in the line of reform, Miss Cobbe originated a scheme of labor in ragged schools, and afterward a system for befriending young servants, the latter since being worked by the Metropolitan Association, founded for that purpose. She also did much work for the relief of destitute incurables.
Miss Cobbe traveled extensively in Egypt, Palestine, Greece and Italy, and afterward settled down to hard work in London again, and did editorial writing on The Echo and later on The Standard, and afterward contributed largely to The Quarterly Review, Fraser’s Magazine, and a number of newspapers and other periodicals. During this time she was engaged in promoting the Aggravated Assaults Act of 1878 whereby wives whose husbands have been convicted of violent assaults upon them are enabled to obtain separation orders.
In 1880–81 she delivered a course of lectures on The Duties of Women, which were published and circulated largely in America as well as Great Britain, and, in addition, have been translated into Danish, French and Italian. In the latter year she founded the Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection, of which she was the secretary for fifteen years, and the late Lord Shaftesbury was the president. See also “God draws a cloud over each gleaming morn,” “The Scientific Spirit of the Age” and “The Contagion of Love.”
