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2000 "Those candid and ingenuous vivisectors": Frances Power Cobbe and the anti-vivisection controversy in Victorian Britain, 1870-1904

Montgomery, Brooke

Montgomery, B. (2000). "Those candid and ingenuous vivisectors": Frances Power Cobbe and the anti-vivisection controversy in Victorian Britain, 1870-1904 (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/13131 http://hdl.handle.net/1880/39765 master thesis

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"Those Candid and Ingenuous Vivisectors": Frances Power Cobbe and the

tinti-Vivisection Controversy in Victorian Britain, 1 870-1 904.

Brooke ~Montgomery

A THESIS

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DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

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my2000

O Brooke Montgomery 2000 National Library Bibliothhue nationale 191 of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographic Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Ottawa ON K1AON4 Canada Canada Your hk Votre r~fcirmtd

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The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriete du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protege cette these. thesis nor substantial extracts f?om it Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent etre imprirnes reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. ABSTRACT

This thesis examines the anti-vivisection controveny of late Victorian Britain, looking particularly at the involvement of Frances Power Cobbe, leader and morai centre of the movement It explores the way that the idea of progress informed arguments on both sides of the debate and turned emerging scientific discourse into contested ground on which two sides fought over which would be the one to define what progress meant for British society. Women were prominent on the anti-vivisection side while men dominated the growing scienufic profession and consequently the arguments of Cobbe and others that emerged out of the controversy were gendered and frequently made associations between the treatment of women and of animals. Many people were instrumental in helping me complete this thesis. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Douglas Peen without whose support and guidance this study could not have been completed. I would also like to thank memben of the History Department who provided input on this thesis, particularly the members of my committee, Dr. Elizabeth Jameson and Dr. Martln Staum. Thanks also to Dr.

Gretchen MacMillan fiom the Political Science department who was the external examiner. In addition I must thank the Rstory Department for their generous financial support which allowed me to devote most of my time and energy to my studies.

I would also like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to my fellow graduate students,

Chns Mummery, Jeff Wigelsworth, James Ems, James Warren and Kristin Bumett, who

provided fhendship, emotional support and humour throughout my two years of study. I

would particularly like to thank Whitney Lackenbauer who offered invaluable insight and advice and who was always a good sparring partner during our fiequent debates. Thanks

also to my co-workers in the University Archives who were always interested in my

work, supportive and encouraging. I would like to offer a very special thanks to my dear

friend Jennifer Arthur who was always there when I needed to talk or go shopping and

who is truly a 'kindred spirit' Finally, thank you to my parents Bill and Sharonne

Montgomery and my brother Craig for their love and support and for their unwavering

faith in my abilities. I could not have done it without them. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Approval Page...... ii .-. Abstract...... -111 Acknowledgements...... iv Table of Contents...... v

Introduction......

Chapter One: Context of Controversy: ...... 17 Animal Welfare Sentiment and the Regulation of Vivisection. 1800-1900

Chapter Two: The Life of Frances Power Cobbe: ...... 36 Philanthropy as Woman's Mission

Chapter Three: Feminising the Anima! Body: ...... 1lO Women, Animals and Anti-Vivisection in the Writing of Frances Power Cobbe

Conclusion...... I44

Bibliography...... 147 INTRODUCTION

Controversy over the practice of vivisection has plagued scientists fiom the nineteenth centuly until the present in both Britain and North America. It has become a particularly contentious issue in the last thirty years as animal rights proponents have united to promote the liberation of animals from laboratories. Contemporary debates about the practice of vivisection, however, are substantially different fiom nineteenth-century arguments. Today, philosophers such as Peter Singer, Tom Regan and Stephen Clarke, though arguing &om different philosophical perspectives, all agree that animals are intrinsically valuable and morally relevant beings who have the right to live free fiom human abuse and exploitation.' The =ti-vivisection movement of late Victorian Bntain, though in many ways a precursor to today because it engaged in questions of our moral obligation to animals, had a fbndamentally different philosophical starting point. In the past, debate centred primarily on the morality of causing pain to helpless animals, yet those involved in the movement never questioned the hierarchy of being that placed humans above animals. Singer, Regan and Clarke agree that the existence of a hierarchy of being

-has been used, and continues to be used, as the justification for many forms of animal abuse, including the use of animals for vivisection.

What the contemporary animal rights movement does have in common with the anti- vivisection movement of the nineteenth century is the substantial presence of women.

I See Keith Tester, -4nimals and Sociey: The Hummip of Animal Rights (New York : Roudedge. t 99 1). 1- 16 for a ddiscussion of the basic arguments of Singer, Regan and Clake. See also, Peter Singer, .4nimal Liberation, (New Yok: Avon Books, 1 979,Tom Regan, The Case for.4nmalRighrs.h. (BakeIq: Universic of California Press, 1983). Tom Regan, The Sn~ggIefor Animal Righn, (Clarke Summit: International Society for Animal Rights, Inc., 1987), and Stephen Clarke, ThehfomlSrms of .4nimalr. (Oshrd: Clmdon Press, 1977). Currently, women compose seventy to eighty percent of animal rights adherents.' It cannot, however, be stated that anti-vivisection was a feminist cause, then or now.

Although women who supported it in the nineteenth century often recognised that the oppression of both women and animals was interconnected and that many members of the movement were also feminists, the two causes never actually united and, in fact, sometimes saw their aims as antithetical. The distance between the two groups became more acute in the twentieth century as liberal feminists made a concerted effort to dissociate themselves from any identdication with animals or animal causes because they believed that much of the justification for women's alleged inferiority was based on their association with the "animal," represented by the body. Men, on the other hand, were traditionally linked to the mind or rationality. And as Lynda Birke puts it "to be closer to animals in our culture is to be denigrated."' Feminists, therefore, have asserted that women and men are both rational being distinct fiom animals. But the implication is that they are better than animals and indeed the identification of women as rational agents has deliberately rested on the premise that humans and animals are different and that

'humanness' is a superior quality.

Some feminists and male supporters of feminism within the animal rights movement, however, are beginning to challenge the traditional human centred view and to see it as

part of the dominant and patriarchal culture. They argue that liberal feminists are buylng

into this culture when they privilege the mind over the body, the human over the animal,

and reason over emotion. Animal liberation advocates such as Singer and Regan who

espouse a rights position also tend tacitly to accept these polarisations as givens because

Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donov~uhtrod~~tion,n m AnimuL mid IVornen: Feminisr Theoretical Erplorations eds. Carol J. Ahand Josephine Donovan (Durham: Duke Universit)' Press, 1995), 5. Lynds Birke, "Exploring the Boundaries: FWAoimals and Science," indnimalc and ilbrnen, 35. they too privilege reason over emotion. They attempt to bring legitimacy to the movement

by invoking a call to reason to support their claims for animal liberation. And what feminist theorists like Brian Luke point out is that the denigration of emotion implied by

the construction of opposites is gendered. He writes,

a central patriarchal ideology is the elevation of the rational/cultural male over the emotionaVbiologica1 female. Women's rage (labelled 'sentimen5 hysteria, etc.) is thus divested of political significance by interpreting any female reaction against the established order not as a moral challenge to that order, but as a biosexual phenomenon to be ignored or subdued.'

Although Luke feels that both men and women need to start to view emotion as a valid

starting point for animal advocacy, some women theorists who follow Luke's line of

reasoning suggest that women in particular should embrace their association wtb

'emotion' and approach animal advocacy fiom a sense of ethical responsibility rooted in an

"historical praxis of care."' They are encouraging women to embrace the very capacities

that have frequently been labelled as sentimental and irrational, that is to sa/ their inherent

nurturing capabilities, and use them to fight against animal expl~itation.~In addition, they

believe that animal advocacy is a natural extension of their feminist principles because

. they believe that all oppression is connected and that women as victims of objectification

and exploitation themselves, must not abandon fellow targets of abuse. Women must

embrace their historical linkage with animals and recognize that animals too have suffered

centuries of abuse and have been objectified as the "Other."

-- - Brian Luke, "Taming Ourselves or Going Feral? Towards a Nonpaaiarchal Metaethic of Animal Liberatioan in Animals and ?Pkmen,293. 'Ibid. 6 For more on this subject see, Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan eds, Bq~nd.4nimalRighu: -4 Feminisr Coring Edric forrhe Treatment ofilnimak (New York: Continuum, 1996) and Carol J. Adams. Feminism and the Dejense of Animals (New York: Coatinutun, 1994). In arguing that both women and animals have suffered from patriarchal structures of oppression and in accepting a caring ethic as an empowering tool in helping animals, feminists harken directly back to the nineteenth century. The anti-vivisection movement of late Victorian Britain was dominated by women who saw the fate of animals and of members of their own sex as inextricably linked because each group suffered from male violence, and such women consciously exerted their so-called inherent 'motherly' qualities and brought them to bear on the treatment of animals subjected to vivisection. This thesis, therefore, seeks to uncover the ways that gender Influenced women's involvement in anti- vivisection in the nineteenth century. The participation of Frances Power Cobbe, leader of the most influential of the anti-vivisection societies that proliferated in the 1870s, will form the focal point of this study. Cobbe was involved in a number of social campaigns in nineteenth-century Britain including workhouse reform, women's education. and women's sufkge. She also wrote extensively on religious subjects, particularly theism, which was the faith that she had come to embrace in her youth. Theism was based upon an intuitive understanding of God's moral laws and human obligation to act in accordance with those laws. Cobbe, like so many Victorian intellectuals, doubted Christianity and ultimately rejected it in Favour of another creed. Her life, therefore, provides a window into many of the issues that occupied the Victorian social conscience. It was anti-vivisection that most aroused Cobbe's passionate indignation and encouraged her to come to the aid of the animals she believed were being used as the tools of science. This too was a reflection of burgeoning animal welfare sentiments in the nineteenth century. Cobbe was instrumental both in the formation of the Royal Commission on Vivisection and the lesislation that ensued, thereby putting the subject on the public agenda As a single and independent woman she rejected the social conventions that prescribed a limited role for women within the domestic sphere, and which stood in the way of her desire to engage in meaningful work, and forged a career for herself based upon her idea that as a woman she was well equipped to bring a moral message to the worid. She was the self-appointed "prophet of humanity" who would preach a message of lund and compassionate treatment of animals to the whole of Britain and the world if they would listen.

Historical scholarship on the animal welfare movement in Britain is currently small but it is growing. Though Keith Thomas's Man and the Natural World offers a comprehensive examination of the relationship between humans and nature, including animals, from 1500 to 1800; his study really focuses on the era just prior to the development of institutionalised animal protection.7 Nevertheless, his work does provide the background necessary to an understanding of the increasing interest in animal welfare that was so characteristic of the Victorian period. Thomas's work is broad in scope and generous in detail. He draws together a vast amount of anecdotal evidence to suppon his argument.

Hilda Kean's 1998 work, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Briroin since 1800, examines a variety of animal welfkre campaigns in Britain, offering a similarly broad treatment of the subject, as does Thomas for the earlier Her emphasis is on organizations other than the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

(RSPCA), the most prominent and successful of the nineteenth-century animal welfare organisations, that have received little scholarly attention, such as the National Canine

' Keith Thomas, hian and the .Vaturn[ Forld: ChongingAttirudes in Enghnd 1500-1800. (Toronto:Penguin Books, 1983). * IIilda Keaa, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain Since 1800, (London: Rd-tion Book 1998). Defence League, the Metropolitan Drinlung Foundation and Cattle Trough Association, the Battersea Dogs's Home and others. She devotes a chapter to the anti-vivisection controversy, but her treatment is cursory. She discusses the involvement of the RSPCA in anti-vivisection and briefly discusses the presence of women in the movement

Studies on animal welfare in Britain that focus on the RSPCA tend to emphasize its roots as a middle-class organisation intent on imposing its standards of morality and respectability on the working class. James Turner's Reckoning witit the Beast, for example, places particular emphasis on the development of the RSPCA in Britain and the similar societies that emerged in various cities in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, noting that on both continents they were respectable organizations wth a predominantly middle-class membership.g According to Tumer, middle class involvement in the animal protection movement was an attempt to control the lower orders. In the early years of the nineteenth century the attention of reformers was directed primarily against bull-baiting and cock-fighting because these were seen as disruptive practices that encouraged men to miss work in the mills and factories. Organized animal protection also provided an effective way for the middle class to transfer their guilt over the worlung conditions of their employees onto animals. This was a strategy that allowed them to assuage their guilt while at the same time preserving the social order. This is problematic for several reasons, however. It implies calculation on the part of the middle- class holders and suggests that they worked from motives that were not in any way altruistic. Arguably human motives are always mixed but it seems very cynical indeed to

James Turner, Reckoning with the Becut.- Animuk, Pam undHumuniy in the Victorian .\find (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). suggest that the Victorians viewed charity in such a cold and detached light. Moreover, such an argument assumes a level of middle-class professional homogeneity that was clearly not present That is to say, not all members of the middle class were business owners who would have had large numbers of employees. Middle-class professions were diverse and included clergymen, bankers, lawyers, doctors, and business owners.

Like Turner, Hamet Ritvo believes that middle-class efforts to help animals stemmed fiom a desire to control the lower orders as much as from actual concern for animal suffering. In 7he Animal Estate, Ritvo argues that Victorians reinforced the hierarchy of the upper over the lower classes and the imperial power of England over its colonies, through their treatment of animals.'' As proof of this contention she points to that fact that the efforts of the RSPCA were directed primarily against the working classes, who were identified as being cruel because of their unruly and violent behaviour. The comfortable identification of cruelty as a lower class proclivity convinced the middle class of their moral superiority and justified their attempts at imposing their code of respectability on the lower orders. Rho also explores the notion that domination over exotic animals reinforced the imperial power of Britain. As wild animals from the far reaches of the empire, such as tigers, lions, and elephants became popular in zoos and menageries of Britain, they provided tangible proof of the power of the British empire.

Displaying these dangerous yet captive animals strengthened the legitimacy of colonial ruie and emphasized the British role as civiliser.

Absent in both Turner and Ritvo's class-based assessment of the animal welhre movement is any close attention to the issue of gender. Neither author expands upon

10 Hmiet ktvo, The .4nimal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the b'icrorian Age (Cambridge: Hmard University Press, 1987). women's prominent involvement in animal welfare organizations, such as the RSPCA or the various anti-vivisection societies that were formed in response to the furore over legislation in the 1870s. In Ritvo's work in particular the theme of dominance and exploitation is prominent and so it is curious that she does not explore the inherently gendered nature of this idea. Certainly the anti-vivisection controversy revealed that women and animals were implicitly linked in the Victorian imagination and that the oppression of both groups was related to male violence. Cobbe's advocacy of animals, for example, was primarily informed by gender because she identified with anjmals as fellow victims of male exploitation.

In his lengthy article "Animals and the State in Nineteenth Century England", Brian

Harrison examines the various legislative actions that affected the treatment of animals throughout nineteenth-century Britain and how the institution of the RSPCA enforced such legislation." He pays particular attention to the relationship between the RSPCA and the police, noting that the RSPCA deliberately cultivated a good relationship with the authorities in order to solicit their help in prosecuting offenders. Hamson also relies on class as a tool to understanding the motivation of the RSPCA, particularly when he discusses their efforts to maintain the organisation's respectable status. Hanison's secondary purpose in this article is to shed light on pressure group politics in Britain and particularly to emphasize the pragmatism of the Victorians' attitudes to the State.

'I Brian Harrison, uAnimaIs and the State in Nineteenth Century England," Englirh Histon'caI Review 88 (197 1): 786-820. There has only been one study to date that attempts to deal directly with anti-

vivisection in Victorian Britain in all of its dimensions. Richard French's 1 975 work Anti-

vivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Sociery focuses mainly on the political

aspects of the controversy but also pays attention to the intellectual and social context of

the movement." French's work is a comprehensive and invaluable source for an

examination of this issue. His main purpose in this book is to explore the reasons why

scientists were ultimately victorious in the battle to win the hearts and minds of the

Victorian public. In doing so, he draws together a vast number of sources and provides a

wide-ranging examination of the debate. French devotes only a short chapter to the

importance and significance of women in the movement, however, noting that female

participation was among the highest for causes without overtly feminist objectives. He

briefly discusses Cobbe's involvement, but does not delve deeply into her motivations for

involvement in anti-vivisection.

The fact that women were prominent in the anti-vivisection movement has been

noted by most authors who deal with the subject but there have only been a few studies

'that have explicitly examined this connection. Most of the work available on the subject

tends to focus on the literary context with the exception of Mary Ann Elston's article

"Women and Anti-vivisection in Victorian England, 1 870-1 900" in which Elston examines

the historical links between the women's movement and anti-vivisection." She explores

the overlap between membership in both causes and others that attracted a predominantly

female membership, such as the campaign to repeal the CD Acts, but it is hard to discern a

" Richard D. French, Anti-vivisection undMedimfScience in VictorianSociey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). " Ann Ehn"Women and Anti-vivisection in Victorim England, 1870-1 900," in Civitectton in Histon'cal Perspective ed NicoIaas A. Rupke, (New York: Croom Hekn, 1987), 259-294. clear argument in her work She cautions against malung any definitive conclusions about feminism and anti-vivisection, pointing out that there were feminists who were in favour of vivisection and physiologists who were supporters of women's suffrage, such as Victor

Honely, but concludes by arguing that the connections between organised anti-vivisection and the women's movement were complex but discernible.

Coral Lansbury also discusses the relationship between women and anti-vivisection but her focus is substantially different kom that of Elston. In The Old Bro~unDog:

Women. Workers and Anti-vivisection in Ehvardion England, Lansbury argues that women were the most fervent supporters of anti-vivisection because the vivisected animal stood for the vivisected woman.'' In particular she explores the way pornographic images of strapped and bound women paralleled those of women strapped to gynaecologlcal chairs and animals laid out on vivisectors' tables. Lansbury's work offers interesting insight into the complex ways that the vulnerability of both women and animals at the hands of men were expressed discursively in fiction. The main problem with Lansbury's work is that it is ostensibly about the Edwardian era but the majority of her sources come from the late

Victorian period, which means that her work is not soundly grounded in its historical context. This discrepancy takes on greater importance when it is revealed that women became increasingly immersed in scientific culture after the turn of the century and themselves became vivisectors, thus indicating that the common enemy of anti- vivisectionists became not just men, but science as a discipline.

Sarah Theobold-Hall's 1998 Ph.D. dissertation, At the Borders of Humnnir~;is similar in emphasis to that of Lansbu~yas she traces negotiations of the humadanimal

'' Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women. Wok,and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). boundary in literary treatments of vivisection during the period 1870 to 1 904.15 She examines the way that public debate over anti-vivisection and animal interests was shaped md directed by gender ideology. Included in the works under discussion is Cobbe's autobiography, which she classifies as a work of fiction in the sense that it was carefully constructed by Cobbe to "rewrite history and unite politics and practice through personal nanati~e."'~But of course all potential sources are consmcted; none are value neutral and so they all need to be read critically. On the other hand, as I think Hall points out, fiction can provide insight into culture despite the fact that it is not ostensibly grounded in fact or truth. Other works examined by Hall include Ouida's Puck, H. G. Wells's The Island of'Dr.

Moreau and Wilkie Collins's Hean and Science. Hall's works suffers as Lansbury's does from a lack of historical context which is not overcome by an introductory chapter designed to provide an overview of the anti-vivisection movement. The focus of Hall's work is not the historical but the literary contexf however, and in that dimension her argument is compelling.

Finally, Moira Ferguson has also looked at women's involvement in animal causes

'from a literary perspective in her recent book, Animal Advocacy and English~vomen.1780-

1900: Patriots, Nation, and ~mpire." She examines the writing of several authors, including Cobbe, who wrote on various aspects of animal welfare in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All of the authors she looks at are not typically examined within the confines of the so-called traditional literary canon. Ferguson explores the ways that women writers "not only attacked cruelty against animals but complicated it to entwine the

-- - l5 Sarah M. Thmbold-Hall, At he Bordms of Hurnmrity: .4nimals, Women and the .4nti-viviisection .\fovemenr in Lure Xinetemth Cenmty Literature, (UnpubMed PlD. Dissatation: Universit);of Tulsa, 1998). l6 Ibid, 2 1. " Moira F-n, Animal Advocacy and Eng1&hwomen 1 780-1900: Polriotr. .%tion, and Enrpi~.(Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998). concerns of slaves and other subjugated c~mmunities."'~Her focus is on the relationship between animal advocacy and ideas of nation and race and in particular she finds that women participated in myths of nationhood that were reinforced by the idea that kindness toward animals was a hndamental 'British' trait She provides an interesting avenue of research which although not the focus of this study offers some promising new directions.

Frances Power Cobbe, leader of the anti-vivisection campaign, has been examined primarily in the context of mid-Victorian feminism and has had only one biographer to date. In her 1994 Ph.D. dissertation, Vicegerent of God: The Public Cnisades ojSFrances

Power Cobbe, Lori Lynn Williamson examines the impact of Cobbe's intellectual development on her public crusades.IgShe devotes the bulk of the work to Cobbe's anti- vivisection activities because they occupied the last thirty yean of her life. She does not. however, make explicit connections between her feminist arguments and her involvement in anti-vivisection. Williamson concludes that Cobbe's cornmiment to anti-vivisection ultimately resulted into a "descent into fanaticism." She maintains that Cobbe's devotion to anti-vivisection was detrimental both to her understanding of progress and of the -. importance of science and medicine. Cobbe did become increasingly hostile to science as the vivisection battles raged on into the 1880s but it was not, I would argue, because she became fhnatical but because she had come to see the goals of science as directly antithetical to the goals of animal welfare. Despite disagreement with some of her conclusions, Williamson's study has been an invaluable tool in fbmishing some of the details of Cobbe's life that cannot be gleaned fiom published sources and which were, unfortunately, inaccessible to this author. l8 lbid, 1. 19 Lori LJP~Williamson, Vicegerent of God: The Public Crusades of Fmnces Power Cobbe. 1822-1 904; (Unpublished PhD. Dissatation: University of Toronto, 1994). Published primary sources on the anti-vivisection controversy are plentiful as it was

an issue that generated a lot of ink in the pages of British periodicals and in Parliament.

Cobbe was a prolific writer who published pamphlets, tracts, books and articles in many

British periodicals such as the Fortnightly Review, Frasers,MacMilluns, and the Qzrarter!~

Review. Others such as George Hoggan, R H. Hutton, Lewis Carroll also added their

voices to the debate. In addition, the Report of the Royal C~mmisszonis some five

hundred pages long and the issue generated much debate in Parliament in the spring and

summer of 1876, the year in which legislation was introduced, amended and passed.

Archival sources are diverse but scattered. Many of the London anti-vivisection

societies still exist and contain pertinent records but financial restraints prevented me from

travelling to London. What still exist of Cobbe's personal papers and correspondence are

housed at the Pennsylvania Historical Society in Philadelphia, the Huntington Library in

Los Angeles, the Bodleian Library, the National Union of Women's SufRase Societies,

and the Shaftesbury Estate in Donet Given the fact that sources on Cobbe are so scattered

I decided early on to approach the topic fiom an ideological perspective in order to make

-use of the readily available published primary sources that exist and could be obtained

through interlibrary loan. This thesis, therefore, remains centred in the realm of ideas,

focusing on the intellectual milieu of which Cobbe was a part.

The fiat chapter will outline the historical context of anti-vivisection by exploring

the rise of animal welfkre sentiment in Britain. Concern for the suffering of laboratory

animals did not suddenly emerge but was the product of animal protection efforts that had

been going on since the early part of the nineteenth century. Concurrent with such concern

was the professionalisation of science into di~tinct~fieldsof study including the practices of physiology, bacteriology and pharmacology, all of which required the use of animals in their research. The aims of animal welhe advocates and scientists would collide over the issue of vivisection in the 1870s when a Royal Commission was established to investigate the issue and legislation was introduced into Parliament This chapter explores the particular issues that emerged in the 1870s, particularly the moral arguments put forward by both sides in the debate. Though Cobbe is not central to this chapter, the issue of morality that was articulated so prominently by the anti-vivisectionists was one that Cobbe herself used and that informed her most fundamental ideas on the subject.

Chapter two provides biographical details of the life of Frances Power Cobbe in an effort to place her within the intellectual context ofVictorian Britain. This chapter explores both Cobbe's feminist ideas and her objection to vivisecnon, noting that each was premised on ideas of a moral society and her notion that philanthropy was part of moral reform. In addition, this chapter will detail the involvement of other women who spoke out against vivisection, noting how their arguments were in many ways similar to Cob be's.

Chapter three will explore the complex ways that gender, and to a lesser extent class,

'influenced Cobbe's advocacy of animals. An examination of several key pieces of

Cobbe's writing provide the basis of the chapter while the analysis is extended to include other works of Victorian fiction that reveal that women and animals were linked in the

Victorian imagination. The affinity of the anti-vivisection movement with other moral crusades of the late nineteenth century, particularly the campaign to repeal the Contagious

Diseases Acts, will also be examined. The Victorian attitude toward science and medicine emerges natumlly out of a discussion of both vivisection and the CD acts because both campaigns saw the medical profession as dangerous to the bodies of women, and both invoked the sexual imagery of rape to describe the penetration of the female body by the steel speculum and that of the vivisected animal by the physiologist's knife.

I would like to say a brief word about terms. Fiat of all, the word scientist is frequently used in place of the more specific term physiologist. This is due in part to the fact that Cobbe herself frequently used these terms interchangeably, and also because vivisection was a blanket word used to describe procedures done in a number of different sub-fields of science, which were unified by an emphasis on research. Vivisection literally means the cutting open of living organisms, which points to the specific techniques of physiologists, but it in fact was used to refer to a variety of procedures that included administering drugs to animals to witness their effects, infecting them with a disease. starving them, baking them in ovens and numerous other procedures that all came to be categorized under the broad term of vivisection.

Although Cobbe indicted doctors on the same grounds as she did vivisectors, doctors did not usually perform vivisection after the completion of their medical training. There was a clear distinction between theory and practice. Doctors dealt with human patients on a day-to-day basis whereas scientists, including physiologists, bacteriologists, phamacologists and others, were for the most part engaged in laboratory research. The two were related in Cobbe's thinking because they both "experimented" on weaker victims.

Doctors used female patients as subjects instead of animals. The two groups were to

Cobbe united in their primary emphasis on the acquisition of knowledge over the cultivation of morality.

Finally, I would like to mention that I have consciously refrained fiom using the term

"animal rights" to describe the anti-vivisection movement As already mentioned the idea that animals have 'rights' is a contemporary one promoted most particularly in the writing of Singer and Regan who both see exploitation of animals through intensive factory farming, entertainment or vivisection as a fundamental violation of the 'rights' of sentient creatures. The Victorians, Cobbe included, believed in stewardship of the animal kingdom.

Humans, by virtue of their moral capacities, had the responsibility to care for and protect animals but they also had the 'right' to kill them when necessary for human benefit. The only thing humans did not have the right to do to animals was to torture them, which was what vivisectors were charged with.

Ultimately, this thesis is an attempt to unite the themes of morality and progress wth

issues of gender. Arguments put forward by both women and men spoke with virtual uniformity of opinion, calling vivisection a moral evil. But women such as Cobbe also

invoked their authority as guardians of the domestic and the moral sphere to support their stance. Moreover, Cobbe viewed vivisection as a male proclivity and thus made associations between the oppression of her own sex and that of animals. For their part.

scientists viewed women as their primary adversaries and attempted to diminish the force

-of anti-vivisection protest by dismissing it as the sentimental ramblings of "hypocritical

humbugs and hysterical old maids."''

"Elie de Cyos "The Anti-vivisection Agitation," ConfmponuyReview 43 (1 883): 500. CHAPTER ONE

CONTEXT OF CONTROVERSY: ANIMAL WELFARE SENTIMENT AND THE REGUTION OF VIVISECTION, 1800-1900

Experimentation on living animals, or vivisection, had a long htory before it came

into common use in Britain in the 1870s. It had been practiced in 500 B.C.by Alcmaeon

of Croton who cut through the optic nerve of a hganimal and in 350 B.C. when

physicians had cut open animal throats to observe them swallowing. Galen of Pergamon

had practiced it in the second century AD. Mer falbg into disuse during the Middle

Ages, vivisection resdced in the seventeenth century as scientists made a variety of discoveries.' The work of Galen in particular provided the basis for many of the findings

of sixteenth and seventeenth-century anatomists and physiologists. In 1628 the English scientist Wihn IWey discovered the circulation of the blood by means of vivisection and published the results in h~sDe Mom Cordis, which in turn stimulated a spate of other animal experiments.'

By the middle of the eighteenth century vivisection had become common enough in

Britain to occasion explicit discussion about its moral implications. Alexander Pope

wrote of his contemporary the Rev. Stephen Hales, a practitioner of vivisection, "He is a very sood man, only I'm sorry has his hands so much imbued in blood."' Others such as

Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson reiterated Pope's opinionJ A now oft-quoted

footnote about animals appeared in Jererny Bentham's 1789 work An Introduction to he

1 Lori Lynn Williamson, C7cegemt of God: The Public Cmsades of Fmnces Power Cobbe, 1812-1904 (Unpublished PbD. Dissertation: University of Toronto, I 994), 280-28 1. 'Richard D. French, Anrivivisecrion andMedical Science in VictorianSociey, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 15-16. Quoted in French, 16. 'Ibid. Principles of Morals and Legislation. He wrote, "The question is not, Can they reason?

Nor, Can they mlk? But, Can they s~t#er?"~ The arguments against the practice by men like Addison, Johnson and Bentharn presaged those of anti-vivisectionists in the late

Victorian period. They were based jointly on skepticism of the efficacy of the method and moral condemnation of the pain dcted on anima~s.~

It was not until the 1870s, however, when vivisection became institutionalized in

Britain and the animal welfare movement had gained strength that organized protest against the practice developed. In 1875 a Royal Commission was established to investigate vivisection and in 1876 the first piece of regulatory legislation of its kind in the world, the "Cruelty to AnuMls Bill", was passed. In addition a plethora of anti- vivisection societies emerged including Frances Power Cobbe's Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection (VSS),the London Anti-Vivisection

Society, the International Association for the Total Suppression of Vivisection and the

Society for the Total Abolition of vivisection7

Opponents of vivisection consistently placed the issue in a moral context and

'painted scientists as upholders of a false religion rooted in the self-interested pursuit of professional prestige. Scientists attempted to debate the subject on the basis of vivisection's efficacy, but it would be the issue of morahty that would come to shape the controversy in the press and in public opinion Scientists would be forced to counter claims that they were mhumane and cruel upholders of a new and dangerous religion.

3 Jeremy Benthm An innoduction ro the Principles of .MOMIS and Legislotion. (New Y orli: Mothuctn, 1970), 283Bb. French, 17. '[bid, 160. Proponents of both sides grappled for the moral high ground and eventually collided head

on during the 1875/76 hror over governmental regulation of the practice.

Concern over the suffering of animals subject to vivisection was an outgrowth of

more general concern for animal welfare that had been growing in Britain fiom at least

the middle of the eighteenth century. In his exploration of the changing relationship

between humans and nature fiom 1500 to 1800, Keith Thomas argues that urbanization in

particular began to change the way people viewed ad.Animals were everywhere in

early modem Society. People had a very immediate relationship with them. As they

moved hher away £?om the countryside they began to move away fiom the immediacy

of the hurnanfmd connection Consequently people began to allow certain animals

back into their lives in order to combat a growing sense of alienation from nature. In

addition, the increasing wealth of some town dwellers made it more feasible for them to

hewith animals that had no productive value. Horses were praised for their courage and

generosity and dogs were particularly venerated as protectors and companions to

humans.' Although the popularity of cats developed more slowly, by the late eighteenth

-century they too were well established within the middle-class home. These pets were

seen as companions and were distinguished fiom other ammais in three principal ways.

First, they were allowed into the house to live in close proximity to people, second they

were usually given names, and thud they were never aten Close observation of

household animals encouraged claims that animals were intelligent and loyal and

therefore worthy of having kindness bestowed upon them Pet ownership then was one of

%kith Thomas, Man and he Nottimi Wodd:Changingdnitudes in England I5OQI800, (Toronto:Penguin Books, 1983), 101. the most important reasons that people began to change their attitudes about animals.g

By the middle of the nmeteenth century the Victorian cult of pets was hiyestablished

among the growing urban middle class. This was evidenced by a broad range of pet care

products available for the conscientious pet owner. Brass collars, kennel care products

Like Spratts Patent Meat Fibrine Dog Cakes, Ashworth's Patent Metallic Comb-brush, and Boulton and Paul's Dog's House and Yard Combined, were a few of the items that

Victorians could purchase for their beloved pets.''

Underlymg this growing sympathy for animals was a dread and abhorrence of pain that was new to the English sensibility. Prior to the nineteenth century pain had been

unavoidable for most people and certainly for many animals but by mid centuiy it had

become somethmg to be banshed. Although the origins of this change are hard to

pinpoint with certainty, James Turner suggests that it may have been the result of

industrialisation, which insulled in people a belief that they could "harness the forces of

nature" and therefore find a way to control pain1' The discovery of anaesthetics such as

ether and chiorofom hrther served to rnake pain into somethmg that was potentially avoidable. Ether came into common use in 1846 after a demonstration of its efFects in

Boston The Scotsman, James Young Simpson, mtroduced chloroform shortly

afterwards." Doctors seized upon anaesthetics with immense relief and they passed into

common practice more quickly than any other medical discovery."

Ibid, 110- 120. 10 Hamite Rho, The ..Inimal Estate: The English and Oher Creatures in the ficturian .4ge, (Cambridge: Harvard Univasig Press. 1 987), 86 "James Turner, Rehnmg with the Beast: Aninrais, Pain and Humaniry in the C?ctufrun.Lfind. (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 80. '' Chriaopher Lawrence, Medicine in the M&ng of hilodm Brimin. I 700-1920. (New York: Routledge- 1994,64. 'qumer, 79-82. Nowhere was the demon of pam more evident than in the practice of vivisection and it was at the heart of the matter as a moral issue. It was not that scientists were taking an animal's life that so disturbed opponents of the practice like Frances Power Cobbe, but that they were making its life a misery. What was especially disturbing about vivisection, in Cobbe's mind particularly, was the ha that not only did scientists dctpain but they understood that they were doing so. With their knowledge of physiology, they had "the most perfect acquaintance with every pain which they cause[ed]."'" This made the act more morally reprehensible than the abuse dieted by the "drunken drover" or "low rufliad' who didn't know better." Virtually all of the rhetoric that emerged from organirations such as the VSS and from other individuals protesting the practice emphasized the sufFenng that animals endured on the laboratory table. Consequently the issue of the consistent use of anaesthetics during experiments was one of the most contentious and important topics in the whole debate over regulation of the practice, as will be discussed shortly.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century concern over animal welfare was

'reflected m efforts to legislate for their protection On 2 April, 1800 Sir William

Pulteney, MP. for Shrewsbury, brought forward a bill to outlaw bull-baiting. The bill was defeated two weeks later in a sitting that attracted few members but another attempt to help animais through the apparatus of the state was made in 1809 when Thomas, Baron

Erskine, brought a bill before the House of Lords that proposed to "suppress cruelty to all domestic animals", not just bulls.16 The Lords were concerned about the scope of the

14 Frauces Power Cobbe, The Mom1 Aspects of Vwisectiun, (London: Pewtress and Co., 1884). 7. " Frances Power Cobbe, Life of Fmnces Power Cobbe, Volume II, (New Yo&: Houghton, Mif£lin and Company, 1894), 606. l6 Turner, 15-16. bill and voted to limit it to draught ammak and passed it unanimously. It failed to pass through the House of Commons, however, and was voted down by a margin of ten votes." No more efforts were rmde to protect animals until 1822 when Richard Martiq

MP. for Galway, proposed a Bill protecting cattle and hones from acts of cruelty. The bill was passed and anyone prosecuted under the Act faced censure by a fine and up to three months in jail The bill was not fhr-reachmg because it did not include protection for cats and dogs, nor did it prohibit bull baiting as the courts managed to have the bull excluded fkom the meaning of the term cattle. It was a milestone, however, because for the fist time the sanction of the state was brought to bear upon those who abused animals. Martin's act was revised in 1835, 1849 and 1854 to include domestic animals not already protected.Ig

The fust anmd welfare organization, the Royal Society for the Prevention of

Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), was formed in 1824 in response to the passlng of Manin's

Act. It was founded by evangelical humanitarians drawn from the ranks of the growing middle class and it officially gained the support of the crown in 1840 with the appending of the word ~oyal." The RSPCA rhedffom targeting aristocratic practices such as game hunting as instances of cruelty and this probably garnered them the suppon of the crown and was likely the reason that the society was so succesdkl. From the beginning the RSPCA was as concerned with maimaining social order as it was with alleviating the suff- of animals. While there is no doubt that members came together out of genuine concern for animals, much of their publicity reflected the implicit assumption that those most inclined to be cruel to animals were f?om the lower orders of society. It was believed that respectable middle-class citizens understood the importance of kindness toward animals." lelabouring poor were seen as naturally more brutal than the middle class and this view was strengthened by fiequent observation of them beating horses and cattle m the street. The rnajorlty of prosecutions brought by the RSPCA concerned those animals abused by butchen and drovers. Between 1857 and 1860 eighty-two percent of offenders prosecuted were members of the workmg class.

The RSPCA was always concerned that they portray an image consistent with middle-class values of respectabilrcy and rnorallty. They hYed their own force of constables who were employed on a hll-time basis and whose job it was to patrol the streets of London, and later other cities, and to respond to cases to which the Society had been a~erted.~The constables were expected to reflect well on the RSPCA and consequently only those who were respectable were hired. In one case they became very concerned when they found one of their constables "living in a wretched apartment, in an obscure Court ... a most disgracefid state and place for a person holding a respectable situation The RSPCA also disliked its constables piling up debts and some were dismissed because of such practices.'5

From the begking the RSPCA was cautious in its actions and always favoured a moderate course that followed the line of public opinion'6 This was apparent from the beginning when their efficient Honourary Secretary Lewis Gompertz was eased &om his

" Brian Harrison, -Animals and the State in Nineteenth Century England: English Historical Review. 58 (1971): 788. '' Ritvo, 13 3. =fbid, 137. 23 H&rlison,794. '' Quoted in Harrison, 797. " Ibid, 797. position with the society because of some of hs more extreme viewpoints. He was a vegetarian who believed that it was wrong to put an animal to any use that was not directly beneficial to the animal Consequently he would not ride in a carriage or eat meat. The fact that he was also Jewish did not endear him to the Christian majority who subscribed and supported the RSPCA and hence Gompertz was seen as a distinct liability. 27

Nowhere was the moderate stance of the RSPCA more apparent, however, than in its attitude towards vivisection Although the society was responsible for invoking

Martin's Act to prosecute the French physiologist Eugene Magnan and three English doctors who injected alcohol and absinthe into the vein of a dog at the annual meetlng of the British Medical Association in 1874" they proved reluctant to deal with the issue when the anti-vivisection controversy peaked m 1875176. Cobbe was htrated by their unwdlingness to draw up a memorial protesting the performance of pa~hlexpenments on animals. When she went to enlist their support they suggested that she take responsibllay for drawing up the mernord herself. In reflecting on that meeting she ivrote m her autobiography, 'They were not the men to take the lead in such a movement and make a bold stand against the claims of science." '9 It was specifically because most men of science were fkom the ranks of the middle class that the RSPCA was reluctant to deal with the issue. Accustomed as they were to the casual brutality Inflicted on animals in the street by those who worked most closely d them, they were ill prepared to conceive of respectable humane men of their own class torturing animals in laboratories. That the RSPCA declined to take an active part in the proceedings reveals that it was a controversy that had moved beyond their traditional scope of protecting animals from workmg-class cruelty. They were hesitant to antagonize respectable middle-class citizens engaged in what they considered to be a legitimate practice. Moreover, they were not convinced that scientists were inflicting cruelty of the same magnitude on animals as those of the lower classes were.)' John Colam, Secretary to the FSPCA maintained before the Royal Commission that English physiologists generally tried to prevent pain to animals fiir more than did scientists on the continent and that he had not heard of one case of wanton cruelty Inflicted on an animal by a scienti~t.~'

In line with their moderate stance the RSPCA supported regulation of vivisection not abolition They objected to experiments that caused intense or lingering pain, to the performance of experiments as a method of demonstratio% and to the performance of experiments by students or other inexperienced practitioners.'2 That they were willing to believe the scientist's chto humane treatment of animals in their Iaboratories was reflected in Cobbe's recounting of the RSPCA's investigation of the practice for the

Royal Commission She wrote '7 understood, later, that he (Mr. Colam Secretary of the

RSPCA ) was shown a painless vivisection on a cat and offered a glass of sherry: and - - there (so hr as I know or ever heard) the labours of that sub-committee ended."" Mer the enactment of the Cnrelry to Animuis Act of 1876, the RSPCA put the matter behmd them They quickly returned to their more traditional work of protesting working-class cruelty, doubtless reflecting their ambivalence regarding the issue. Whenever the RSPCA

- - 30 Rie~o,160-16 1. 31 John Colam, Digest of Evidence Tokm Before the Royal Commission on the Practice of Subjecting L~LP Animals to Ekperimenlsfor Scienrific Purposes, (London: 18761, 13. 3= Ibid. was forced to deal with the issue subsequent to 1876 they consistently advocated regulation rather than abolition The RSPCA saw abolitionists as zealots and attempted to distance themselves &om them because they believed that for reform to be successfbl it had to work with the confines of the law and public opinion'4

Prior to the nineteenth century the practice of vivisection was generally confined to private laboratories on both the continent and in Britain but the seeds of institutionalization were sown early in the nineteenth century in France and

Both countries had implemented reforms to their univen rty systems that provided educational and academic posts to those in the sciences. This helped provide essential resources and laboratory space to those in developing fields such as experimental physiology.36 In France, often called the birthplace of modem physiology, men like

Claude Bernard and Francois Magendie were pioneering the practice and attracting pupils to the study of the method. Mer 1850 the centre of physiological research shifted to

Germany with the work of men like Hermam von Helmhol~Emil du Bois-Reyrnond, and Carl ~udwi~."Institutionalization, therefore, came comparatively late in Britain. beginning around 1870.

Britain lagged behind both France and Germany in physiological study because

Word and Cambridge dominated the hcipline. As Anglican institutions steeped in

landed privilege both universities resisted innovation, particularly instruction of the

" Cobbe, Ll/. VoL iL 578. stHhn, 805-806. 35 Tuma, 84-85. " W.F. Bynum, Seience and he Practice of Medicine in the :Vineteenth Cenmy.(Cwbridge: Cambridge Uni~etSityPESS, 1993), 95-103. "Turner, 84-85. "progressive sciences."38 A genteel education that included classics, mathematics, and at

Cambridge theoretical physics was felt to be sufEcient for Christian gentlemen. The natural sciences of which physiology was a part were not introduced into the curriculum of either school until mid-century. An Honours School in Natural Sciences was set up at

Odord in 1850 and a Natural Sciences Tripos at Cambridge in 1851 but science did not at first constitute a recognizable area of specialty. Students were expected to have a grounding in the more traditional subjects first.3g University College London had been established in 1826 as a secular institution that emphasized law and medicine rather than more polite learning but it lacked the social prestige of Oxford and ~ambrid~e."

In medical schools, which were responsible for the training of physicians and were largely based in London hospitals, the study of physiology was subservient to the study of anatomy in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Students were taught that human anatomy was a demonstration of the work of ~od.~'This was derived from

Paiey's 'Argument &om Design', which provided proof of God's existence. Paley argued that if one came across a watch then one had to infer the existence of a watchmaker."

'Similarly, the human body's parts were designed and this pointed to a ~esigner.'"

Accordingly, medical researchers in Britain relied on the observation of structure to determine the function of organisms and consequently continued to depend to a far greater extent than their continental counterparts on the study of anatomy from which they could infer function, rather than on the deduction of physiological processes arrived

3sRobin Gihow, The Yicrorian Periad: The Intellectual and Cultural Con- of English Literamr-e. 1830- 1890, (New York: Longman, 1993.113. 39 Ibid. 'O Lawence, 35-36. " Ibid, 34. '' Gilmour, 127. "3 Lawrence, 34. at by observation of the living organism This combined wd~a general and widespread antipathy to experiments upon Living anunals served to isolate Britain from the laboratories of France and Germany. This isolation became more acute in the 1 850s and

1860s as continental physiologists like Claude Bernard used experimental techniques to make rapid advances in scientrfic understand ing?

This situation began to change in the late 1860s; institutionalization can be said to have finally emerged in Britain in 1870 when several British physiologists, many of whom had been introduced to vivisection on the continent, obtained positions within

Odord and Cambridge. They set out to introduce the continental model of physiology into British laboratories. In the same year ihe Royal College of Suqeons began to reform their examining procedures and to demand more physiological knowledge on the part of students.'" Mchael Foster, a product of University College London's medical school, was mstrumental to th~sprocess. He began hs career in medicine as a general practitioner but returned to University College in 1867 as an insactor in practical physiology. In

1870 he moved to Trinity College Cambridge and took up a post as a fellow and praelector in physiology and in 1883 he was made a full professor of physiology. From hls position at Cambridge he led the drive to bring the experimental and laboratory-based methods of physiological practice into ~ritain~Science based more on that of the continental model was a change initiated primarily by men of the middle class and was a struggle against entrenched Anglican orthodoxy and control of institutions. Their success in bringing about such change was reflective of the increased power and authorrty of the middle ckss by the late Victorian period.

U T-, 84-85. '' French, 42-44. Vivisection might ail1 have entered quietly and unobtrusively into medical and educational institutions m Britain had it not been for the 1873 publication of The

Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory, edited by the English physiologist John

Burdon Sanderson, with contributions by Ernmuel Klein, histologist and bacteriologist of the Brown Institution, Michael Foster, and T. Lauder Brunton, pharmacologist of St.

Bartholomew's Hospital, London It was a two-volume book, the fist of its kind written in Enghsh, and it was designed ostensibly for beginners in vivisection. It contained step- by-step instructions for the performance of numerous classical experiments, which were accompanied by illustrations of their use." According to Richard French the impact of the publication of the Handbook was profound and far-reachq." This was the case for two specific reasons. First, Burdon Sanderson made a grave tactical error when he failed to indicate the use of anaesthetics for all the experiments illustrated in the book and second, by prefacing it as a work for beginners in vivisection he seemed to set no limits

"to callow youth being indoctrinated in animal experiment."" Cobbe certainly believed that the Handbook was a manual for beginners in vivisection, the purpose of which was to "induce young persons to perform experiments on their own account and without adequate surve~.llance."~~Sandenon attempted to control some of the damage when he argued before the Royal Commission that he had not indicated the use of anaesthetics pridy because he believed that practitioners would naturally assume their use was implied5' In addition he backpedaled furiously on the 'beginner' issue, arguing that the

'Elynum, 113. " French, 47-48. a Ibid. " Ibid, 48. Cobbe, Li/c. II, 567. " John Burdon Sanderson, Digest qf Evidence, 2 1. handbook was of course only intended to be used for students in laboratories that were under the control of skilled physiologists, not by private practitioners." That questions about the Handbook were asked of numerous witnesses before the Royal Commission bears out the seriousness of its impact.

The opening volley in the battle over vkkedion was launched by a Dr. George

Hoggan. He wrote a letter to the Morning Post, published February 2, 1875, in which he described the atrocities he hlrnself had witnessed in laboratories in France during his training there. The letter was reprinted in the Spectator by its anti-vivisection editor, R

H. Hunon and sparked weeks of debate in the ''Letters to the Editor" section. In his letter

Hoggan called for a government inquiry into the practice of vivisection in which

"experimental physiologists shall only be witnesses, not judges."" Cobbe read the letter and began corresponding wnh Hoggan Cobbe had become concerned about vivisection in England after the publication of the Handbook and the incident in Norwich in which the French physiologist Eugene Magnan injected alcohol and absinthe in the vein of a dog during the Annual Meetlng of the British Medical Association With the RSPCA

-mwilling to help her she had kncasting about for a new way of dealing with the problem Hoggan encouraged her to pursue regulation through legislative activity."l She took up the challenge and wah the help of several politically powerful acquaintances she had made since moving to London, she drew up a bill designed to reguiare vivisection-'5

The bill was introduced into the House of Lords on May 4, 1875 by Lord Hemiker and it defined vivisection as "the curring or wounding or treating with galvanism or other

'' Ibid. " Spewator, 6 February, 1 875, p. 178. s~obbe,Llf, II, 578. 55 Williamson, 335. appliances, any living vertebrate adfor purposes of physiological research or demonstration, also the artificial production in any livmg vertebrate animal of palfil disease for purposes of physiological research or dern~nstration"~~It stipulated that all laboratories were to be rwtered annually with the Home Secretary and would be liable to periodic inspection Anaesthetics were to be used during all experiments and it was only through the securing of a special license, at a cost of ten pounds, that experiments could be performed without anesthetic. In order to obtam such a license the scientist had to prove that it was necessary for the mrd to remain conscious during the experiment?'

In response to the bill submitted by Cobbe, scientists, encouraged by Charles

Danvin, submitted their own bill, which was introduced into the House of Comnlons by

Lyon Playfair, liberal MP. for the University of Edinburgh and by Lord Cardwell into the House of ~ords." The Playfair bill submed a mere eight days after the first, dfiered from Cobbe's bill primarily on the issue of pahl experimentation. Whereas

Cobbe wanted cases involving potentially parnful experiments assessed individually and a separate license obtained for each, the Playfair bill recommended that paifil

&periments be legalized and that scientists would merely have to apply once to the

Home Secretary for a license that would last for fne years. AU that would be required to obtam such a license \L=the consent of a scientific body and of a professor of physiology, medicine or anatomy.sg The Pkyfhr bill disturbed anti-vivisectionists primarily because they did not believe that scientists, Iefi to their own devices, would abide by the stipulation of using anesthetic. Cobbe argued "Dr. Lyon Pkyfkir leaves all

56 Ibid. '' Ibid. '*16id.336. '' ?bid and Cobbe, Lif, IT, 582. experiments conducted under anaesthetics-and dlpractically, though not theoretically, leave, we fear, those which only profess to be so conducted (a very different thinghas utterly without restriction as they now are. Indeed, it attempts no sort of limitation upon them '"' The presentation of two bllls into Parbent on the subject of vivisection within one week of each other encouraged the government to form a committee to investigate the question On May 24, 1875 a Royal Commission was announced by the

Home Secretary, Richard ~ross.~'

There were 53 witnesses examined by the Royal Commission and of those the majority were medical doctors who supported vivisection Charles Darwin and George

Henry Lewes were pro-vivisection witnesses with no institutional affiliation. John Colam representing the RSPCA supported the practice so long as proper measures were employed to ensure that d were spared pain as did Dr. George Hoggan who nevertheless advocated strict guidelines. Only George Jesse of the Society for the Total

Abolition of Vivisection, and James Maden Holt MP were outright proponents of abolition6*As a woman, Frances Power Cobbe was not invited to give testimony before the Commission.

Much of the evidence yen by medical witnesses addressed the concerns raised by the publication of Sanderson's Handbook, damage control appeared to be the primary motive of many of the witnesses. Consequently, pro-vivisect ion witnesses almost unanimously agreed that eminent and humane men, who always worked within the confines of morality and compassion, ran all physiological laboratories in Britain

Moreover, they concmed that as far as they knew students only performed vivisection

Cobbe, Lge, II., 583 Williamson, 3 39. under the supemision of a competent instructor. John Mallet Purser, MD. went so far as to suggest that "students have no taste for e~~erirnentation."~'In addition, most pro- vivisection witnesses maintained that though the practice was increasing in Britain it was still far more frequent on the continent? This was no doubt an attempt to allay fears that the excesses described in continental laboratories were being transported into British labs.

Witnesses who themselves practiced vivisection also assured the Commission that they always used anaesthetics except for the very few cases where they would hinder the experiment. Indeed, all of the medical witnesses, in an attempt no doubt to paint themselves as humane, conscientious men, advocated their use whenever possible in order to show that the practice of vivisection was not necessarily antithetical to moral treatment of animals. 65 Finally, vi~llyevery pro-vivisection witness agreed that the practice was absolutely necessary to the advancement of science, pointing to a variety of discoveries obtamed by animal experimentation to support their contention. They almost all mentioned William Harvey's discovery of the circuktion of the blood as an example.

In addition, many witnesses cited the discovery of the ligature of arteries as an essential contribution to scientific knowiedge?

It was in late 1875 when the Commission was sitting that Cobbe, at the urgins of

George Hoggan, founded the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection, later to be renamed the Victoria Street Society after their address at 1 Victoria Street. The

VSS advocated the restriction rather than abolition of vivisection because it believed that total elimination of the practice would be impossible. At the time Cobbe herseF accepted

" Digest of Evidence. Job11 WetPm, ibid, 35. 64Digest of Evidence. 651bid.. the use of animals in scientltic experiments as long as anaesthetics were consistently used and aninlais spared pain. The humanitarian Lord Shafiesbury was less convinced than

Cobbe that regulation and not abohon was the ethical answer to the problem, although he accepted it as a pragmatic solution He wrote,

I judge, by the terms of the circular, that the object of the society will be restriction and not prohibition Possibly, this end is as much as you will be able to attain Prohibition, I doubt not, would be evaded; but restriction will, I am certain, be exceeded. Not but that a little is better than nothing. But you will find many who will thmk wnb much show of reason that, by surrendering the principle, you have surrendered the great argument.67

Despite his reservations Shafiesbury agreed to be the Chairman of the VSS (he later became president) while Cobbe took the position of Honorary The membership of the Society was a mix of middle class and aristocratic individuals who were chosen primarily because of their socd prominence and political power. The executive included, for example, Lord Shaftesbury who was a philanthropist involved in causes such as Poor Law Reform, the treatment of the insane in asylums, and numerous other causes69, Leslie stephen'', the philosopher, man of letters and editor of the

Dictionary ofNationa1 Biopphy, Cobbe's partner Mary Lloyd and others."

The VSS was not the only antivivisection society to be formed at this time. Both the London Anti-Vivisection Society and the International Association for the Total

Suppression of Vivisection were founded in June 1876 and unlike the VSS were based

upon the principle of total abolitionR The London societies were hged by various

66 Ibid. 67 Cobbe, Lije, vool. II, 587. Watmson, 346-347. 69 Dictionary of Na~ionolBiogmphy. Volume IV, (London: Oxford Universi? Press), 1058-1062. 'O Concise Dicrionauy of :Vation& Biogmphy, Vohune II, 190 1- 1970,6 34. '~wiamson,347. French, 160. provincial or specialized societies including George Jesse's Society for the Abolition of

Vivisection, the Scottish Society for the Total Suppression of Vivisection, a similar

society in Ireland, the Society for United Prayer against Vivisection, the Friends' Anti-

vivisection Association, the Independent Anti-Vivisection League, and the Church Anti-

Viviseaion ~ea~ue.~Vivisection was never a prominent issue in Ireland in the nineteenth century but it garnered some interest in Scotland because Edinburgh

University was well known for endorsing and performing vivisection. But the London

societies always dominated the movement. The Society for the Total Abolition of

Vivisection was the most prominent of the provincial societies. Its leader George Jesse

gave testimony before the Royal Commission Jesse, a former railway engineer, called

for the total prohibition of vivisection under the authority of Martin's .4ct." In 1883 the

VSS and International Association amalgamated, although the VSS was never able to

woo any of the other London societies into a simikr arrangement with them."

With anti-vivisection sentiments growing in the 1870s, scientists were put on the

defensive. They felt that they were being targeted by a group of zealots who had no

'understanding of physiological processes. They saw regulation as a slight of their good

name and as a curtahent of theu legitimate scientific endeavors. They argued that as H.

W. Adand, MD. put it, "competent men m England are to be trusted.. .abuses must be

very rare ... that in the great schools the control and discretion of the profwsors is

sufficient safeguard against abuse^."'^ They were furious that those they considered to be

ill-informed and sentimental fools with no scientific understanding were questioning their

Ibid,222. 74 George Jesse, Digest of Evidence, 3 1. '' French, 225-226. 76 H. W.Achd, Digest of Evidence, 9. sincerity and their motives. Many of the scientists who testified before the Royal

Commission insisted that regulation was not necessary. It could be left to the "conscience and humanity of the experimenter."

The Commission might have decided not to pursue regulation of vivisection but to leave it in the hands of scientists who were presenting themselves as capable and compassionate men had it not been for the testimony of Emanuel Wein, assistant professor at the laboratory of the Brown Institution, Lecturer on Histology at St.

Bartholomew's Hospital, and contributor to the Handbook. EUein testified that he only used anaesthetics "out of deference to the feelings of those present, and that "an investigator has no time to consider the suffering of the Klein fed the public perception that vivisection was perpetrated by unca~gbrutes. For Cobbe he was, as

Richard French put it, an "archvivisector incamate" and he was experimenting in London under government funding." Thomas Hwley, a strong advocate of vivisection. recognized the damage that Klein's testimony had done and the ammunition it had given anti-vivivsectionsts. He wrote to Burdon-Sanderson in October of 1875 that "the ground

'is cut away from beneath my feet; the advocates of legislation and restriction are furnished with all the arguments they want.""

The findings of the Royal Commission, which came out in January of 1876, were an attempt to balance the claims of both sides of the vivisection controversy. The

Commission concluded that abolish the practice would not be possible or reasonable.

Attempts to ban vivisection would only result m "the flight of medical and physiolo~ical

77 Sir Thomas Watson, Digest of Evidence, 5. 7s Emanuel Klein, Digest of Evidence, 28-29. 79 French, 105. so Quoted in French, 105. students from the United Kingdom for foreign schools and laboratories.'' Moreover, the

Commission concluded, vivisection had resulted m discoveries that had alleviated human suffering and so abolition would not be reasonable. As a result, the Commission recommended that the practice of vivisection be continued but that it be accompanied by the use of anaesthetics, applied by "humane and skilful hands."" It stated,

The infliction of severe and protracted agony is in any case to be avoided:-- that the abuse of the practice by inhuman or unskllful persons,--in short the ~nflictionupon animals of unnecesary pain, is justly abhorrent to the moral sense of Your Majesty's subjectss3

The issue of pain was at the heart of the hdtngs of the Commission. While the report clearly indicated that the Commission believed that humans had a right to use animals it also pointed out that they had a responsibilrty to ensure that they did not suffer.

Regulation, not prohibition, seemed the best way to achieve that aim. In order to appease those who believed that regulation damned them by colouring all physiologists with the same brush, the Commission stated,

Those who are least favourable to interference assume, as we have seen, that interference would be directed against the skilful, the humane, and the experienced. But it is not for them that law is made, but for persons of the opposite character. It is not to be doubted that inhumanrty may be found in persons of very high position as physiologists. We have seen that it is so wnh Magendie. "

After the release of the report it was stdl uncertain as to whether Disraeli's government was going to act upon the recommendations of the Royal Commission and pursue a bill regulating vivisection. It was only at the urging of the Queen that things

-- 81 ^Report of the Royal Commission on the Practtice of Subjecting Live Anids to Esperiments for Scientific Purposes," Parliamentary Papers, 1876, XVI, Appendix IV. IC Ibid fbld. moved forward. A bill was introduced to the House of Lords on May 15, 1876 by Lord

Carnarvon, the Colotllal Secretary, the only member of Disraeli's cabinet who showed any interest in the subject and who was himself a committed anti-vivi~ectionist.~~The bill was based on consideration of the Report of the Royal Commission and recommendations made by the VSS. It reiterated the points made in the initial bill submined by Cobbe regarding the use of anaesthetics and licenses, but added that vivisection was only to be allowed if' it would brmg about a new scientific discovery that would prolong human Life or alleviate human suffering. In addition it stipulated that cats and dogs were to be exempt fiom experimentation and it prohibited the performance of experiments designed primarily to gain manual dexterity or for public e~hibition.'~

Cobbe and the VSS were pleased with the Bill as it stood but physiologsts acted quickly to introduce amendments that would lessen what they perceived to be its severity.

Some three thousand scientists signed a memorial and submitted it to the Home

Secretary, asking to have the bill modified." For the scientific community the most contentious parts of the b4as it was initially proposed, were the stipulations that only

'experiments that advanced knowledge or prolonged human life could be performed and the clause prohibiting the use of cats and dogs. In the former case scientists argued that

'all great discoveries were of gradual growth, and that it was impossible to affirm positively of any one experiment of a tentative kind that it would result in a discovery by which life might be prolonged or suffering dimmished"88 On the issue of the use of cats and dogs, scientists argued that it was often necessary to use them because resuhs in such

8L lbid, M. W'am~~n,349-350. 86 French, 1 15. " Cobbe, Li/c. vol. II, 595. animals were svnilar to results in humans. They saw no reason that scientists should be forced to obtain licenses to perform experiments upon these animals if anaesthetics were to be used, which they maintained they most often were."

The ensuing debate in the House of Commons over the proposed amendments reflected the moral tone that the controversy had taken Those who supported the anti- vivisection position emphasized the sdering of the animals and refused to address the issue on the basis of scientific efficacy. For anti-vivisectionists the practice was morally wrong and any benefits arising from it could not just@ the means. The language used by outraged anti-vivisectionists such as Lord Coleridge, was visceral and sensational.

Coleridge, for example, argued,

The more I thmk about it, the less I am satisfied that we have the moral right, which is assumed, to torture animals for the benefit of mankind.. . I doubt whether, if it were certain that by pumng 1,000 horses to death in slow and hideous torments, we could prolong the life of a man or of men for a few hours or a few days-I doubt much 8 it would be justifiable so to torture 1,000 horses. I believe, $1 spoke my whole mind, I should say. that I do not doubt that it would be clearly and abominably wrong.''

For Coleridge, as for others, the innidion of pain was in and of itself' morally wrong and could not be justlfied by claims to human gain. J.M Holt similarly argued that vivisection represented a conflict between right and wrong, between "the principle of humanity and the spirit of cruelty.g1 Holt saw science as being at odds mh religion and morahty. He rejected the idea that the needs of both parties could be balanced, because for Holt it was a question of morahy versus immorahty. Vivisection was wrong, therefore, there could be no debate on the subject.

""Cmelty to Animals BL&" Parliamentary Debam, Third Series, 1876, VoL 230, p. 106. 89 bid. 124-125. go [bid 11 1, Opposition to vivisection was rooted in the belief that the practice destroyed the natural sympathy of the practitioner and created hardhearted, soul-deadened men who would bequeath their legacy of cruelty to future generations.9? Samuel Haughton, MD. argued before the Royal Commission that "accustoming students to the sight of animals under vivisection would produce in many cases young devils rather than men who would advance science."" Cobbe believed that vivisection was particularly insidious and immoral because it was based upon what she perceived to be deliberate torture.

Scientists did not want to help people, she argued, but wanted merely to leave their mark on the world. Experiments were performed by "men addicted to high speculation on all the mysteries of the universe; men who hoped to found the Religion of the Future, and to leave the impress of thei minds upon their age, and upon generations yet to be

Scientific cruelty was particularly disturb~ngbecause it was administered with hll awareness of the pain being dcted but \Nlth no concern for the suffering. Scientists were men who could "calmly contemplate hideous tortures perpetrated regularly, and as a matter of business, upon hundreds of animals every year, and continue to uphold the

-torturers in esteem, and in high public functions, as the instructon of youth."g5 In an attempt to refute ths pervasive assumption a number of pro-vivisection witnesses for the

Royal Commission deliberately addressed it in thei testimony. H.W. Acland maintained that scientific men who performed vivisection were not oblivious to suffering, and the prominent Dr. David Femer insisted that "the practice of experimenting on animals does

Debares, vol. 23 1,903-904. See for example, George Jesse, Digest of Evidmce, 3 1 . Lewis Carroll, "Some Popular Fallacies About Vivisection," Fornight@ Review VoL 23 (1875): 850. 93 Samuel Haughton, Digest of Evidence, 17- 18. " Cobbe, Lije. vol. II, 606-607. '' Cobbe, "Rights of Man and the Claims of Brutes," in Smdies il'm and Old of Ethical and Social Subjec~,(London: Trubner and Co., 1865), 220. not harden men's hearts. Some experimenters are among the most humane men

[known]."% This contention, however, became more difficult to prove once the public was made aware of Ernanual KZein's comments before the Commission,

Scientists and their supporters attempted to argue their case on exactly the terms that the anti- vivisectionists refbsed to debate: the efficacy of the practice. They continually stressed the benefits to humans that had been derived fiom vivisection.

Examples such as the discovery of the circulation of the blood by William Harvey, and the "mode of recovery of an artery after ligature,"w and others were used to impress upon people the benefits to human Life that had been derived from vivisection. The Earl of

Airlie argued that "those persons who spoke of the dction of pain on dogs and cats as demoralizing to the penon who vflcted it looked only at the pain and not at the results of the experiment."98 The line of reasoning that the scientists punued was that the lnaction of pain while unfortunate was thoroughly justified by the human benefit derived fiom the practice. They accused their opponents of overblown sentimentality and of not taking the long-term benefits to humans into account. Thus, for the scientists and their

'supporters, the issue of morality was applied only so far as it involved humans and not animals. In fact many scientists maidned that their right to kill animals was entirely justifiable, that it was indeed a right of the powdid. One pro-vivisection advocate, Dr.

George Humphry, suggested that vivisection was morally right because it eradicated moral and physical degeneracy, which was the natural result of civilization99 This echoed Herbert Spencer's Social Evolutionist idea that society was weeding out weak and

" H. W.Acland and David Ferrier' Digest of Evidence, 8 & 26. '' Debates, vol. 23 1,899. 9% Ibid, vol. 230, 125. " George Humphrey, Digest of Evidence, 6. ~nferiorindividuals in order to make society as a whole stronger. According to Spencer,

"to prevent misery would entail a greater misery on future generations."loo In the case of vivisection, it was animals who would suffer rather than people to preserve the future of the British race.

Supporters of the scientrfic lobby in Parliament attempted to counter the emotional tone of anti-vivisection rhetoric by portraying scientists as reasonable and moderate men who did not oppose legislation on principle but were merely concerned about the scope of the bill and the extent to which it would harm the cause of helping people. The Marquess of Lansdowne argued that,

The Report showed, indeed, that the attitude of the Profession was not one of factious opposition to legislation on vivisection; that the abuses arising from vivisection in the country were very small and very much exaggerated, and that the medical Profession very generally leant towards humanity and forbearance. lo'

Furthermore, the scientists argued that the instances of pamful vivisection which were the target of the anti-vivisectionists were in fact rare cases and anaesthetics were always used when possible. They accused the anti-vivisectionins of unnecessarily slowing the progress of legitimate scientific investigation by harping on the very small number of experiments that actually caused pain Viscount Cardwell argued,

The noble and learned Lord who had las? spoken (Lord Coleridse) appeared altogether to have orrutted fiom his consideration the recommendation of the Commission that anaesthetics should be employed in all cases where they could possibly be had recourse to. That was the key to the whole question If in the Royal Commission they had occupied their time in discussing the metaphysics of morality-in examining the relations of man to the lower animals as regarded by Aristotle. .. they would have made little progress in the practical duty conMed to them by the Crown That duty was to assist the

-- - - - Irn quoted in Roland N. Stromberg, Intellecmol History Since 1 789, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. 1990), 135. '*'Debates, vol. 230, 106. Legislature in Erammg enactments which without retarding the progress of discovery for the benefit of man, might put the closest attainable timit upon the suffering inflicted upon the lower animals.I"

While consistently emphasizing that painfil experiments were rare and that anaesthetics were almost always used, when forced to jute the small number of pahl experiments performed they took refuge in the argument that though they were hurting animals they were helping humans. Supporters such as Sir John Lubbock stressed that scientists were not happy to cause harm and only did so because they were anxious to reduce human suffering.

Still I trust I may be permitted to express a hope that one result of the strong sentiments which have grown up on this subject may be to alter the state of feelmg in which mcn of high character, and I do not doubt, really, most kind- hearted, thmk it a legitimate subject of pride to boast of the greatest number of lives which they have been able to destroy in the course of a day's so- called sport; and we must remember that, whlle in the one case it is the death itself of these animals which is the object in view, the aim of physiologists is the relief of suffering.lo'

The scientists were invariably referred to as humane and conscientious men whose noble goal was ultimately to help both humans and animals with their discoveries. Indeed

Cobbe henelf' argued that the scientists so effectively painted themselves as members of a "noble, humane, learned and thrice honourable professiony' that they hd almost convinced the government that it was "outrageously impertinent" of them to suggest that they, scientists, might need to be subject to inspection as was the case with other professions such as teaching or rnanufhcturing.lw

As both sides lobbied the government, the press took an interest in the subject of vivisection Scientific periodicals such as the Lancet, the British Medical Jozrrnal, and

la Ibid, 115. '03 Debates, vol. 23 1,90 1. '@Frances Powa Cobbe, "Mr.Lowe and the Vivisection Act," Contempormy Review vol. 29 ( 1 577): 33 7. Nature, not surprisingly came out in favour of the scientific community believing the bill

to be too harsh Other papers such as the Times, the Pa22 Mall Gazette and the Stondard

initdy supported the anti-vivisection platform but they rapidly lost sympathy in the face

of the overwhelming antipathy of the medical profession to Carnarvon's bill and their

increasing perception that anti-vivisectionists were hysterical fanatic^.'^' Punch did the

same, pointing out other cruelties done to animals with which the anti-vivisectionists did

not seem to be concerned. It jabbed,

Twould seem there's an impulsive and emotional alliance/ Amongst the men of sentiment against the men of science./ You talk of the atrocities codedby Professors./ Are Gun club "Swells" less heinous, more excusable aansgressors?.'"

The charge of privileging the suffering of certain animals over others was one

frequently directed at anti-vivisectionists and continued to haunt them into the 1880s after

the furor over legislation had subsided1'' Anti-vivisectionists attempted to refute ths by

arguing that other practices such as hunting and slaughterhouse techruques were not

inherently cruel because they resulted m instant death and did not diet suffering, but

'such arguments were weak attempts to avoid the charge of hypocrisy. Lord Coleridge

was forced to concede that some sports caused anirnal suffering but he refused to accept

that cruel spon made cruel men."' Cobbe herself steackstly defended her own meat

eating, arguing that one did not have to be a vegetarian to be an anti-vivisectionist. She

believed that eating meat was natural and that slaughter was part of God's design She

claimed that "the cattle we use for food exist on the condition that we shall take their

-. .

'OS French, 266. lo Punch. 17 June 1876, p. 249. 107 See for exampIe, James Paget and Samuel Wintq "Vivisection: Its Pains and Uses," .Vineteenth Century VoL 10 (December 1881 ): 920-948. lives when we need them; and in doing so, in the ordinary not unmerciful manner, we save them the far worse miseries of old age and sta~atioa"'~~Vivisection dflered from the slaughter of anunals for food because it violated God's design: it was unnatural and it destroyed man's natural love and sympathy for animals. Lewis Carroll similarly argued that humans had an absolute right to inflict death on animals for food or for clothing, but not to &ct pain on them In effect, he did not see the right to kill an animal as coextensive with the right to torture one.'" Anna Kmgsforcl, a medical doctor, and feminist, was one of the few anti-vivisectionists who ralized that slaughter practices were frequently humane. She was never part of the mainstream anti-vivisection movement, however, and was in fact blackballed by Cobbe for some of her radical viewpoints such as vegetarianism The fkct that Cobbe and other anti-vivisectionists were so wihg to turn a blind eye to the suffering of animals under more common practices llke hunting and slaughtering reflected their implicit assumption that such practices were natural and hnctioned as part of traditional English upper-class culture.

The scientific lobby and the press proved more persuasive than the VSS and other critics and convinced the House of Lords to agree to the amendments suggested by the scientists. On August 15, 1876 the bill was officially passed and became "An Aa to

Amend the Law Rekting to Cruelty to Anha~s.""~ The Act stipulated that experiments could only be performed in a registered place and performed by a person holding a license issued by the Secretary of State; that the use of anaesthetics to prevent pain was nev,that the animal be Mled if it would likely continue to suffer after the effects of

Debates, vol. 230,113. '~9Cobbe, ,ZiioraIAspecrr of Vivisection, 12. S& ajs, RK Hutton, "The Biologists on Vivisectionq The ;Vineteenth Cenntry Vol. I I (January 1 882): 30-3 1). "O Carroll, 848. the anesthetic had worn 09that experiments were not to be performed as "an illustration of lectures in medical schools, hospitals, colleges or else~here""~and that they not be performed in order to attain manual dexterity. The Act allowed for experiments that did not directly advance physiological knowledge as they might lead to discoveries that would prolong human life and alleviate human suffering. Moreover, experiments could be performed on cats and dogs without using anesthetic as long as a certficate was obtained, and it could be proven that using an anesthetic would otherwise "frustrate the object of such experiments."l''

Cobbe and the VSS were disillusioned by the outcome of the legislation despite the momentum that had been building around it. They believed that the amendments so severely weakened the bill that it became virtually useless and that, in effect, it sewed to protect the interests of the vivisecton. Lord Coleridge had stated as much in the debates. arguing that it would be better to have no law than to pass the bill with the amendments recommended by the s~ientists.~'~Other anti-vivisectionists such as J.M. Holt had believed all along that regulation would be useless. Holt's view was that a system of licenses and certificates would prove difficult to enforce and largely ineffectual. He saw any legislation in regards to vivisection as a means to legalize cruelty to animal^."^

Moreover, he had objected to the Royal Commission on principle because he believed that it had more adequately represented the interests of scientists than those of anti- vivisectionists.'16 Of the 53 witnesses examined before the Commission there were only

'I' Williamson, 358. *I= "A Biil Entitled An Act to Amead the Law Relating to Cruelt~;to Animals," ParfiamemnPapers, August IS, 1876,168. Ibid. 'I4 Debares, vol. 230, 109. '" Debares, vol. 23 1,906. lbid 907. two who were outright supporters of abohon George Jesse was one and Holt hunself was the other. Others such as George Hoggan, John Colam, Arthur de Noe Walker and

George Macilwain were not particularly fond of the practice of vivisection but nevertheless supported regulation rather than aboI.~tion.'~' In addition, as Cobbe pointed out, of the seven men on the Royal Commission, two were scientific experts, one a physiologist and the other a surgeon There was no one who directly supported the anti- vivisection position directing questions or assessing the evidence. ''*

Despite Cobbe's change of heart, the VSS would not immediately commit itself to a new platform Doggedly pursuing its ameliorative stance, mfluential members including

Lord Shaftesbury and George Hoggan were determined to give the Act a chance. But with increasing criticism from men such as AP. Childs, the editor of the anti- vivisectionist magazine the Home Chronicler, Cobbe placed pressure on the society to change its position ' lg Consequently, in 1878 the VSS declared unequivocally for total abolition This cost them some members including Dr. George Hoggan, who was at the time the Honourary Secretary and who had given evidence before the Royal Commission, but it also secured some new members who had been unwilling to attach themselves to an orgadion that only advocated half-measures.'20 The wisdom of thchoice was brought home to the VSS in 1881 when the society attempted to prosecute a Dr. David

Ferrier under the Act. Cobbe and her associates in the VSS had come across accounts published in the British Medical Journal and the Lancet that alleged that Femer had surgically induced cerebral lesions in monkeys even though he did not have the

117 Digest of Evidence. 'I8 Cobbe, "Mr. Lowe and the Vivisection Act," 340. "9~ren&, 161. Ibid, 162. appropriate License or certification to perform such experiments. The VSS decided to prosecute him under the Act. The matter went to trial but Ferrier managed to escape prosecution because a medical witness for the defense maintamed that G. F. Yeo, who was registered, had achLally carried out the operations. Ferrier, it seems, had merely observed them The prosecution changed its tactics and argued that a license was necessary even if the individual only observed the operation and tested the subjects afterwards. This was rejected by the court which judged that licenses were only necessary for those actually performing the procedures. The judgment resulted in the

VSS's total and final loss of farth in the Act that they had helpedto bring into being."'

This marked their final attempt to further their cause m a court of law and under the auspices of the .4a.In

Attempts in Parliament to abolish vivisection continued apace throughout the

1880s and 90s. Bills, either sponsored by the VSS or one of the other anti-vivisection societies, were introduced into Parliament each year from 1876 to 1884.1" J. M. Holt, backed by the International Association for the Total Suppression of Vivisect ion,

introduced bilk in 1877, 1878, and 1880, all of which were defeated. The VSS backed an

"4 In abolitionist bill introduced by Lord Truro in 1879 but it was also defeated 16 to 97.

1881 the VSS promoted its own abolition bill which was introduced to the House of

Commons by Su Eardly Wilmot. The second reading of the bill was repeatedly postponed and it was not until April 4" 1883 that there was at last a debate over it.13 The

I" Ibid, 20 1-202. See also, Annual Repon of& Victoricr Smef Sociegfor the Pmrection ofi4nimalsjvn1 rivisection (Januan;, 1881) 9.6 for a discussion of the Ferria case. "Cobbe. ti% volume II. Q :lid I 8. French, 1&I. '" French, 164 and Cobbc Life vol. 11.61 1. 13~obbe,Li/e vol. 11.6 1 1. bill was talked down by advocates of vivisection including Sir William Harcourt, the

Home Secretary responsible for issuing licenses to vivisecton, and Lord PIayfair who had been responsible for countering the first bill to regulate vivisection, introduced by supporters of Cobbe. The VSS's bill was brought before Parliament again in 1884 but was not given a second reading. AAer 1884 no more serious anempts to legislate abolition were undertaken until the turn of the century.lZ6

With the repeated Failures in Parliament after the implementation of the "Cruelty to Animals Act," anti-vivisectionists did their best to keep the subject on the public agenda. Cobbe launched a propaganda campaign in whlch she displayed on poster, placards and in pamphlets, graphic depictions of arumals in the experimental laboratory.

The pictures she used were taken from physiological books such as Burdon Sanderson's

Handbook and other such works.ln This tactic backfired on Cobbe, however, when she was accused of deliberately fils- detalls of physiological experiments in her book

The Nine Circles of the Hell of the innocent, published in 1892. Cobbe's colleagues at the

VSS had endorsed the book and its publication was announced in the Zoophi[~st,whch was the newsletter of the VSS. Workmg from Wales, where she had retired by this time, she and her co-worker Georgine M Rhodes, based in London, sfied through an endless selection of physiological experiments published by scientists in order to compile them into a book that would take readers on a temfymg journey through the physiological laboratory. They divided the experiments into nine categories (nme circles) and detailed

13See for example, Frances Power Cobbe, Iliusrrc~tionsof Vivisection: or Experiments on Living .-lnimofs, jkrn the Works of PlysioIogists, (Philadelphia- American Anti-Vivisection Society, 1888) and Cobbe, Light in Dark Piuces, (Pamphlets on Vivisection, Z 882-1 887). each graphally. They described how animals were mangled, poisoned, suffocated, burned, frozen, starved, flayed, infected with artificial diseases, and tortured by miscellaneous other procedures.

The crucial error that Cobbe made was in not indicating the use of anaesthetics in many of the cases she reponed. Victor Horsely, a brain surgeon, took issue with her omission and at an Anglican church congress that had met to discuss vivisection in

Folkestone, he publicly attacked Cobbe and accused her of falslfylng twenty out of twenty-six experiments detailed in the book by implying that they were performed without anaesthetics. Cobbe quickly defended henelf against Horsley's charges by claiming that she had not seen the original reports of the experiments that her co-worker

Rhodes had inserted in the book. She wrote that it "was compiled for me - not by me - and as it happened, in London while I was at home here in ~ales."" In addition, Cobbe suggested that their omission was insigdicant because vivisectors were notorious for not using anaesthetics while allowing the public to thmk that they did. l" Horsley responded in the Times of October 17' in a tirade, calling Cobbe a liar. He refuted her claim that she was not responsible for the omission, arguing that she had vouched for the accuracy of the contents of the book in its prefkce. He made, in total, eight accusations against

Cobbe's claims in the Nine Circles, and called for all members of the public who "care for truth and honesty" to wrthdraw their support fiom the VSS."l

Frauces Power Cobbe and G. M. Rbodes, The Mne Circles of the Hell of the Innocent: Describedfrom the Reportr of tjte Pwsiding Spilits, (Landon: Swan Sonnenchein and Company, 1 892). Quoted in Williamson, 5 18. '30 W~arnson,5 18. 13' Times, 17 October, 1892. At a VSS meeting on 27 October 1892 Cobbe accepted some of the responsibility for the desbut placed the rnajonty of the blame on her assistants who had not been rigorous enough in their data collection. She defended all of them against Horsley's attack, however, when she questioned whether the scientists were attempting to win advantage m the conflict by suggesting that no painful experiments took place in

England. She asked,

Do they wish us to understand that there are no such things as paifil experiments in England? Apparently that is what they are trymg to make us think--that there never has been anythmg of the kind; that they are perfectly incapable of putting any adto pain Do they really mean that? Is that what they wish us to understand? If they do not mean that, I do not know what it is they mean. It seems to me that they are raising this tremecdous storm very much as if the old slave-holders were to have danced a war-dance round Mrs. Stowe and scalped her for having said that Legree had flogged Uncle Tom wrth a thousand lashes. when really there were only nine hundred and ninety-nine. 'j'

The press and the VSS rallied behmd Cobbe not because they necessarily believed she was innocent of the charges laid but because they felt that Horsely's treatment of her was ungentlemanly. The Sunday Times reported that "it may be time to remind ths most indignant scientist, that in polite society, gentlemen do not call ladies 'lim!"'"' In all, some twenty-six provincial and London papers concurred with the Sunday Times that

Horsley's attack was unnecessarily harsh because Cobbe had not intentionally set out to mislead the public. Although the VSS and other anti-vivisection societies staunchly stood behind their leader, the inciderr hurt the crediblhy of a movement that was already suffering fYom the growing strength of science.

lr Cobbe, Li/, II, 627. lU Quoted in Wfiamson, 52 1. Despite their best efforts anti-vivisectionists were losing the battle over

vivisection as scientists presented an increasingly united and powerhi1 front. The 188 1

IntemationaI Medical Congress held in London was a strong display of scientific

solidarity. In the opening session of the congress the President, John Simon, stressed the

important discoveries arrived at by vivisection He described the anti-viv~sectionlobby as

"mere screamers and agitation-mongers who, happy in their hysterics or their hire, go

about day by day calumniating our profession and trymg to stir up against it the

prejudices and passion of the ignorant"'Y In the closing session a resolution was passed

stressing the importance of animals to physiological research and denouncing any

restrictions on their use. Mchael Foster urged his fellow continental researchers to avoid

legisktion in their own countries at any cost'j5 In countries like Germany and France

where the experimental method had been born there were no hutations placed upon the

actions of physiologsts, nor did public opinion focus much attention on their conduct.

Moreover, animal welfare organizations had made Me progress in such countries and so

there was no fear among physiologists that any of their techniques would call down

'censure. One of the comphts among British researchen was that they were losing their

best and brightest scientists to the continent where they would not be hndered by a

"'tyrannical and unreasonable law."'"

hi-vivisectionist propaganda designed to counter the threat of the Congress

mimined that "almost every section of the Congress was convened during a great pan

john Simon, Opening Adhss, Dehm?dBefo~he Section of state Ll.ledicineofihe intenzofiono/ Mediicol Congress, (London: I 88 I ), 22. '" B~~LKQ,114-145 and French, 198-199 I# Samuel Ww Its Pains and Uses," Nineteenth Century, 10 (Decanber 1 88 1 ): 939. of the sitting into a stumpmeetmg for the glorification of vivise~tion.''~Such a claim

revealed the increasing paranoia of the VSS, who recognized that science was

consolidating its power.

The most signdieant boost to the scientdic position was, however, the formation

of the Association for the Advancement of Medicine by Research (AAMR) in March of

1882. After the prosecution of David Ferrier brought about by Cobbe and the VSS in

October 1881, physiologists began to see themselves as vulnerable to future prosecutions

under the Act. They therefore joined forces with the larger medical community in order

to elicit support for vivisection. The formation of the MMR was a counter to the wealth,

organization and persistence of the anti-vivisection front. It functioned on two levels.

First, it attempted to educate the public on the necessw of vivisection through a series of

articles m periodicals such as the Nineteenth Century. 13' Secondly, and ultimately more

importantly, its purpose was to represent experimental medic me to politicians,

particularly the Home Secretary, who was responsible for the issuing of licenses to

perform vivisection under the Act. The AAMR approached the Home Secretary, William

' Harcourt, who was a professor of International Law at Cambridge and sympathetic to

vivisection, with an offer of advice in reporting on licensing. Harcou~accepted their

offer and thus a rektionshp between the AAMR and the Home Office regarding

vivisection was established and was to remain standard operating procedure until 1 91 3

when the second Royal Commission on Vivisection forced a change in the

arrangement.'jg Such an arrangement was extremely beneficial to the advance of

physiological practice. It essentially placed a scientific organization in charge of

rlnmrol Report of the Victoria Smer Society for the Prurectiun of ilntmaltji-om L hisection. 4. I" French, 204. Sealso, uVivisectioxr Its Pains and Uses." providing licenses to members of its own profession. Consequently, refusals to requests

for licenses were extremely rare and experimental medicine flourished during this time.

The number of lice== issued increased from 42 in 1882 to 638 in1 91 3.

The increasing power of experimental medicine during the 1890s resulted in a

split in the VSS. In 1898 the Honourary Secretary of the VSS, Stephen Coleridge, called a National Council meeting at which Cobbe was not present and managed to cany a

motion to return to a restrictionist policy. Coleridge's position was that while abolition

should be the ultimate goal of the VSS, the support of lesser measures which might

benefit animals should not be rejected. ''" 'RE change in policy was reflective of a shlft in

public opinion resulting from the increased authority of science and of Cobbe's waning

Influence over the VSS. Cobbe was semi-retired and Living in Wales by 1898 and her

1895 appointment as Vice-President had really been more of a token recognition of her

years of service than a reflection of her continued control of the society.iJ' Cobbe was

furious over the policy change and quickly formed the British Union for the Abolition of

Vivisection (BUAV) in response. The formation of the BUAV was a ha ditch effon. to

retain control of a movement and an organization with which she had come to identify

herself over the thuty years she had been involved in the cause. She had officially retired

from her position as Honourary Secretary and editor of the Zoophilist. the newsletter of

the VSS, m 1884, when she moved to Wales with her fiend Mary Lloyd. Yet even after

French, 207. I" Ibid, 208. 141 Williamson, 545. Ic Ibid, 543-544. her retirement Cobbe continued to take an active interest in anti-vivisection, writing some

173 pamphlets, books or leaflets for the cause.'"

Frances Power Cobbe and the other anti-vivisectionists saw the controversy of the

1870s as a clash between right and wrong or between morality and science; the two could not be reconciled. For the scientists, it becarne a power struggle in which they felt compelled to protect their right to pursue their studies unimpeded by sentiment and ignorance. They did so by arguing persuasively for the effectiveness of the practice.

Certainly vivisection did not end in the 1870s and indeed the conflicting alms of animal rights advocates and scientists plague us stifl. CHAPTER TWO

THE LIFE OF FRANCES POWER COBBE: PHIL,ANTHROPY AS WOMAN'S MISSION

Frances Power Cobbe was involved in numerous social campaigns in Victorian

Britain including women's education, women's suffige, and anti-vivisection It was to

the latter cause, however, that she devoted her heart and soul and to which she cornmited

the last thirty years of her life. She, more than anyone else, was responsible for putting

the subject of vivisection on the public agenda and for workq unceasingly to keep it

there. For Cobbe, anti-vivisection was both a moral cause and a way to engage in

meaningfbl and active work. She rejected social conventions that proscribed a limited

role for women and confined them to the domestic sphere and forged a career for herself

based upon her belief that as a woman she was uniquely qualrfied to bring a moral

message to the world. To Cobbe, it was the animals subjeaed to vivisection who were

most in need of her help.

Frances Power Cobbe was born on December 4, 1822, the youngest child and the

' only daughter in a hrnily of five children Cobbe was born in England where she and the

farnily lived until she was four years old at whlch time they moved to the family home,

Newbridge, in County Dublin, Ireland. Her fhdy was part of the Anglo-Irish gentry and

so she grew up living a Life of ease and comfort and enjoying the benefits of being, as she

put it, "well-born-"Her fkther, Charles Cobbe, had served in the British army in India and

was a veteran of the Maratha wars. Her mother, Frances Conway, came 60m a very

weahhy family and it was her money that allowed them to fix up Charies's firmly home of Newbridge which had been sitting vacant for ten years prior to the 1809 marriage of

the Cobbes.'

Cobbe's chddhood was by her own account a lonely one. She was five years

younger than any of her brothers, and her mother, an invalid due to an ankle injury that

had been ill-treated by doctors, was unable to spend a sigruticant amount of time with her

daughter.' Moreover, by the time her daughter was born, Frances Conway Cobbe was

already forty-seven and kely had expected that her childbearing years were over.

According to Cobbe, however, she was very close to her mother, writing idyllically of

their relationshp in her 1894 autobiography. She described her mother's "low, gentle

voice, her smile, her soft breast and arms, the atmosphere of digmty which always

surrounded her, the very odor of her clothes and lace, redolent of dried roses", as sweet

memories that had sustained her throughout her life.' By contrast, Cobbe's father was a

distant figure in her childhood and in her early adulthood a tyrannical one determined to

bend her to his will. When Cobbe had a religious crisis he exiled her to her brother's fm

in Donegal County, unable to accept eaher her new religious ideas or the challenge to his

'authority that he perceived in her refusai to accept his religtous rule.

Cobbe's early education was undertaken at home, first by her mother and then by a

governess. In 1836 she was sent away to a prestigious girls school in Brighton for the

completion of her education as the daughter of a wealthy landowner. The school in

Engiand which her father arranged to send her to was by Cobbe's account one of the most

expensive in the country, costing approximately one thousand pounds for two yean of

' Frances Power Cobbe, Life of Frances Power Cobbe, Volume I, (New York: Haughton, Miilk and Companyt 1 894), 1-2 1. '[bid, 29. Ibid. study." Though she was well-treated and indulged as the daughter of a wealthy patron she despised the school. She found the academic regimen frivolous and intellectually aultlfymg. Writing about the school after fifty-he years of bearing witness to its results, she was positively scathing in her description In Cobbe's view women's education taught girls nothing of any value. The sole purpose of institutions like the Brighton school was to make women "ornaments of society." She argued that "everythng was taught us in the inverse ratio of its true importance. At the bottom of the scale were

Morals and Religion, and at the top were Music and ~ancin~."'In condemning the educational system established for women, Cobbe was writing in the tradition of Mary

Wollstonecraft who some one hundred years earlier had similarly recognized that women were primarily taught to cultivate their appearance rather than their mind and to make themselves pleasing and divert- to men.6 Though Cobbe's feminist arguments were dlffcrent because she stressed the innate differences between men and women, Cobbe still believed that women were as capable as men of rational and intellectual thought.

She, llke Wollstonecraft before her, believed that women occupied an lnferior position in

British society because they were not given the proper educational opportunities and if they were tutored in subjects that exercised the rational faculties, then they too could take up full citizenship in the nation

Cobbe left school m 1838 believing that she had learned everything necessary

"for a lady to know? She soon realized otherwise, however, and began to educate herself in earnest. M&mg use of the library at her home Newbridge and the library of

'Ibid, 49. Ibid, 56. Mary WoIIstondA Gindimtion of rhe Righu of Woman, (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1988), 187. Archbishop Marsh in Dubh she taught herself history, Literature and classics, reading

"as many of the great books of the world as I could rea~h."~She also arranged to have the parson of her parish teach her Greek and geometry, subjects she felt she could not properly master on her own It was around the same time that Cobbe began her process of self-education that her parents decided that she needed to go out into society.

Accordingly she was sent to balls and parties in Dubhn, escorted either by her father or an uncle. Cobbe was thoroughIy bored by such events and begged her parents to allow her to stay home and receive guests instead of going out into society. She believed that the men she met at such affairs were inane and dull. She described them as "empty- headed young coxcombs." Her parents tinally agreed to release her Eom her social obligations and Cobbe subsided into isolation and study, quite happily as she tells it. She travelled to London every few yean for sightseeing and took one or two trips in Ireland to houses of relatives, but beyond that she showed no interest in participating in elite social cult

It is curious that in all of Cobbe's voluminous writing she devoted almost no attention to the problems that were going on in Ireland in the years that she was growing up. The only mention she made of it was fifty years later in her autobiography and her discussion primarily consisted of detatling the "liberahy" of the English landlords, her

Father included, who she described as 'noble' and benevolent. For example, she spoke of her fither's efforts to improve the squaior of the nearby village of Bakk by replacing the traditional mud cabins that were, in Cobbe's opinion, "somsh-looking hovels," with cottages made of mortared stone. The Irish heof 1845-49 and the fever that followed

' Cobbe, Lif, I, 6 1. Ibid, 62. it were mentioned only tmefly. She described how the Anglo-Irish did their best to help

the poor, writing, "The splendid generosity of the English public to us at that time

warmed all our Anglo-Irish hearts and cheered us to strain every nerve to feed the

people."10She also mentioned how gentry women contributed by tending to those who

were ill from the fever, mydying as a consequence. Cobbe always viewed herself as

innately 'English' and so she viewed the Irish &om a position not oniy of class

superiorm but also racial superiortty. The view that the English were the most "civilized

and advanced race frequently crept into her writing. She argued, for example that

"savages undoubtedly feel pain less than civiked men"" and her attacks on vivisection

rested on the assumption that it was unEnglish to hfkt pain on an animal.

It was shortly after her return from school in Brighton that Cobbe went through one

of the most profound changes of her Life. She experienced a religious conversion that

eventually resulted in her rejection of dogmatic Christianity in favour of theism a belief

based on an intuitive and moral understanding of God's goodness. She had been raised

an Anglican; her parents belonged to what she described as the "the mild. devout,

' phhthropic Arminiarusm of the Clapham School ".I2 They were evangelicals who

stressed a conversionist and intensively active faith based on a literal interpretation of the

I3ible.I' Her first doubts about her inherited religion related directly to the issue of

interpretation. Her father was reading the story of the loaves and fishes to the assembled

------bid, 6 1-64 & 149. lo lbid, 1 65. " Frances Power Cobbe, *Vivisection: Four Replies: Formigh~bReview, ~xxi(1 882): 92. " Cobbe, Lye, t70. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family FmetMen and Women of die EngIish Ifiddie Ch. 1780-1850 (Chicago: Uaivmity of Chicago Pres, 1987), 8 1. farmly on a Sunday evening and Cobbe attempted to understand exactly how the story

had unfolded. She wrote of the incident,

How did happen exactly? I began cheerfbY, to thnk, quite Lnagining I was doing the right thing to try to understand it all.. .Did the fish grow and grow as they were eaten and broken? And the bread the same? No! that is nonsense. And then the twelve basketsfill taken up at the end, when there was not nearly so much at the beginning. It is not possible! 0 Heavens ! (was the next thoushi) i am doubting the ~ible!'"

Such doubts in the Literal and lnfaliible author@ of the Bible proved impossible for

Cobbe to quell. Unable to conceive of an alternative to the doctrinaire Chnstianrty she

had been raised to accept, she saw no choice but to reject it altogether. Thirty years

before Thomas Hwdey first coined the tenq Cobbe became what we would now label an

agnostic, left ~h what she described as a "Tabuka rasa of faith".I5 Religious crises like

the one Cobbe suffered were not unusual amongst the women who came to populate the

Victorian intellectual scene. Cobbe's contemporaries, George Eliot (1 8 19- 1 880) and

Hamet Martineau (1 802-1 876), both found thernsehres questioning Christianity. Eliot's

crisis occurred in 1842 when she was in her early twenties, and resulted in banishment to

'her brother Isaac's home? Martineau did not suffer familial disapproval as Eliot did but

castigated herself for her religious doubts. She was raised as a Unitarian a faith that

followed the teachmg of Christ but rejected his divinity. At the age of eleven she began to

doubt the authority of Christian dohe, particularly the contradiction implied by

predestination and free will. She questioned how humans could be blamed or rewarded

" Cobbe, Li/, I, 76. l5 Ibid, 8 1 and Lori LpWrlliamson, Ucegerent of God: The Public Crusades of Fmnces Power Cobbe, 1822-1904 (Toronto: University of Toronto, Unpublished Disrtation, 1994), 58-59. l6 Wfi8mso11,65. for their conduct if it had been decided beforehand. She found no easy answers and was plagued with guilt because she believed that doubt equaled sin."

Cobbe told no one about her religious doubts and instead grappled with the issue alone, attempting to come to some understanding that would provide her with the spiritual fulfillment she craved but could not get fiom Christianity. What she eventually meto embrace at this point in her religious evolution was a form of Deism, whch was characterised by an emphasis on a reasonable ethic as the end product of religion. l8 It taught that it was not the Bible that provided revelation but the physical world apprehended through the senses and rational understanding. God had established an orderly universe and provided humankind with the capacity to discern its workings, and he made no further revelation Therefore, it was only through "natural religion" that one could find the existence of God and understand basic morallty and immorality.19Cobbe came to a deistic understanding of the universe on her own but once she had given some structure to her new belief system she began to read the works of other Deists, including

Voltaire. For Cobbe deism held no promise of a future life and she abandoned all hope in

' one. She could also no longer accept Christ as the Son of God and she came to believe that the reverence reserved for the son instead of the father was idolatry." Cobbe never returned to Chnstian~tyalthough religion would always be a major source of authority and comfort for her.

-- -- - l7 Valerie KO- Pichanick, Hamet tiMahnear.-The Woman and Her WunG, 1802-18 76. (Ann Arbor: The University of Mihgan Press, 1980), 24-25. '' Clyde L. Man- A Hislory of Christianiry in the Wur7d (New Jersey: Rentice-Hall Inc.. 1985), 248. '' ibid, 248-249. 'O Cobbe, L*, I, 83-84. Sometime after her conversion to Deism Cobbe had a revelation that l&ed her faith "to a higher While praying she came to the startling realization that when she thought or spoke of goodness it was God to whom she was referring. Goodness was not an independent, rational principle; Goodness was God himself. Cobbe continued to believe that hth should entail acting in accordance with one's own conscience domed by a moral concept of right and wrong, but she came to believe that God was the uttirnate arbiter of right and wrong or, as she cailed hn, the "Lord of conscience." For Cobbe,

God embodied the very meanings of Goodness and Justice. She wrote, "God's Goodness is what I mean by Goodness! It is not a mere title, Wte the 'Majesty' of a King. He has really that character which we call 'Good." He is Just, as I understand Justice, only more perfkctly just. He is Good as I understand Goodness, only more perfectly good."" This concept in particular formed the basis of her ethically based faith. Christianity's emphasis on reward in heaven for good deeds meant that people were not motivated by a moral sense of right and wrong but by self-interest. Cobbe believed that one should do right simply because it was the moral thing to do and most in accordance with God's wishes

'and God's being. Morahty and immorality were to be gleaned from an intuitive understanding of Go4 not from rational thought. Therefore, for Cobbe theism repiaced deism when hth transcended all that could be gleaned from the bodily senses and one accepted as trustworthy the direct Divine teachmg of God's holiness."

Cobbe was to find legithiation for her new found faith in Theodore Parker's

Discourse on Religion of which she fist read a review m the Athenaeum in 1845. She

- - ".- Ibid, 84. - Ibid, 84-85. Ibid, 88. described it as the "epoch mahg book" of her &*" The Discourse, first pubhshed in

America in 1842, reflected the Influence of American transcendentalism, particularly that

of Ralph Waldo Emerson, on its authorsx Emerson preached that the transcendental law

was the moral law through which humans could come to an understanding of God. a

living spirit. The formahtion of religion and its descent into fundamentalism had

obscured the true nature of We, which was energetic and fluid. God was not dead; God

could be seen in the "transcendental unity resulting from the convergence of all forces

upon the energetic truth, the heart of the moral law."26 In line with Emerson, Parker

suggested that it was through mtuition not reason that God's existence could be

established. The Bible was a human work not a divine one and was therefore liable to

error. God was good and consequently there was no hell because "the dinite love of God

must make the whole of existence a blessing to each man""

Although Cobbe embraced Parker's theism she ail1 did not believe in an afierlfe

and ths was to prove problematic for her when she lost the one person in the world who

meant the most to her. In 1847 her mother, Frances Conway Cobbe, died at the age of

' seventy-two. This was a blow to Cobbe who believed that her mother had been the only

person in the world who had loved her. Harder ail1 was the $ct that having rejected the

idea of Heaven she was forced to accept that her mother was gone altogether; she existed

only as a memory and not in any unearthly fonn Cobbe wrote that "I had no choice but

think that that most beautiful soul which was worth all the kingdoms of earth had actually

pppp bid. 87. Wiamson, 62. '6 George Perkins et al. Eds, The Amert'can Tmdition in Literurnre. Seventh Edition, (San Francisco: McGraw-Hill Publishing Co.. 1990). 108 1. " williamsob 62. ceased to be."" Ultimately Cobbe was unable to accept this. Having begun a correspondence wah Parker she told hun of her doubts about a &re life and her anguish in thinking that her mother was totally gone. Parker responded by telhg Cobbe that he did believe in the immortahy of the soul because of the intense goodness of God. He wrote,

I feel my immortality and have no more doubt of my eternal life - eternally conscious, eternally progressive - than of my present mortal condition But I do not pretend to know any bgabout the form of that life, or its conditions. Since I believe the intense goodness of god - which you so beautifblly speak of - I have no fear, or desire to know more about the form of the next life, or rather of the next stage of th~sWe. If I had only Reason, which cares little about persons and deals more with ideas, I should not think I suffer or care about meeting my friends in the next stage of life. But as I have Affections more powefil too than reason, I cannot doubt that I shall see and know my friends in ~eaven.~

With the help of Parker, Cobbe came to trust intuitively in the immortality of the human soul even though it could not be proven rationally. Cobbe came to see the doa~eof immortality as "the indispensable corollary of that of the goodness of god" and as a way to realize the continued existence of her mother.'' Imortallty was evidence of God's oodness and she meto believe, in the words of Cardinal Manning, "If Man be not immortal, God is not justv3'

Whlle her mother had been ill Cobbe had kept silent about her religious doubts and continued to attend fdyprayers and church services wdh the fady but shortly after her mother's death she told her hther about her conversion He responded, as she must have known he would, in anger and confusion He sent her away to live with her

a Cobbe, Life. I, 89. Quoted in Williamson, 67. Cobbe, Life. L 92. Ibid. brother on a farm m Donegal, giving her no indication that he would ever allow her to

return She hlIy anticipated being dismheerited. He was aging, however, and needed his

only daughter to care for him so after a year at her brother's he summoned her home. She

went accordingly to take up her position as daughter at Newbridge. She was responsible

for amusing and helping her father, directing the household, entertaining guests, carrying

out fdy correspondence, teachmg in the village school twice a week or so, and

attending to illness or other tribulations of people in the surrounding villages of Donabate

and ~aiisk"

Despite her importance in the running of Newbridge, she occupied "an anomalous

position" after her return from ede for she was under a kind of moral opprobrium Her

father had by no means accepted what he considered to be her religious treachery.

Everything she said was listened to cautiously as though it might conceal some

"poisonous heresy."" When he saw scraps of a manuscript she was preparing on her

religious views he warned her "don't leave those about; you don 'r ho~vinto whose hands

[hey may fall.'"' Cobbe claims that though she was occasionally lonely during that time

'in her life she was not unhappy. She had weathered her religious crisis and come to

believe in a faith that provided her wrth solace, strength and satisfactionj5

While in exile &om Newbridge Cobbe had begun to write the first of many works

on religious matters. Called an Essay on T'e Religion it dealt with her reasons for belief

in God and those for not believing in apocalyptic/dogrnatic ~hristianity-'6She had put the

work aside when she returned home, however, and when she again took up her pen she

'=Ibid, 88-90. 33 Ibid, 94. 3j Ibid, 100. 35 Ibid, 95. chose to start on somethmg entirely new instead of enlarging on or completing her first

manuscript. At the age of thrty she began what she considered her magnum opus, her

Ersay on the Theory oflnmitive Morals." The book was written between her thirtieth and

thirty-third years in spare moments stolen between her domestic duties." She wrote

Intzritive Morals to popukrise Kant whose ideas on virtue and morality remforced

Cobbe's own views.'* Kant believed that the highest moral hculty was Duty, the rational

resistance to evil impulses. He believed that "valid rules of conduct [could not] be found

in experience but must be sought in pure rea~on."'~Cobbe wanted to impress upon her

readers the message that she had gleaned fkom Kant, namely that the end of creation was

not happiness but the wtue of rational s~uls.~Moreover, Kant's idea that the motive and

not the resuh determined the moral worth of an action was employed by Cobbe and was

central to her condemnation of vivisection Scientists thirsted for knowledge, not

goodness, and this made them morally suspect within her worldview.

Once completed, Intuitive Morals was published by Longmans in 1855, by Crosby

and Nichols in Boaon, and again by Trubner in Landon'' Cobbe arranged to have it

'published anonymously so as not to offend her Father and such anonyrmty caused

reviewers to assume that the writer was male. Consequently it was at first favourably

reviewed. Critics described the work as the product of a "lofty mind." The Guardian

reported that "His treatment of morals is often both true and beautiful "" Once it became

known that the writer was a woman, however, the reviews changed and were, as Cobbe

M~bid,91. '' Ibid, 9698. WiiIiamson, 72. 39 Roland N. Stromberg, Eumpem InteNectual History Sinee 1789 (Engiewood CLfk: Pmtice-Ha. 1990),30-3 1. " WWilliamm, 72. " Cobbe, L#, I, 100. put it, "barbed with sharper teeth""' Cobbe had stepped outside of the bounds of obedient womanhood and Victorian propriety. She was sharply reprimanded by the

clergy in particular. Her work was no longer to be judged on its own merit but on whether it conformed to the appropriate form for a woman's writing to take. Charlotte

Bronte had hced the same situation when it was discovered that the author of the hmous

Jane Eyre and her subsequent book, Shirley, was a woman. Reviewers began to speak of the 'vulgarity* and 'coarseness' of both works? Charlone wrote to her friend George

Henry Lewes, "I wish all reviewen believed 'Cmer Bell* to be a man; they would be more just to him You will, I know, keep measuring me by some standard of what you deem becoming to my sex; where I am not what you consider graceful you will condemn

Cobbe was far more philosophical about the situation, even expressmg great amusement over some of the reviews."

Cobbe continued to live with and care for her fhther untiI his death in 1 857. In his will Charles Co bbe provided for alI of his children but hls daughter received the least of all. His estate was lefi to hls eldest son and Cobbe received an ~nheritanceof about two hundred pounds per year. This amounted to little more than what Co bbe had received in

pin money when her father was alive and she considered it a narrow provision. Despite

her reduced income, however, she decided to leave the estate and live an independent life.

She was by this time 36 yean old and showed no inchtion to marry. In fact, she seemed to have a deep-rooted dislike of men. Though she worked closely with some men such as

4= [bid, 10 I - 43 Ibid. " Ruth Gouneias, "Charlotte Bronte and the Critics Attitudes to the Female Qualities in ha Writing- Australusion hivenities Language and Litematre Association, 62 (1 984): Z 5 3. " Muriel Spark, ed., The Bmnte Lenen, (Toronto: MacMillan, 1966), 17 1. " cobbe, ~i/e.I, 101. Lord Shaftesbury later in her career, she seems to have preferred the company of women for the most part. In any event, her fither had fully intended that she continue to live at

Newbridge with her brother and his wife and farmly but Cobbe refused to consider being a mere lodger in her family home. Expressing little grief over her fhther's passing she decided to start her new l$e with a long vacation She cut off half of her hair, (she was no longer able to afford a maid to do it) and set off to the continent on her voyage of self- discovery, travelmg to France, Italy, Egypt, and the Middle East du~sher eleven months abroad?'

Upon returning to England late in 1858 Cobbe was at a loss as to what she should do with her life. She had taken such a long vacation as a sort of "conclusion to [her] self- educati~n'~~and so, at the age of 36, she was ready to take up meaningful work. Her inheritance, though small by her standards, nevertheless provided her with enough income that she was able to work where and when she pleased. She soon heard through her friends Harnet St Leger and Lady Byron that a woman named Mary Carpenter was looking for help at her Ragged School, Red Lodge as it was called, in Bristol. Red Lodge

'was a school for wayward children of the workmg class. Mary Carpenter sought to

"educate, rehabilitate, reform and save [chddren] from becoming part of the 'dangerous' class involved in crime.7Ag In exchange for "abundant occupation," Cobbe accepted room and board for a moderate sum at Carpenter's house.50

As much as she was loo& for meaningful work, Cobbe also wanted a companion with whom she could share her life and discuss her rehgious convictions. Cobbe believed

"[bid, 195-198. Ibid, 250. " Williamson, 125. 50 Cobbe, Lij,I, 25 1. that Miry Carpenter might be "outside the paie of orthodoxy" and would therefore satisfy her desire for such theological discussion." Carpenter was a Dissenter, part of the

Unitarian hth, and therefore more likely to share in some of her heterodox views.'"

Moreover, having never married Cobbe yearned for a nmnng and mutually supportive relationshp. Her father, hostile to her religious ideas until the end, had certainly never provided such a connection.

Unfortunately, Cobbe did not find Carpenter a congenial companion nor was life at

Red Lodge comfortable. Carpenter's life revolved around the children at her school and her commitment to them left her Little room to pursue additional relationstups. Carpenter was not interested in conversation on subjects other than the school and thw bothered

Cobbe. She wrote "her absorption in her work always bhded her to the fact that other people might possibly be bored by hearing of it Cobbe herself probably did the same on the subject of vivisection later in her life. In any event, Cobbe does not seem to have cared particularly for the chddren of Red Lodge, seeing them as a distraction to Mary Carpenter who was the real reason she had accepted the position in the first place. She wrote condescendingly, "I have always lacked imagination enough to realize what are the mental limitations of children of the poorer classe~."~"Cobbe was always ambiguous about those of the "lower orders." Her desire to help them was usually qualified by a distinct sense of antipathy to the conditions under which they lived and their coarse manners. As will be discussed in the next chapter, her class pqsition would also impact her attitude toward working-class fdevictim of spousal abuse.

" Ibid, 25 1. " W'iamson, 126. j3 Cobbe, L@, I, 257 54 Ibid, 264. Not only was Cobbe generally uninterested in the children of Red Lodg, the spartan regimen proscribed by Carpenter wearied Cobbe who was possessed of a suh4mialappetite and enjoyment of the finer things in life. Cobbe described Carpenter as an, '*ingrained stoic" by both temperament and principle. She seemed indifferent to even the minor comforts of life and was unsympathetic to Cobbe's desire for indulgences such as fresh vegetables. Carpenter even called Cobbe's Pomeranian Hajin a "self- indulgent dcbq" when she observed her stretched out luxuriously before the fire. "

Cobbe left Red Lodge periodically throughout the summer of 1858 and the following year in order to escape the dreariness of her surroundings and regain her energy after suffering bouts of rheumatism She spent a considerable amount of her time with her fiiend Isa Blagen whom she had met on her earlier travels at her villa in ~lorence.~~

Cobbe tinally accepted that Carpenter would never be the companion that she wanted and so she decided to move out of Red Lodge while continuing her duties at the school. She moved to Belgrave House, Durdham Down where she lived alone. She found life much improved by accommodations that were closer to the outskirts of the city and more like the country life to which she was accustomed. Though for a time she continued her work at Red Lodge, she soon found her time and effort taken up by workhouse visiting in

Bristol to which she had been introduced by Margaret Elliot, the daughter of the Dean of

~ristol"Over the next two years Cobbe and EUiot together would visit workhouses in

Bristol and in London and Cobbe alone saw several in Italy and France while wintering on the continent due to her healths8

5s Ibid, 252-254. " Wiiamson, 135-136. Cobbe, Life. I, 280. "hid, 293. Ahhough workhouses had existed for hundreds of years in Britain, it was not until the passing of the Poor Lmu Amendment Act of 1834 that they had come under intense criticism from a variety of sectors of the country.5g Rural pauperism had been endemic in

England since Elizabethan times and it had typically been the responsibility of each parish to care for the ill, aged and insane of the community. In 1795, however, there was a change in Poor Law adrmrustration Labourers, whose wages were insufficient to support themselves and their fdes, were given relief based on their earnings, the size of their famdy, and the cument price of bread. The most famous example of this system was drawn up by the Berkshire magistrates at Speenhamknd, near Newbury. This system was widely adopted across the country but had disastrous results. It helped keep agricultural wages low because landlords had no incentive to rake wages that they knew would be supplemented by poor relief The 1834 poor law was an attempt to address the problems of the Speenbamland system and come up with an economically sound and humane form of poor relief It was the result of two years of study by Edwin Chadwick and the Royal Commission to which he had been appointed, and it produced a system in

' which the poor were forced to rely on indoor relief offered in centralised locations, which were really workhouses. Such workhouses were managed by elected Poor Law

Guardians who were responsible for providing pauper education, providing improved care for the aged and the 4 and in ensuring that able-bodied workers were denied outdoor relief Workhouses were deliberately made to be as unattractive as possible on the principle that this would prevent all but the truly desperate from seeking help within their walls6' Conditions within such workhouses were indeed squalid and soul destroying, as Cobbe found out.

Women had started to gain widespread access to the poor in workhouses in the

1850s when the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, established in

1857, began distributing pamphlets and tracts on the subject. By the end of the decade

Louisa Twining had launched the Workhouse Visiting Sociery. The mandate of her society was to promote "the moral and spiritual well-being of all inmates, comfon the sick, insmct the ignorant, and encourage useful oc~u~ations.'~'Cobbe was not a member of Twining's workhouse society but she was working in its tradition when she went visiting with Margaret Elliot. She was appalled by the conditions she found at St.

Peters in Bristol when she visited it in 1859. Many of the hteswere desperately sick and tnfirm The children were "joyless, spiritless little creatures" lefi in the care of untrained and ill-equipped matrons who were themselves of the poorest clas~es.~'In

Cobbe's opinion, the male inspectors of the workhouses knew nothmg about the needs of women or children. She wrote scathngly, "I have sat m the infants' ward when an entire

'Board of about two dozen gentlemen tramped through it, for what they considered to be

'inspection;' and anythmg more helpless and absurd than those masculine 'authorities' appeared as they glanced at the hle cots (never danng to open one of them) while the awakened babies screamed at them in chorus, it has seldom been my lot to witness. ""

Cobbe found the plight of incurable patients the most disturbing. In England the sick and the poor alike were sent to the workhouse, the former group often unable to care

- - " Michael E.Rose, The English Poor Law 1784LI930, (New York: Bams and Noble, Inc.. 197 1), i 7-71. 6' Williamson 157. for themselves and Iackmg the resources to afford appropriate care. They were usually

placed amongst the general workhouse population, afforded little in the way of medical

attention, and often left to die practically alone.& Cobbe and Elliot attempted to arrive at

some means to alleviate the situation of many of the incurable paupers. Realizing that it

would be virtually impossible to build new hospitals to kouse the needy, they decided to

try to improve conditions within the existing ~orkhouses.~'Their plan consisted firstly

of distinguishing incurables from other paupers and placing them in separate wards. They

wanted to admit private charity freely into the wards in the form of basic comforts that

would alleviate the suffering of the patients. They recommended comfortable

surroundings such as "good spring beds," "easy chairs" and "smll refreshments such as

good tea and lemons and oranges; also snufT, cough lozenges, spectacles, flowers in the

window, books and papers ; and above a4 kindly vi~itors."~To promote the plan Cobbe

wrote an article for Macmillan 's Magazine, entitled "Workhouse Sketches" whch was

well received and earned her a small sum (14 pounds).67 It was the first article for which

she received payment and she was pleased. She used the money to give the poor old

'souls of St. Peten "such a tea as had not been known before in the memory of the 'oldest

inhabi~mt.~'~~

Cobbe's workhouse visiting came to end in 1863 when she severely sprained her

ankle while stepping off of a train platform in Bath. Her ankle was mistreated by the fust

doctor who looked at it; he bound it so tightly that the circulation was severely impeded

and subsequent doctors contmued to give Cobbe bad advice. For four years she remained

Ibid, 286. a Ibid, 287. Ibid. 6;Ibid, 288. crippled by her injury as she visited doctors in London, Italy and Savoy hoping for some

relief She received contradictory advice from nearly every doctor that she saw. One told

her to go abroad to "to certain baths, which proved to be the wrong ones for my

tr~uble,'"~while another told her not to go abroad but to have a special boot made for her

leg to keep it stfl. A French doctor then told her that the boot would permanently

damage her leg. Eventually she ceased to listen to the advice of any doctor and instead

did the one thing that virtually every doctor agreed she should not do, namely walk on her

legs7' A year or two later she had recovered but the ailment left her with a permanent

distrust and contempt for the medical profession

While injured, Cobbe was again faced wrth the question of what kind of work with

whch to occupy herself Havmg realized from the Macmillan S experience that she

could make money with her pen, she embarked on a weer as a journalist that was to last

until anti-vivisection came to occupy all of her avaikble time and energy. She became a

correspondent for the Daily News in Rome for a year and in Florence for another.

Writing, combined with her yearly inheritance, allowed her to continue to travel to the

'continent and even enabled her to keep a maid." Upon her recovery she moved to

London and continued her career as a journalist. In 1868 a man named Arthur Arnold

invited Cobbe to write for his new paper, the Echo. For seven years, she wrote three

articles a week on some social subject of current import. In 1875 the Echo was sold and

Cobbe resigned her position She then went to work for the Standard for which she wrote

ibid, 288-289. 69 [bid, 3 11. 70 Ibid, 3 10-3 12. 7' ibid. two or three stories a week for a year or so. She resigned her post there, however, when the Standard printed a pro-vivisection arti~le."~

It was while in Italy in 186 1 that Cobbe first became acquainted with Mary Lloyd, the woman who would be her companion for the nwthrty years. They were introduced through a mutual friend, Mary ~omerville." Lloyd was a sculptor who had been living in

Rome and workmg with John Gibson, a prominent British Sculptor who had moved to

Italy to work with the famous f an ova." In 1864 Lloyd bousht a house in South

Kensington, London, (Hereford Square) where the two women lived together for 25 years until they retired to Wales m 1884.~'Such relationships were not uncommon in Victorian

England. They flourished particularly well in feminist circles. Philippa Levine describes these relationships as "romantic fhendships" and notes that they were frequently intense and passionate and used language very similar to that of romantic hetero~exuality.'~They took place between women who were married to men and did not live together and between women who shared a household and a life very similar to a traditional marriage like Cobbe and Lloyd. In fact, many of these women referred to their relationships as

'marriages and often exchanged rings and promises of fidelny? Cobbe frequently had an affectionate and intimate tone when she discussed Mary Lloyd in letters to hen&, underbg the fict that theirs was a female marriage. For example, in a letter to Mary

Somerville she described Lloyd as her 'better half and later wrote, ''Poor old darling. I am comforted by knowshe is happy and enjoying her little fling. Her life can never

[bid, 3 9 1-398. Ibid, 358-359. :.I Dictionary of National Biography (London: Word Univasity Press): 1 157- I 16 1. '5 Cobbe, Lijk II, 36 1. "Philippa Levine, "Love, Friendship, and Feminism in Lata'l grn-~enturyEngland," Women 3 Studies International Forum, VoL 13, Nos I/2 (I 990): 72. have too much of that to make up for the past-but I am very lonely without her."" Such relationships not only provided love and companionship but often validated a woman's decision not to many but to have a career instead."

Cobbe fint became mterested in ''WOW'S rights" while working with Mary

Carpenter in ~ristol.*'Her own experience of women's education and her observations on the treatment women received in the workhouse contributed to the development of her feminist conscience and when she moved to London in the late 1860s she became actively invoived in campaigns for women's education and sufhge. She was also a member of the Kensington Discussion Society, the Married Women's Property

Cornminee and briefly a member of the Executibe Cornminee of the London National

Society for Woman's ~uffra~e.*'In 1878 she was instrumental in securing amendments to the Matrimonial Causes Act that stipulated that women should have the right to secure a legal separation from an abusive husband, that the husband pay suppon to his tvlfe and children in the event of a separation and that the custody of all children under ten be given over to the wife in such cases." She continued to support women's causes throughout her lfetime although she only wrote sporadically on such issues after 1875 when she became heavily involved in anti-vivisection In May 1876 she made a speech on the subject of women's sufEage in St George's Hall; in 1881 she delivered a series of lectures on the duties of women at the WwerPalace Hotel, and in 1 890 she made her kn effon on behalf of women when she read a paper entitled, "Women's Duty to

" Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: WoYork and Communityfor Single Women 1850-1920. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 158. " Quoted in Barb ma Caine, Victorian Femhicu (Toronto: Odord Universiv Press, 1 992),12 3. 79 Vicinus, 158. " Cobbe, LiJe, II, 525. '' Caine, 125. " Cobbe, Lfj2,II, 539-540. Women9' at the conference of Women Workers m ~irmingham*'She also wrote articles on battered women and women and the medical profession in 1878 and 1881 respectively, but both of them were so heavily informed by her anti-vivisection activities that they were as much about vivisection as they were about women, as will be explored more llty in chapter three.

Once in London, Cobbe found herself working alongside women such as Lydia

Becker, Bessie Rayner Parke. and Barbara Bodichon, the guiding lights of the new women's suffige movement." Bodichon, who spearheaded the movement, came horn a liberal middle-class firmly. Her father had been a wealthy radical Member of Parliament who had raised his sons and daughters under a spirit of equality, providing them all with the same ed~cation.'~In 1854 Bodichon published a feminist pamphlet, d Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Imponant Laws Concerning Women Together wirh a Felt.

Obsentations Thereon, and in October 1866 she read a paper on women' suffrage before the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science in ~anchester.'~Lydia

Becker (1829-90) was in the audience that day and in response to Bodichon's words

'decided to act. In January 1867 she formed the Manchester Women's Suffrage

Committee. Subsequently, saage societies in London, Edinburgh, and Bristol were organized.*' Cobbe became involved in the women's sfiage movement in June of 1866 when she signed a petition requesting the vote for women that had been drawn up by

Barbara Bodichon, Jessie Boucherett and Emily Davies, and was presented to Parliament

33 Ibid, 53 1 -553. st Williamson, 2 12 and Caine 125. * Bonnxe Andason and Judith Zinssr, A History of Their Own: Women in Eumpefiom Pre-Histo* ro [he Presens, volume II, 3 60. 86 Ibid. gt Susan Kingsfey Kent, Gender and Power m Britain, 1640-1990, (New York: Routledge, 1 999), 193. by John Stuart Mill, known for his advocacy of women's suffrage.a8 Cobbe knew Mill personally and expressed great fondness for him She was disappointed when ~JSill- health prevented him fiom vishg her and Mary Lloyd in Wales on the summer holidays one year in the early i 870s. Mdl was not involved in anti-vivisection because he died in

1873 before the controversy really escalated, but Cobbe mentioned that his love for his cat marked hun as one of the "highest order of men"89

The seeds of Cobbe's feminist leanings had been sown earlier in her life during the years of religious crisis. Parker's work had been particularly siguficant for Cobbe in this regard because of hs conception of God as androgynous. In the preface to the Collecred

Works of Theodore Parker, which Cobbe edited, she identified Parker's idea that God was both a &her and a mother to humanity as his most important contribution to religious thoughtW This was important because Cobbe had rejected dogmatic

Christianity, not only because of her religious doubt about the Divine authority of the

Bible but also because she recognized that its implicit patriarchy confined women. Cobbe realized that Christianity was, as Philippa Levine puts it, "a critical source of sex role segregation" in which women were ascribed the role of wrfe and mother that enforced their political Ths aspect of her new Gth emerged more fully in the 1860s once she began writing about women's issues. She came to embrace this new,

'feminized' god and integrated it into her own personal theology. In an 1861 article for

Macmillan 's Magazine she revealed this new element of her religious thinking. She wrote, We have had enough of man 's thought of God-of God fist as the King, the 'Man of War," the Demiurge, the Mover of ail things, and then, at last, since Christian times of God as the Father of the World. Not always have men been very competent to teach even this side of the truth alone; for during more than a thousand years the religious teachers of Christendom were men who knew not a fther's feehgs, who thought them less holy than their own loveless celibacy. But the wornan's thought of God as the 'Parent of Good, Almighty," who unites in one the father's care and mother's tenderness, [hat we have never yet heard"

This was sigrufcant to the development of Cobbe's thinking because it provided the spiritual basis for her vision of a moral world in which women contributed through philanthropy and charity. Sarah Hall describes ths as a conversion of "the patriarchal elements of Chnstiamty into a matriarchal fantasy of women working together to bring about salvation through their role as the spiritual and moral guides of the domestic

Cobbe addressed a range of issues concerning the social, political and legal position of women in Victorian society, dealing with subjects as diverse as the suffrage, marital violence, poverty, and female exploitation by the medical profession. She recognised that the fdy, the church and social convention systematically oppressed women and, as Barbara Caine has pointed out, came closer to articulating a theory of patriarchy than did any other Victorian feminist? Ceminly her own sxperience with her

Father, the despot of her youth who had banished her because of her religious heresy, must have reminded her of the precariousness of a woman's position in the home. But it was marriage m particular that she saw as constraining to women Under English

- - 91 Pbiltppa Levine, Feminist Lhs in P?ctorion Englond: Private Roles and Public Commirmenr (0l;ford: BdBlackwell, 1990), 34. "Frances Power Cobbe, Social Science Conpsses, and Women's Part In Them- .1iacZiillan i .\lagazine V (December I86 1): 9 1-92. " Sarah M Theobald-Hall, At the Bordm of Humanity: Animals Women, and the AnbC'irisecfion .Clovement in Lore Nineteenth Cennrry Literuh~m,(Unpublished Dissertation: University of Tulsa 1998), 194. Common law wives were relegated to a position analogous to that of a chld, a criminal

or an idiot. Under the Married Women's Property Act a woman had no legal existence

independent of her husband once she married. She could not make a contract, she could

not sue or be sued, she could not possess personal property, and any of her earnings

received during the marriage automatically became the property of her h~sband.~'Cobbe

argued that ths law was based on the erroneous assumption that all marriages were

idyllic, that all husbands cared for their wives and children and made sure that they had

proper food and clothmg, and that they dispensed the family money with fairness and

generosity. Such was not always the case. She wrote, "setting up an ideal of perfect

&ge union sounds very well But what would it be to set up an ideal, say, between

rich and poor, and to assume that what ought to be their relation m a Chnstlan country

actually is so?"% In assuming that all marriages lived up to the ideal, women whose

husbands were brutal fell through the cracks in the rnachery of state and law. No

precedents had been set up to deal with such "exceptions." It was sentiment that men

were holding fast to when they determined legislation about marriage, "the poetical

'vision in their minds of a wife's true relation to her h~sband."~'Moreover, such a notion

was premised on the assumption that perfect love meant perfect dependency. Cobbe

arged tbat silencing one group did not create real unanirmty between two people. In

hct, it had precisely the opposite effect

Cobbe believed that the Married Women's Property Act was unjust because it did

not secure for a woman the equivalent support that it did for a man and it was not

- - Caine, 104. 95 Frances Power Cobbe, "Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors', Fmm,bfagazine VoL 78 ( 1868): 779. % Ibid, 785. * Ibid, 787. expedient because it could in the case of unhappy marriages result in the ruin of a family.

It needed to be repealed for those two hdamental reasons. Until it was, marriage would

remain a cohgand potentially dangerous institution for women, a lottery as she

called it.gs As moral and intelligent beings, women had civil rights that could not be

denied to them 99

In Cobbe's view the exclusion of women from the political &anchse was another

fundamental reason that they suffered.lw She believed that in a society whch employed

the Darwinian notion of "survival of the fittest," or what she called "might is right."

women's lack of a political voice weakened them and rendered them vulnerable to male

exploitation, much as physical weakness placed women at the mercy of violent husbands

in domestic situations. She advocated women's sufEage as "the natural and needful

constitutional means of protection for the rights of the weaker half of the nation"'" She

argued that it was through legislative actMty that women could not only help to alleviate

social problems that affected women, like domestic violence, but to help eliminate other

problems as well such as "pauperism, vice and crime."'" Cobbe recognized, for example, that st was precisely the hct that women had virtually no protection f?om the law nor a

voice in legal or political matters that they were forced to remain in marriages that were

brutal and violent. Women, she argued, had no means to extricate themselves from such

mamiages because they could not legally obtain separation from their husband, nor could

* Frances Power Cobbe, *Celibacy v. Mwiage,"Fraer f Magmine 65 (February 1862): 233. 99 bid, 794. Irn Cobbe, L& II, 526. lo' Ibid, 532. 'c Ibid, 550. they bring the law to bear on the men for their btahy becaw women were viewed as

What particularly disturbed Cobbe about women's kick of political rights was that by denying women a voice in public affain, men were preventing them from contributing to the good of society. She argued,

.. .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 mercifbl and tender-hearted moiety, is a mistake which cannot fail, and has not failed, to entail great evil and loss.

In effect, Cobbe saw the saage as a way to allow women to help other victims. A truly moral society would, she believed, gve women an equal say in all matters of politics and allow them to bring their compassion to bear on social issues.'05 The denial to women of such rights was senmg society back No doubt she believed that had women been more politically duential the amendments that so weakened the 1876 vivisection regulation bill would not have been passed. She questioned in her autobiography, "why should the fact of being a woman close to me the use of the plan, direct means of helping to achieve some large public good or stopping some e~ll?"'~It was clear what evil she was referring to - vivisection

Cobbe identified several key reasons that women had been excluded fYom the hchise. In particular she messed the sexual double standard, sanctioned not only by men but by society as a whole, as a factor in the continued oppression of women Again it

-

IrnCobbe. L@, II, 536-537 and Frances Power Cobbe, "Wife-Torture in En@anb- Conten~poravReview 32 (1878), 62. ILUCobbe, L& 4 527. '" Ibid, 5 53 - '06 Ibid, 525. was sentiment that women were fighting against rather than reason or intellectual

c~nviction'~' In requestmg the fianchlse women were challenging the traditional and

gendered boundaries that identdied them with and confined them to the home. Separate

sphere ideology was primarily associated with the middle class and had emerged in

Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century. It was firmly entrenched by the 1 830s

and 1840s. It surfaced partly in response to the threat of social disorder brought by the

French Revolution and the Jacobite element in British society, and partly by the

increasing forces of industrialisat ion As Susan Kingsley Kent points out, "domesticity

became the means by which revolution, whether political or economic. could be

imaginatively contained and its protagonists disciplined to meet the needs of the modem

industrial state."108 In other words, by remforcmg a strict herarchy of class and of

gender, evidenced by the self-definrtion of the middle class as a distinct and morally

superior group and by the rigidity of roles prescribed for men and women, Britlsh society

was able to counter the threat of social disorder.

More sigruficantly, however, domestic ideology resulted fiom the new types of

'wealth that were emerging out of the Industrial Revolution and that were primarily in the

hands of the middle class. Their wealth was based on commerce and manufacturing

rather than land. Wnh the prevalent attitude held by the aristocracy that engaging in

work was vulgar and degrading the middle class needed to find a way to justify their

wealth. They turned to religiously-based idea of the 'work ethic'. Work came to be

equated with doing God's duty in the world. Religion, therefore, offered a way for the

middle class to validate its position in society. It was no longer necessary tc be a member

lui Ibid, 530. 106 Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power, 140. of the landed class to quaw for gemlhty because real gentility was a matter of the inner state, not the outer casing. Religion provided the middle class with a moral code of behaviour that stressed piety, earnestness, temperance and asexuality, which were all the hallmarks of respectability. It was respectability that became the criteria by which the middle class would judge itself, not by hlystatus or connection

As industrialisation increasingly separated people's places of work horn their home, the domestic sphere came to be the exclusive domain of women. While men ventured out into the public life of the busmess world women were expected to remain with the private sphere managing the home. It was the women's responsibility to see to the religious life of the children and of any senants in the family's employ. This led to an image of women as bemg naturally more religious than men and assigned to them the special position as caretakers of moral@. Women were viewed as domestic angels providing an earthly paradise of comfort for their husbands to come home to at the end of a long day in the public world. Their confinement w&un the home helped to ensure their virtue; they were not exposed to the evil and temptation of the world. This strict polarization of roles had become ever more rigid by mid-century when many middle- ckss family businesses, started in the early part of the century, had become well- established money maken that were able to function without the help of female family members. When such businesses were getting starting women's labour was often invaluable but once this became less of a pressing issue, attitudes hardened and male/female roles became less flexible.lm While the female role with the family was crucial, the ideal of domesticity masked the exclusion of middle-class women from

"Lanore DavidoE and Catherine Hall, Farnib Fortunes: Men and Women of the Enplish JliddIe Class. 2 780-I850(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987),11l-116 & t 49. political, economic, and social power and stood to reinforce the conventional idea that giving politic. rights to women would destroy their inherent womanly qualities. 110

Cobbe argued against this, chmng that women would instead bring such qualities as compassion, justice, and mercy to bear on public He. It was therefore a duty for women

C to participate in the affairs of the country ''I

Despite Cobbe's emphasis on the liberating impact of gender ddTerence. her feminism is frequently read as a conventional upholding of the very ideology that limited women. Indeed, many contemporary feminist arguments have tended to susgest that difference and equality are antithetical and to categorize accordmgly. But as Joan Scott has demonstiated, ths obscures the complexity of the issue. Scott argues that in the

equality versus difference debate among feminists.. .a binary opposition has been created to offer a choice to feminists, of elther endorsing 'equality' or its presumed antithesis 'dflerence.' In $a, the antithesis itself hides the interdependence of the two terms, for equality is not the elimination of difference, and difference does not preclude equahy.'"

Cobbe's ideas serve to illustrate thls point. Cobbe believed that women and men were fundamentally different in nature. She argued that they paralleled each other, never converging. Such differences were she believed "innate, unchanseable, ineradicable."""

They did not, however, make women derior and therefore less eligible for participation in the male-dominated public world. Indeed, the fact that women possessed innate

'womanly' characteristics meant that they could not be eradicated even if women were g~enstmilar opportunities as men, such as useful education. Critics of female education

I10 Vicinus 2. '" Cobbe, Li/, 4 53 1-33. '" Joan W. Scott, "Deconstrucdng Equality-Versus-Difference:or, the Uses of Pobw~ucturalistTheo~ For Feninkq3 Feminist Studies 14 (Spring 1988): 38. frequently argued that giving women an education on par with that of men would make them manly but Cobbe rejected such an idea. If women were allowed to pursue their education, the "result would be what the Lord of Nature has designed-a true Woman : a being, not artifcdy different f?om a man, but radically and essentially, because naturally, ddifferent-hs complement in the great sum of human nature, not a mere deduction fiom hts own share of that su~n."~~''She described women as the left hand of humanrty. They were to contribute to the world's work but not to do the same work as the right hand, that is, the work of men'"

Cobbe did, however, stress that women had specific domestic duties that men did not. In particular, daughters had an obligation to care for their parents, the needs of whom surpassed even those of a spouse.L16Such duty, however, did not mean that a daughter had to do whatever a parent bid wnhout question. She only had an obligation to fulfil commands that tended to the general benefit of the parent, such as providing food or companionship. She did not have to obey commands that circumscribed her own wishes.

In fa^ she had a duty to disobey commands that clashed with the decisions of her own

'con~cience."'~'Daughters were morally compelled to stand up to a tyrannical father out of justice to their own souls. Certainly Cobbe had done so when her fbther had condemned her religious conversion She cared for him in IS old age but consistently refused to give in to his demands for her to reject her newfound htk What distinguished

Cobbe fiom the proponents of domestic ideology, therefore, was the fact that she

'13 Frances Power Cobbe, "The Education of Women, and How it Wodd Be Affected by Universie Exam.a.~ns,~'in Essqvs on the Atmiis of Women (London: Emily Faithful, 1863), 225. "'Ibid, 227. IU F&= power Cobbe. "Social Scierce Congresses" 91. 'I6 Frances Power Cobbe, "Self-Development and !Self-Abnegation," in Srudies h*mand Old of Ethical mrd Social Subjects, (London: Tmbner and Coy1 865), 76-78. "'Ibid, 80. believed women were autonomous and rational beings who were responsible for their own moral choices. Thus, sexual drfference did not mean that men and women were unequal but that women should embrace and celebrate those virtues that were uniquely feminine while ail! demanding that their social and legal rights be on par with those of men. They should also discover the personal authority to make moral choices mhin domestic situations.

When farmly duties were no longer an issue as in her own case, Cobbe believed that women had a moral obligation to society to engage in meaningfL1 and usehi work.

She believed that women were particularly suited to lead social causes because of their lnherent nurturing, religious, and mernful qualrties.tt8 She argued that women who did not marry should choose one of three paths in Me. They should pursue the Beautiful

(Art), the True (philosophy or Literature) or the Good (Philanthropy). The good was always an option for independent, single women, while truth and beauty were open only to those with special glft~."~ Accordmg to Cobbe, women were innately more

"conscientious, temperate, religious, and (above all) [more] rnerclful and tender-hearted" than were men."'?0 They were always potentla1 mothers and if they chose to remain single then they could best uulite their wodyquahies by 'mothering' the sick, the weak, or the helpless victims of society.121Women's duty was to pursue vme and they could best do that by ether embra- the home duties of a wfe and mother, or the "out- of-door duties of the phi~hropist."'"Philanthropy thus represented the extension of

'I8 Frances Power Cobbe, "'Female Charity-Lay and Monastic,' Fmrrr 's .Cfuguzine 56 (December 1 862): 774-776. See also, Cobbe, L*, II, 527. 'I9 Cobbe, Female Charips 771 and Cobbe, "The Education ofwomen, and How it Would Be Mated by University Examinations," 228-229. '20 Cob be, Life, 4 527. 'I1 Caine, 131-133. I"' Cobbe, "Education of Women," 222. 'women's work' as conceived of withm separate sphere ideology to the public realm. It was not just chanty but moral reform of society. The image of the middle-class home as a bastion of morality and the mother figure as its moral barometer was extended into society at large; women were the mothers of the poor, the fallen, and the innocent victims of the cruel and immoral world. Anunals were also encompassed in this global 'fiimily' and consequently their protection was seen as part of the responsibility of moral mothers like Cobbe. I"

By embracing phhthropy as a necessary and usehl occupation for women,

Cobbe was working within a tradition of feminine charity. In fact, F. K. Prochaska suggests that in the nineteenth century philanthropy became komanized ' as some 500,

000 women laboured for charitable organisations. No other job besides domestic service came close to that number."" The roots of feminine philanthropy are to found at the beginning of the nineteenth century when chanty departed from the more casual giving at the local level that had characterised it for centuries and came to be more centralked and

~rganised.'~Women began to take an increasingly important role in supponing and organising these more complex endeavours. In forty-four of the fifty charities that

Prochaska examined for his study Women and Philanthropy, the percentage of women subscribers increased over the nineteenth century. The RSPCA, for example, saw the total number of female subscribers rise to sxty-nine percent by the end of the century.'"

Women also gave large sum to philanthropic endeavours in the form of bequests and

I %q AM Elston, *Wornen and Anti-Vivisection in Victorian England, 1870-1 900; in i lvisec~ion;n Historical Pmpecritv, ed- Niwlaas A. Ruupke, (New York: Croom Helm, 1987), 272. F. K Prochm Women and Phihnthropy in NineteenlhCenmy England (Toronto:Clarendon Press Oxford, 1980), 223-25. l3 Ibid, 2 1-46. Ibid, 2 9. were more likely than men to leave a large portion of their assets to theu charity of choice upon their death1" Women saw charity as a way to create professional space for themselves and to escape the boredom of the home. As charity itself became ever more professionalised, women found satisfaction m their work, whether paid or unpaid, within these organisations. The prolrferation of women's philanthropic activity reveals that women actively sought work outside the home and were moving beyond the domestic sphere in vast numbers, embracing the opportunrty to exercise their skill^."^

Demands for women's sufEage emerged naturally out of charitable activity.

Suffrage was seen as an extension of pbthropic activity to the political arena, the result of which would be the contribution of women to the happiness and virtue of humanity.'" Indeed, many feminists believed that it was through philanthropy not agrtation for the vote that women would improve the status of their sex generally.

Cobbe's anti-vivisection crusade and Josephme Butler's campaign against the Conragzotts

Diseases Acts can be seen as examples of this. Both saw their crusades as necessarily resulting in the improved condition of women Cobbe believed that society needed to be reconstituted on grounds that saw the kind and compassionate treatment of animals as one of its tenets because in such a world women would also be better off For Butler, her leadership of the campaign to repeal the CD Acts stemmed from a desire to bring about a moral and social transformation of society in which the sexual double standard that so subjugated, denigrated and devalued women would be aboljshed.'" In addition to Cobbe and Butler, Anna Ktngsford, a feminist and amtvivisectionisf argued that women would

'3Ibid, 34-35. '=ibid,2-17. Ibid, 228. Im Cake, 152. achieve emancipation fir more quickly by showing their capacity for hard work rather than by "ckmouring for freedom and power."'31

In a middle-class culture that privileged the farmly as the most important unit, single independent women like Cobbe who sought personal fuIfhent outside of the domestic sphere were problematic. They existed outside of the bounds of accepted womanhood, challenging social conventions and often generating fear in the mmds of middle-class men who wanted to maintain the male-dominated status quo. W. R Grq's

1862 article "Why are women redundant?" was reflective of the deep current of concern over the large numbers of single women in Victorian society. Greg estimated that some

1,248,000 women of the upper and middle-class and "in the prime of life" (between twenty and forty yean) remained unmarried in England in 1862. 'j2 According to Greg, spinsterhood was an unnatural state for ali but a few women, and even those who were

"rightly and naturally single" were considered aberrant.'" To Greg and to many

Victorians, single women were incomplete beings forced to "carve out artdicial and pamfuly-sought occupations for themselves" in place of embellishing the existence of

'others, namely rnen'j4 Greg's famous solution to the problem of 'redundant women' was to ship them to the colonies or to the United States where they would be able to fmd

husbands and fulfil their feminine destiny. Although Greg's micle drew fie from a small

number of ferninins of the day, tus underlymg assumptions remained popular throughout

the century, revealing the discomfort that the Victorians so clearly felt about women who

131 Samuel Hopgood Hart, d,Life. Diqand WorkofAnna Kingsford, by her collabomror Edward MairZmd, Th~dEdition, Two Volumes, (London: JobM. Watkins, 19 13), 17. '" W. R Greg, "Why are Women Redundant?" lVotional R&ew VoL 14 (1862): 13 1. '" Ibid, 439. Ibid, 436. existed outside their 'natural sphere. ' Nineteenth-century domestic ideo logy trapped

women and men in roles that were often at odds with the realities of daily life.

The ideal of domesticity had stripped single women of much of the prestige they

had enjoyed from the Middle Ages through to the Early Modem Period. In pie-industrial

society they had managed large convents, had admhstered vast estates and run shops,

small businesses and inns throughout the country.lM But with the consolidation of

bourgeois social values in the early nineteenth century, single women were condemned to

marginal positions in the home, church, and workplace. For a lower middle-class woman

forced into independence upon the death of a father, husband or a brother, there were few

occupations available to her that would allow her to maintain her status. She could work

as a teacher, governess, companion, or seamstress. Starting in the 1850s, some middle-

class women could enter the profession of nursing. In Edct, pioneers of the field such as

Florence Nightingale and her contemporaries, Mary Stanley, Jane Shaw Stewart, and the

founders of the nursing sisterhoods preferred to hire middle-class women. Most of those

in the nursing profession at that time were, as Anne Summers puts it, "more accustomed to giving order than taking them"'" Florence Nightingale, who helped recruit nuns to

the Crhea, preferred middle-class women over those of the working class because

working-class women were perceived to be inclmed to drunkenness and were, as

Nightingale put it, "the most slippery race in existence." Many of the women who were

initially recruited for the Crirnea were fmancially desperate. 'js Most occupations

Vicinus, 4. '" Ibid, 3. 137 Anne Summers, Angels and Citizens: Brithh Women as~MifiiralyrVurses 1854-1914, (New York: Routeledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), 3. '" Ibid, 39-40. avadable to middle-class women were ill paid and ~vercrowded.''~The Bronte sisters provide a good example of the dilemma that faced many middle-class women Out of a fear that their father would die and leave them penniless and unable to care for themselves, the three sisters, Charlotte, Edy and Anne, took jobs as governesses and schoolmistresses in the 1830s. It was hard work for little pay and a1 three chafed under such constraints. Charlotte, in particular, was miserable at her job at a girl's school, Roe

Head. She wrote to a fiiend "am I forced to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage.. . must I fiom day to day, sit chained to thchair, prisoned within these four bare walls?"'"

The problem of middle-class women, ill trained for most practical work, was still at issue at the end of the nineteenth century when George CNslng wrote his 1893 work, The

Odd Women. It was a book that deah directly with the issue of so-called 'redundant women' In fictional narrative it told the story of five daughters left penniless by their father Dr. Madden. Gissing's work was a stark portrayal of the cripphg effects of social inequality on the lives of women '"

Despite the power of social custom many women successfblly broke free from the constraints of separate sphere ideology and forged independent and prosperous lives. As

Susan Kingsley Kent has pointed out, such women co-opted the image of the Angel in the

House in order to step outside of it?* SSimilarly, Philippa Levine suggsts that Victorian feminists were engaged m a process of kcredrawing the defirutional boundaries of

'" Vicinus, Independent Fornen. 3. la Quoted in Margot Peters, Unquiet Soul (Crraden City Doubleday imd Co., 1975), 50 "' George Gissing, The Odd Wbmen (Markham:Penguin Books, 1983). IE Kingsley Kent 180. politics."'" By pointing out how governmental policies affected women's lives, they tore down the divide between public and private.'u Cobbe serves to illustrate this point well. She successfully negotiated the privatdpublic divide and carved out public space for herself Her philanthropic activities, particularly her involvement in the anti- vivisection movement. provided her with a career that afforded both income and mfluence. As Honourary Secretary of the VSS until June 1884, Cobbe combined professional pride with a sense of moral mission. 145

Cobbe first became interested in the cause of anti-vivisection whle in France in

1863. Though she had never actively involved herself in animal welfare campaigns prior to that time, her interest in anti-vivisection was consistent with her conception of herself as a 'moral mother' who was responsible for helpmg the weak and downtrodden in

English society. Moreover, she had always had a deep love for animals, dogs in

particular, and spoke often of her beloved Pomeranian companions, of which she had

many over the years. While in France she read in an Enghh newspaper complaints about

cruelty inflicted on horses in the veterinary school at Mort near Paris. Students there

were performing operatiocs on living horses without the benefit of anaesthetic. She was

deeply disturbed by the reports and her shock and disquietude at the discovery were still

evident thrty-one years later when she wrote in her autobiography.

Living hones were supplied to the Mort students on which, at the time I speak of they performed sucty operations apiece, including every one in common use, and many of which were purely academic, being never employed in actual practice because the horse after enduring them becomes necessardy useless. These operations lasted eight hours, and the aspect of the mangled creatures, hoofless, eyeless, burned, gashed, eviscerated, skinned,

143 Levine, Feminist Lives, 3. 'u Ibid. '" Cobbe, Li/, II, 635. mutilated in every conceivable way, appalled the visitors, who reported the fhs, whle it afforded, they said, a subject of merriment to the horde of students.

Soon after her discovery about Mort she learned that similar experiments were being performed in Italy at the Specola where Professor ScMhad hs laboratory. '" Cobbe was living outside of Florence at the time and she and a group of expatriate English friends drew up a memorial urging ScMto stop his experiments because, according to Cobbe,

Tuscan law could do nothmg to prevent such cruelty. Many of the 783 signatories to the memonal were English; those who were not came primarily from the Italian aristocracy of old Florence. Prominent brmlies such as the Corsis and Corsinis, Aldobrandinis and

Stronis attached their signatures to the rnem~rial'~It did little good, however. SchB deried allegations of cruelty and challenged Cobbe, through a letter m the Nazione (the chief newspaper of Florence), to come forward and make good her claims. Cobbe immediately sent a letter to the newspaper and appended "a full and signed statement by

Dr. Appleton of what he had -elf witnessed in the ~~ecola."'~~The Nazione refused to print her letter and a hous Cobbe left Italy. She returned to England where she began to voice her abhorrence of the practice of which she had just become aware. She was at that time (1863) not aware that vivisection would soon appear in her own country.

Cobbe ktarticulated her moral argument against the practice of painfiil vivisection in "The Rights of Man and the Claims of Brutes," published in Fraser's

Magazine in 1863, irnrnediately after the Mort discovery. After the 1876 debacle over regulation she would reject all vivisection but at this stage she was still developing a

bid, 562.. '" Ibid, 563. la Ibid, 564. moral stance on the issue and was not yet convinced that science and morality could not coexist. She argued that while humans had a right "to take [an] animal's life for the purposes of science as he would take it for food, or security, or health.. . humans did not have the right to dia suffering on anirnals . . . We may take animal Life (that is, the whole sum of the animal's pleasures) for the interests of science; but we must take it wth no needless dction of pain."150 Vivisection without anaesthetic violated this principle and as resuit Cobbe judged it to be morally wrong.

In 1864 Cobbe again addressed the subject of vivisection in the "Morals of

Literature," an extended analogy in which the biographer represented the scientist. She described the biographer as one who ripped open a "man's most secret lifel his most private memoranda, his letters, written in the heat of passion or remorse, to his closest

drawing an obvious comparison to the vivisector who ripped open an animal. It was in this article that she first articulated the fundamental grounds upon which she rejected vivisection She argued that the biographer/vivisector violated a sacred confidence when he sacrificed h~ subject to the supposedly higher aim of truth. The means of attaining truth, by hying open the secrets of a man's Me as the biographer did

152 or by tearing open an animal as the vivisector did, necessarily distorted the end result.

For Cobbe, the scientist violated a moral law and destroyed any benefit that could have emerged fiom an experiment by causing pain to the animal- Here her developing view that there was a tension between the aims of science and the moral treatment of animals was evident.

- '@Ibid, 565. Frances Power Cobbe, "The Rights of Man and the Claims of Brutes: m Studies :Vew and Ofdo f Ethical cmd Social Subjects, (London: Trubner and Co., 1865), 23 2-23 3. It would be the outcome of the controversy over legislation that would ultimately change Cobbe's mind on the issue of regulation versus abolition. Cobbe was so deeply disappointed by the amended legislation, particularly the weakening of the cat and dog clause, that she rejected the efficacy of regulation altogether and committed herself and the VSS to the pursuit of total ab01ition.l~~Her commitment to the abolitionist stance reflected her new understanding that there was no way to prevent animals from being made to suffer once delivered to the laboratory. She wrote,

Finally we found that to extend protection by any conceivable act of Parliament to animals once delivered to the physiologists in their laboratories was cherical Vivisection we recognized at last to be a method of research which may be either sanctioned or prohibited as a method, but which cannot be restricted efficiently by rules founded on humane considerations wholly irrelevant to the scientific enquiry.

Cobbe had come to believe that scientists could not be trusted to protect animals from suffering because their interests were directly antithetical to that goal. In effect, she believed that the cause of science was the cause of suffering. The only way to truly protect animals was to liberate them altogether from the laboratory and it was to that ultimately unsuccessful goal that the VSS directed its efforts in the ha two decades of the century-

Cobbe was not the only woman involved in the anti-vivisection movement. Many of its most outspoken and active supporters were women Indeed the movement had one of the highest levels of female participation of any cause aside from those with direct

15' Frances Power Cobbe, "The Morals of Literature," m Ibid, 264. I" Ibid '" Cobbe, Lif, IT, 596. 'ybid,606. feminist objectives. Is' They were a powem presence in the executive of the VSS in the mid 1880s and the 1895 subscription list shows that women comprised sucty-six percent of all subscribers by that time.'% In an 1884 issue of the Zoophilist, the newsletter of the

VSS, it was advised that "Any woman who has children to educate has a great duty laid upon her to instil such principles into their minds that it shall be impossible to them in

later life to illtreat creatures weaker than themselves.1s7Ahhough women were unable to contribute politically to the formation of policy on the subject of vivisection , they were able to voice their opinions and wield considerable power in the arena of public opinion.

In addition to Cobbe, arguably the most active woman involved in the cause, ha

Kmgsford, born in Stratford in 1846 to a prosperous middle-class family, was also a!

active and outspoken anti-vivisectionist. She obtained a medical degree in Paris primarily

to prove that it could be done without performing vivisection and like Cobbe she

denounced the practice as ineffectual and Mona Caird, a novelin and

essayst, wrote against vivisection in the 1890s. Her book A Sentimenfa! Vie~tsof

Vivisection argued that vivisection was a form of exploitation and that its practice

'deadened the feeling of the vivisector.15gIn 1903 Louise Lind of Hageby and Leisa

Schartau entered the London School of Medicine for Women, where they obtained

permission to attend lectures, courses and demonstrations in advanced physiology at

various laboratories in ond don'^ They subsequently wrote a book on their findings

entitled The Shambles of Science. Other women including Queen Victoria who urged

Is' Is' Elston, ^Women and Anti-vivisection ;" 264. See also, French, p. 239-240. '" Prochaska, 243. See also, Pu biications of the Victorion Street and International Socie~firthe Protection of Animalsjvm Vivisection, 1881. In Anonymous, "Woman's Share in the Anti-vivisection Movement," Zoop hilist (Novanba 1. 1884): 13 5. Is Life, Diqand Work of.4nna Kingsfuonl, 1,20 & 32. Hall, 17-18. Disraeli to act on the report of the Royal Commission and introduce legislation and

Angela Baroness Burdett Coutts, the hensely wealthy patron of the RSPC4 supported anti-vivisection as did early female doctors such as Elizabeth Blackwell and Frances

Hoggan. Prominent feminists such as Jessie Boucherett, founder of the

Englishwoman S Review, and Julia Wedgwood, also supported the cause.16'

Some reserve does need to be used when assessing tlus issue because despite the assertion of the French physiologist Elie de Cyon that "women-or rather, old maids- form the most numerous contingent""' of anti-vivisectionists, it cannot be accurately stated that it was a women's cause alone. Many men including Lord Shaflesbury,

Cardinal Manrung, Alfred Lord Tennysoq Matthew Arnold, and others were either actively involved or supported the cause. Moreover, it was men, of course, who argued both for ar.d against vivisection before the Royal Commission and in Parliament. Nor did all women necessarily suppon anti-vivisect ion. Barbara Bodichon, feminist, EmiI y

Davies, the founder of Girton CoUege for Women, and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, a prominent Doctor who had been assisted in her fight for a medical education by the

Langham Place Circle of feminists, all supported women's access to medical education and if it happened to entail the performance of animal experiments then they were wtlling to accept that They did not oppose anti-vivisection per se; rather they prioritized their feminist aims seeing equahy with men as the most important goal.'N In fact, Cobbe's fiendship with Em@ Davies, founder of Girton College, Cambridge, a college for

- - 160 L@ Lind of Elageby and Leisa K Schartay The Shambles of Sience: Exaacfsfrom rile Dia~of Two Shtdentr of P&siology, (London: Enzest Bell, 1903), x-xi. 16' 16' Elston, 263. ibid, and Hilda Kean, Animal Righu: Political mdSbci~11Chnnge in Brirnin Since IBOO,(London: Rd-tionBooks, 1998), 107. '" Elie de Cyon, "The Anti-vivisectionist Agitation," Contemporary Review Vol. 43 ( 1883 3: 506. 'a Kean, 107. women, came to end in the Iate 1870s because Davies and the rest of the Girton

committee agreed that students preparing for physiology should attend lectures that

included vivisection. Cobbe withdrew her support over the confli~t.'~'Such exceptions

aside, however, anti-vivisection did attract a sigdicant enough number of women to

merit investigation into the complex reasons behmd their participation

Women's motivation for involvement in anti-vivisection was multi-faceted. It stemmed fiom a sense of connection with animals as fellow victims of male cruelty.

Women reabed that female subordination at the hands of men was prototypical of other

forms of abuse. The medical profession in particular was seen as threatems to the bodies

of women of various classes and of animals. The imaginative linking of women and animals in much of the literature of the period was a discursive representation of the

perceived vulnerabilrty of each group. This complex issue will be explored more fully in

chapter three, with particular reference to the writing of Cobbe, Josephine Butler, Wilkie

Collins and others. Anti-vivisection also provided a way for women to carve out public

space for themselves and to wed certain moral convictions with public action from which

they would normally be barred. For Cobbe, involvement in anti-vivisections was tied to

her notions of philanthropy, but it also stemmed ftom her particular love for dogs. The

fact that dog were frequently used in vivisectional experiments profoundly disturbed

Cobbe who believed that they had emotions that were almost the same as humans, that

they had a "shadow of Duty and Religion minus the moral element," because of their

allegiance to humans.'q Following Kant Cobbe believed that duty was the most

important faculty because it was based on the rational resistance to evll impulses. The

'" Caine, 138-139. Frances Power Cobbe, "The Consciousness of Dogs," @amrfy Review 133 (1872): 448. faa that dogs had this capacity to a certain extent made experimenting on them even more morally ambiguous.

The Victorians themselves seem to have attributed women's involvement in the cause to their inherent sentimentality. Robert Lowe, for example, argued that the anti- vivisection agitation was the result of "feelings ...which are rather sentimental and

~ympathetic."'~~In h~ opinion "mere compassion never yet made good laws"'6s and such views were widespread. For example, female delegates were barred from attending the "Seventh International Medical Congress" in 188 1 because it was felt that they might hamper the pkmed resolution to stress the importance of animal expenmentation and denounce restrictions on the practice by competent individ~a1s.l~~In a series of articles promoting the necessity of vivisection, the scientist James Paget wrote,

And it is by these, when duly domed on the has, that the question should be judged, for it is eminently one of those in which sentiment is predominant on one side, reason on the other; in which the arguments on one side are mdy based on kindly feeling and sympathy with suffe~gsof whch the amount is guessed at, while on the other they rest mainly on facts observed, on considerations of uthy, and on the desire for knowledge. "*

The privileging of reason over emotion and the perception that women were more

sentimental, emotional, and consequently more irrational was a deeply rooted prejudice

that Cobbe continually fought against, recognismg that such labelling dealgrated women.

Such a view implied that sentimen- interfered with women's rational capacities thus

rendering their judgments on matters such as vivisection untenable. Women were kept in

their place by reinforcing gender stereo- that cast them as biologically predisposed to

16i Robert Lowe, "The Vivisection Act," Consemporoty Review (October, 1876): 7 13.

Ibid.- - '" W.F. Byum, Science and the Practice of Medicme in the Nineteenth Century (New Yo&: C ambridp University Press, 1994), 144. hysteria and irrationality. Thus women were &missed and their response to subjects like vivisection made politically and intellectually insignificant. The tactics and arguments of

Cobbe and other female anti-vivisectionists, therefore, were an attempt to counter such prevalent assumptions.171 Cobbe warned women not to be sentimental, tearful or hysterical because their cause might then be labelled a "sentimental fad." I"

Cobbe's own writings on the subject of vivisection were distinctly unsentimental.

She used language that was visceral and graphic, frequently going for shock value. In pamphlets and books such as Light in Dark Places, The Right of Tormenting, and the

Nine Circles of Hell, she provided detads of scientific experiments hoping to sway people by appealing to their sense of moral outrage and by inviting them to consider the pain the animals must feel.'" Cobbe, m kct, believed that the "sentiment of tenderness" to animals was derior to .'the sacredness [of] the moral principle."17" Of course such works would have appealed to people's emotions but Cobbe wanted emotion to guide people to a moral position about vivisection Writing somewhat later than Cobbe, Mona

Caird s~milarlydrew on both the use of graphic description and a call to empathy wtth himals to convince her readers to denounce vivisection. She spoke of scientists as men who would "dissect [an animal's] nerves and organs; pierce its brain with red-hot wire ... inoculate the same sensitive organs with virus till they rot away in a putrefying

ti0 James Paget, "Vitisection: Its Pains and Uses," iVineteenzh Century, 10 (December 188 1): 928. '" Elston, 27 l. '" WiUiamson, 4 19. I" Frances Power Cobbe, "Light in Dark Places," in Pomphlca on Vivisection (London: VSS. 1882-18871, Frances Power Cobbe, The Right of Tormenting (London: VSS, 1888), and Frances Power Cobbe, The .Virze Circles of HeN of the Innocent: Describedfim the Reports of the P~esidingSpirits (London: Swan Sonnencchain & Co., 1892). '" Cobbe, "Rights of Man and the Claims of Brutes," 242. sore.'" She then entreated readers to "realise the fkte of a creature seized and bound by strong ruthless hands, and tortured slowly cleverly, delicately, exquisitely."' "

By contrast, Anna Kingsford refused to accept that sentiment and emotion necessarily devalued the cause of anti-vivisection She believed it was illogical to dismiss sentiment because it was exactly on such a basis that anti-vivisectionists argued against the practice. She wrote,

They speak sneeringly of "sentiment." The outcry against vivisection is mere "sentiment." Why, in God's name, what is so Feat, so noble, as human sentiment! What is religion, what is morality, but sentiment? On what divine feeling are based the laws which bid men to respect the lives, the propeny, the feelings of their fellow men? Sentiment is but another name for that moral feeling which alone has made man the best that he is now, and which alone can make him better and purer in the future"ln

kchard French has suggested that women's almost complete lack of scientific knowledge made them more likely to condemn the practice of vi~isection."~This is problematic however, because many nineteenth-century men as well as women were ignorant of science and scientific method." In &a, prior to the 1890s, medical research had not gained enough authority to marwethose unfamiliar with its workings. In the late Victorian period scientists were only just beginning to convince the general public of the concrete benefits that could be derived fiom such research The Lister Institute, established in 1891, was responsible for important work in immunology, bacteriology, physiology, biochermstry and nutrition, but it still received only small donations &om the

175 Mona Caird, Legalised [omre. (Syracuse: Gaylord Brokers, 1908). Ib id. '- Quoted in Brim Luke, "Taming Ouncives or Going Fed? Toward a Noapatnarchd Mctaethic of Animal Liberation," in .4nirnuZs and Women: Ferninis Theoretical Eiplomrions, eds. C aroI J. Adam and Josephine Donovan, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1 995),294. 1;s Richard French, Anti-vivisection and Medial Science in Victorian Sociey (E'rinceton: Princeton University Press, 1973,247. EIston, 271. general public who placed little value on medical research as compared to the development of patient care techniques.'s0 Even achlal discoveries were frequently looked upon with suspicion Sir Almroth Wright developed a typhoid vaccine but no one took him or his work seriously until after WWI when vaccinated British troops suffered low incidences of the disease. Similarly, although there was a fair amount of public excitement surrounding the development of a diphtheria anti-toxin in 1894/95 even that was not an unambiguous triumph There were sudden deaths fiom the vaccine and many suffered fiom 'serum sickness', which included fever, rash and joint pain. It was both women and men, therefore, who viewed science with some skepticism.

Not all of the female supporters of anti-vivisection were medically ignorant either.

Women like Anna hgsford, Frances Hoggan, ElLabeth Blackwell, Louise Lind and

Leisa Schartau were trained medical doctors or medical students. As a matter of fact,

Kingsford argued specifically against the utility of vivisection fiom a scientific standpoint. She maintained that the balance of evidence was against the practice as a

"serious method of study for the cure and treatment of disease. "I" She offered detailed

.and precise medical examples for her contention, using medical rhetoric and language to support her claim. She, for example, argued that crossing the species barrier in vivisectional experiments such as those of Dr. Ferrier on the brains of monkeys presented innumerable clEculties because of the 'hymg degrees of e~~olutionof the central nervous organ, &om the simplest reflex mechm up to the highest encephalic elaborationfi1&Sirmkrly, medical students Louise Lind and Leisa Schartau investigated

1m Bqa~m,154-156. 18' Ibid, 161-162. "ha Kingsford, "The Uselessness of Vivisection," :Gnereenth Centzi~VoL 1 I ( 1882): 17 1. Ibid, 1 75. the actual methods used in anid experiments and studied the principles and theories whch underlay physiology to find out for themselves whether experimental medicine was an inhumane practice.'" Their findings, which were published in The Shambles of

Science in 1903, confirmed that great cruelties were perpetrated in physiological laboratories and that vivisectional techques were misleading and erroneous. Moreover, in their opinion, scientists were motivated primarily by the desire to advance their own careers elther by disproving an existing theory or initiating a new discovery. Morality, including kind treatment of laboratory animals, took a back seat to professional c~rnpetition.'~~The two women, therefore, offered a critique of vivisection based jointly on a refutation of the efficacy of animal experiment and on a condemnation of it as a moral wrong.

Not all male doctors supported vivisection either. Of the three vehement anti- vivisectionists who gave evidence before the Royal Commission, two of them were mdcal doctors who both argued against the practice on the grounds that it was ineffktul and misleading.ls There was, to be sure, a difference between practicing docton who dealt directly with patients and medical researchers who spent their lives in the laboratory, but the scientific discipline was not at this point so cornpartmentalked that there was no interaction between theory and prac.'ice. The fact the doctors were not unanimous on the benefit of animal experimentation demonstrates that anti-vivisection was not a clear conflict between professional medical men and scientifically ihterate women Moreover, to "put ignorance fonvard as a reason for anti-vivisectionist beliefs

181 tind and Sch-u, vii. Ibid, LK. implies that scientific knowledge m itself leads to approval of animal experimentation"'" Women such as Cobbe and Kingsford alike premised their condemnation of the practice on moral grounds and no amount of scientific knowledge would have convinced either woman that the practice was not reprehensible.

Though Cobbe engaged in anti-vivisection because she felt morally compelled to help animals, she was not immune to the faa that leadership in such a cause offered her both public exposure and useful and meaningfbl work As an important member of the executive of the most duential of the anti-vivisection societies, she could not have failed to realize the power she could wield. The VSS was preeminent among the London societies that dominated the movement generally due to the political power and social prestige of members such as Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Chief Justice Coleridge. Cardinal bfannmg, and numerous bishops of the established church'88 It is clear that Cobbe wanted to maintain the ascendancy of the VSS and her own Influence within the movement as she engaged in poliucal maneuvering and m some cases, mud-slinging, to protect herself and her organization Cobbe's treatment of Anna Kingsford whom she had

'met in the 1860s was reflective of this. Kingsford and Cobbe had become friendly in the

1860s because they shared sMilar feminist ideas and a hatred of vivisection. When

Kingsford returned to London horn Paris in the 1880s she made overtures to Cobbe about joining the movement. Co bbe, fee@ her own leadership threatened by this intelligent woman, spread vicious gossip about Kingsford's unconventional Lifestyle. Kingsford was

186 Digest of EM'dence Taken Befote the Royal Commhsion on she Pmctice of Stibjecsing Live -4nirnals ro Expenmenu for Scientif;~Purposes (London: 1876), s& the testimony of George Macilwain p. 17 and Arthur Walker, p. IS. '87~lston,271. "French, 222. lsg Williamson, 394. an independent fieethmking vegetarian and mystic who had left her English husband and only child behind when she travelled to Paris to ohher medical degree. Cobbe used such detalls of Kingsford's Life to throw doubt on her suitability for taking a leading role in a moral crusade. By using her substantd connections in London Cobbe turned

Kingsford into a social outcast, thus effectively banishg hersLmCobbe was not just motivated by professional jealousy m her treatment of Kingsford. Cobbe believed that women had an obligation to their fimdies fint and foremost and hgsford had shown no commitment to her husband or her daughter.

More than any other document, Cobbe's autobiography was a testament to her public career. It was written in 1894 after her retirement to Wales and before the cnsis of

1898 when Coleridge wrestled control of the VSS fiom her. In some ways it was a work of fiction, carefully constructed to conform to Cobbe's vision of the anti-vivisection movement and to place herself in the position of its prophet.lg' She mentioned nothng, for example, of the various conflicts that marred her various phhthropic endeavours.

Of the problems hMary Carpenter there is little hmt and of her destruction of ANla

Kingsford there was no mention at all. She mentioned the Nine Circles incident but focused most on the suppon she received from her colleagues rather than on her own culpabihy for the error^.'^ But the most tekg feature of her autobiography in terms of its purpose as a record of her public life was the fact that she spared little time discussing her personal feelings. She devoted only a few lines to her relationship with Mary Lloyd, the most intimate of her life, writing only "of a friendship like this, which has been to my later He what my mother's affection was to my youth, I shall not be expected to say

Fm~h,222-223 and Willim~~~395. 19' Hall, 22. more."lgj Estelle Jelinek comments that the work lacks even minimal personal reflection, weighed down as it is with Cobbe's preoccupation wah the details of her social causes.lW

This reflects the Lct that Cobbe meant the work to be seen as a testament to her public crusade; it was not a tell-all about her private life. In a sense she was prese~ngthe privatelpublic boundary that she had so blatantly crossed when she began her public career.

Though Cobbe's later years were ones of relative material comfort due to an annuity the VSS had purchased for her upon her retirement and an mheritance from an anti-vivisection supporter, the conflict with Coleridge and the changing direction of the movement left her bitter and Mary Lloyd's death in 1 896 devastated her. Igs In addition, her declining years were marred by an accusation of melty to an old horse she had saved from the knacken yard. The charges were brought by hunters whom she had thrown off of her propew and were confirmed by a veterinarian she had dismissed years before for cruelty to one of her dogs. Given the source of the charges they were most likely false, but it was only with the aid of "the most eminent Vet in this part of the world' who came to Cobbe's defense that Cobbe was acquitted. The papers, however, rang with "false reports and satirical remarks" that left her enraged. It was a humiliating incident for a woman who had devoted her We to the cause of animals and it was an indication that the once vibrant and strong Cobbe was aging and no longer able to defend herself alone. In years past she would probably have published a stinging reply and defense in the pass of the Contemporary Review or Frasers but instead she merely wrote angrily about the incident to her hend Sarah Wister.

In her years at Lloyd's ancestral home Hengwrt, where Cobbe had lived since her retirement in 1884, she had turned it into a haven for domestic animals, taking in strays and pets that no one wanted. It was also a wddlife refuge as she had wrne to deplore hunting and would not allow it on her property. She lived on at Hengwrt with her beloved animals until her death fiom heart hilure m April 1904.197Ahhough Cobbe had hoped that after her death animals would be released fiom the pain of the laboratory and that

"the earth [would] at last cease to be "full of violence and cruel habitations"lgs it has not yet happened at the end of the twentieth century. CHAPTER TElREE

FEMINISING THE ANIMAL BODY: WOMEN, ANIMALS AND ANTI- VIVISECTION IN THE WRITING OF FROICES POWER COBBE

Frances Power Cobbe's religious belief in a morally perfect God and her implicit faah in progress as a positive force of change influenced her involvement in the two causes that defied her public role, women's rights and anti-vivisection. To Cobbe,

'progress' meant the slow but inexorable movement of British society toward a 'moral' world in which women had the same legal, political and social rights as men and in whch animals were treated with compassion and mercy. The systematic oppression of women and the infliction of pain on animals were major threats to moral progress, however, a~d so she made it her life's work to elirmnate them It was primarily gender that domed her advocacy of both groups because she identified with other members of her sex and with animals as fellow victims of male exploitation. To a lesser extent, however, Cobbe's class identity as a member of the landed gentry also impacted her thmking. She was threatened by the gowing strength of the scientific profession which was dominated by inen of the middle class. Such men were responsible for new practices like vivisection and were, therefore, attempting to dismantle "traditional" English society based upon

English virtues like kindness toward to animals.

Cobbe's initial writing on women's issues, articles written primarily in the 1860s,

dealt with topics such as ceh'bacy versus marriage, the suffrage, women's education and

the plight of poor women, but once she became heavily involved in the anti-vivisection

campaign in the early 1870s the subject matter of her writing on such issues changed

dramatically. In 1878 she wrote ''Wife Torture in England'' which was an examination of the ways that marriage forced women to remain in abusive situations and of how political and social sentiment kept them there.' She had identified marriage as an institution that confined women early in her writing and had warned that it was a lottery m which women took their chances on tying themselves to an unfathfbl or cruel man' It was not until 1878, however, that she directly addressed the plight of women who had lost such a lottery.

The fict that in the "Wife Torture" article Cobbe focused on an offence that took place, for the most part, behind closed doors revealed she was talking about vivisection as much as she was deabuse. The victim of both 'moral crimes' suffered away from the prying eyes of the public and the protection of more compassionate people. Cobbe fiequently descnbed vivisection as a furtive, secretive practice that took piace in dark, hidden laboratories much as wife abuse took place with the private sphere of the home.

Such secrecy confirmed, for Cobbe, the moral degeneracy of perpetrators of vivisection and w8e abuse because they were deliberately hiding actions they knew to be wrong. The beating husband, therefore, became the vivisector in Cobbe's mind.

The language she used to describe domestic violence further reflected her implicit connection of the two issues. She called the article detorture largely because she saw the term bearing as too rmld to describe what was done to women, but it was also the term she fiequently used to describe the process of vivisection In addition, the angry, emotionally-charged language she used closely paralleled the tone of much of her anti- vivisection writing. For example, she wrote that abused women "never reach[ed] the bottom of the abyss of their misery" or that "the lot of a mamed woman[was]. .. simply a

I Frances Power Cobbe, "Wife-Torture in EngIanci,'' Contmporcny R~ew32 (1878): 55-87. 'Frances Power Cobba "Celibacy v. Marria& Fraser 's Magazine 65 (Febmaq 1862): 234. duration of suffering and subjection to injury and savage treatment, fir worse than that to whch the wives of mere savages [were] used."' Her anger at the scientists who performed experiments on animals was thus transformed into a fky against men in this article. Vivisection made her an advocate for the "unhappy wives, mangled, mutilated, or trampled on by brutal husband^.'^ The "mangled and mutilated" woman was, for Cobbe, the vivisected antmal, a victim of male cruelty.

Despite Cobbe's anger at a system that forced women to remain in abusive situations, her advocacy of working-class women was complicated by issues of class.

Cobbe felt a clear sense of superiority to workmg-class women who were the victims of deabuse and as a result her attitude toward them was often ambivalent. There was a clear tension between Cobbe's dislike of the deabusers themselves and a barely concealed antipathy to the victims. Working class women were often "wofully

unwomanly, slatternly, come, foul-mouthed+ometirnes loose in behaviour."' Yet by animalising them through implicit comparison to the victims of vivisection, she was, in

effect, makmg them more innocent as amds were innocent, and therefore. more worthy

of her concern

If abused women were analogous to vivisected animals then wife beaters were

compared to scientists m Cobbe's "Wife Torture" article; both types of abusers attempted

to avoid blame for their crimes. Society was, she believed, complicit in this, particularly

in the case of wife abuse where, "the abstract idea of a strong man hitting or kicking a

weak woman.. .has somehow pot softened into a jovial kind of domestic lynchmg, the

' Cobbe, "Wife-Torture in England,)) 86 & 59. Frances Power Cobbe, Lqe of Frances Power Cobbe, Volume 4 (New York: Houghtor~MitIlin and Compq, 1894), 534. 'cobbe, "Wse-Torture: 60. grosser features of the webeing swept out of sight? Sentiment therefore "softened" wife abuse so that the severity of the act was downplayed. The prevalent idea that a man's wife was his property contributed to a woman's helplessness because it meant that a husband could claim that he had a right to do as he pleased with her. According to

Cobbe, the law generally favoured such a view because a wZe was one of the only rlzings a poor man owned.'

Cobbe's critique of vivisection rested similarly on an indictment of the legitimisation of male brutallty.' Cobbe believed that the male-controlled machinery of state had essentially sanctioned animal cruelty through the vehicle of the "Cruelty to

Arumals Act." Scientists could evade prosecution under the Acc by using language deliberately designed to hde their true actions and intentions. She raged that "candid and ingenuous vivisectors" spoke of "scratching a newt's tail when they refer[ed] to burning alive, or dissecting out the nerves of living dogs, or torturing ninety cats in one series of e~periments."~Scientific language was carefuily constructed to deflect criticism and to deny that most vivisectional procedures were pamful. Scientists frequently provided examples of experiments where the animal "showed no sign of inconvenience"'%r "were happier, being better fed and in every way more cared for than they had ever been before."" S.unuel Wilks argued that most vivisections were nothmg more than "pricking

ti Ibid, 58. Ibid, 6243. Philippa kine, Feminist Lives in Kctorion England: Private Roles and P~tblicCo,nnlrmme,n (Cambridge: Basis BlacLweU, 1990), 96. Cobbe, "Wfe Tom," 72. 'O William GUN, "The Ethia of Vivisection,- Kineteenth Cenmry. 11 (March 1882): 464. I' Jiimes Paget, -Vitisection: Its Pains and Uses," Nineteenth Cenruy 10 (December 188 1): 924. guinea pigs and mice in order to test the contagiousness of different forms of disease.""

At the 188 1 International Medical Congress, John Simon asked,

Is it to be seriously maintained that society cannot trust us with dogs and cats? that our foremost workers -- (for it is essentially they who are affected)- -cannot be trusted to behave honestly towards their brute fellow-creatures, unless be rplated and inspected under a spec& law in much the same prevenient spirit as if they were prostitutes under the Contagious Diseases ~cts?''

There were no doubt many experiments performed that did not involve the hideous tortures that so many anti-vivisectionists Lnaged, but there were also likely many that caused considerable pain or at least discomfort to the animals subjected to them.

Moreover, wrth little knowledge of the emotional lives of animals they did not take into consideration the psychological damage done by confinement and lack of contact wth a nurturing individual Cobbe and other women could not fight such evasions with direct political action and so they had to fight vivisection in the arena of public opinion and attempt to persuade people that the practice violated moral laws even if it did not violate human ones.

Cobbe recoped that deabuse resulted primarily, though not exclusively, from poverty and want and she called the areas where it abounded "kicking districts." Dense population, fluctuatmg wages, and excessive alcohol consumption contributed to the brutality of the lives of the people in such areas.14 Cobbe saw wrfe abuse as a self- perpetuating cycle in which sons saw their fathers beating their mothers and the sons then beat their own wives. She asked,

" Samuel Wilks, Ibid, 937. l3 John Simon, Opening Add~ss.Deliw~d Before the Section of State .bledicine of the lnternationol ~LfediccliCongress, (London: 188 I), 1 8. IJCobbe,"Wife-Torture,' 60. how is a kd to learn to reverence a woman whom he sees daily scuffed at, beaten, and abused, and when he knows that the laws of IS country forbid her, ever and under any circumstances, to exercise the rights of citizenship; nay which deny to ha the guardianshp of himse(f of the very child of her bosom---should her husband choose to hand him over to her rival out of the street. Is

The notion that violence was cyclical echoed many of the adwelfare arguments that

explicitly connected ill-treatment of animals to ill-treatment of humans. Such ideas had

been articulated since at least the middle of the eighteenth century. The satirist, William

Hog& depicted the progression fkom animal torturer to murderer in a 1751 series of

prints entitled, the "Four Stages of Cruelty". They offered up graphc scenes of violence

in which the 'hero' first skewered a dog, then flogged a horse, then murdered tus de,

and firally was hunself hanged and subsequently dissected by anatomists. l6

In addition to such adult fare, an entire genre of didactic literature aimed at

teaching children compassion to the 'brute creation' had also emerged in the !ate

eighteenth century." For example, Sarah Trimmer, a middle-class Anglican Tory, wrote

Fabulous Histories: Designed for the Instmction of Children Respecting rheir Treainrent

- of Animals in 1786, the intent of which was to teach children to be kind to animais.

Trimmer, and a host of other eighteenth-century women writers including blary

Wollstonecraft, believed that by teaching kmdness to adone could instil moral

lessons about proper treatment of people in chlldrenis The most famous example of such

literature was probably Anna Sewell's "Bkck Beauty", published m 1877. The characters

l5 Ibid, 62. l6 Coral Lansbtuy, The Old Brown Dog: Women. IVoders and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison: Universie of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 52-53. " Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the bi'ctoric~nAge. (Cambridge: Harvsrd UniverSip PRS, 1987), 130-132. See ah,James Turner, Reckoning with the Beost: -4nimalr. Pain and Humanity in he t'ictoriun hfind ('I3altimore: Johns Hopkins University PY-, 1980), 12- 1 3. who were cruel to horses in "Black Beauty" were portrayed as bad people, either as self- indulgent and haughty like Lady W. of Earshall Hall or coarse and base hke Seedy Sam, the nasty cab man who drove his horses into the ground.1g The idea, therefore, that cruelty to animals related to treatment of people was common currency by the late

Victorian period and Cobbe and other anti-vivisectionists used it quite unabashedly, arguing that vivisection created "cruel and callous" men and thoroughly destroyed natura 1 human sympathy for all creature^.^' Cobbe even came up with a specific term to describe ths process. She called it heteropathy and defhed it as "a tudeuus mystery of human nature", it was the "impulse to hurt and destroy any suffering creature than to relieve or help it." She believed that by watching the infliction of suffering on a weaker creature. a man was &ed to Inflict ever-greater pain and ciuelty. Other anti-vivisection advocates, like Lewis Carroll, who wrote on the subject in 1875, expressed a similar view to that of Cobbe's. He believed that the greatest evil of vivisection was its effect on the moral character of the perpetrator. The animal ultimately died and its suffering came to an end but the rnan became brutalized and bequeathed his curse to future generations."

Despite her concern over working-class spousal abuse, Cobbe reserved particular venom for male members of the medical profession, a group drawn largely from the middle class. Her dislike of physiologists and doctors, stirred by her knowledge of vivisection, was apparent in her criticism of the way medical men had gained exclusive

Moira Ferguson, -4nirnal Adwcacy and Englishwomen, 1 780-1900:Patriots. .Ibrio,~.and Empire (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1 998), 5-8. l9 Arma Sewell, Black Beauty (Manchester: World International Publishing Ltd., i 989). " See for example, Frances Power Cobbe, The Right of Tomenring (London: VSS, 1888), 10, Frances Power Cobbe, The Higher Fxpediency: Address of Miss Fmnces Power Cobbe to the -Lfernbers of [he RichmondAthanaeurn, (March 6, t 882), 17-22, and Frances Power Cobbe, The Scientrfic Spirit of the Age and Other Pleas and Discussions (Boston: Geo H Ellis, 1888), 15. See also, R H. Hutton, "The Biologsts on Vivisection," The Nineteenth Cenru~Vol. 1 1 (1 882): 29-3 9. " Cobbe, "Wife-Tornue"65-66. access to women's bodies and their consequent exploitation of that access. The burgeoning authority of medicine, particularly the growth of highly specialized obstetric and gynaecological medicine, allowed doctors virtually unimpeded entry to the sick chambers of women of a1 classes.'j Cobbe recognized this and described the medical profession as an army gaining sbength and a~thority.~Women were systematically excluded fiom the ranks of this new profession and Cobbe believed this was dane deliberately in order to maintain male power and privileged male space. Such suspicions were not unfounded as much of the emerging scientific rhetoric offered biological explanations for women's "mferior" capabilities. This served to confine women to a specifically constructed role. Such so-called scientific facts resnforced existing ideologies regarding the proper place and sphere of women and were a particularly powerful tool for relegating women to a powerless position. Starting in the 1870s men lke Henry

Maudsley argued that female qualities of mind suited her to be the "helpmate and companion of man" but not hls equals3 Women's "special fimcctions" made them ill equipped to pursue the same pursuits as men If a woman attempted to pursue 'manly' disciplmes she did so at the risk to her own healthz6Danvin expressed similar views, arguing that the chief difference between the sexes was that men could attain "higher eminence" in whatever field or endeavour he engaged in than could a woman." In the

"Descent of Man" (1871) he included a chapter on the ''Differences in Mental Powers of

- - Lewis Carroll, "Some Popular Fallacies About Vitkction," Fomightb Review VoL 23 ( 1875): 85 0. Levhe, Teaminist Lives," 53. See also, James Ricci, The Development of (ivneeologic~lSurgey and Insmrnents (San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1990), 277-283. "' Frances Power Cobbe, "The Medical Profhon and its Moralicq;" Modern Revim 2 ( 188 1 ): 296-299. 'Henry Maudsley, "Ses in Mind and in Education," Fornight& Review 2 1 (1 874): 472. '6 Ibid, 468. 'Evelleen Richards, *Redrawing the Boundaries: Dminian Science and Victorian Women Intellectuals," in E7czorian Science in Context ed. BerdLightma& (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1 997): I 19. the Two ~exes."~'Thomas Huxley agreed that nothmg could alter the "physical disabilities under which women have hitherto laboured in the struggle for existence with men.

Flavia Alaya argues that these emerging scientific arguments were so powerful that they caused a rupture in feminist discourse profound enough to force the modem movement to re-articulate its most fundamental principles. In other words, science offered such persuasive reinforcement to the traditional view of women's sexual character that it both strengthened the opposition to feminism and "disengaged the ideals of feminists themselves fiom their philosophic roots", which had begun with

Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Woman"( 1792) .jO The legacy of biological determinism could still be observed m the 1960s as second wave femmists were forced to dismantle the idea that women were primarily guided by their reproductive capacities. In the late nineteenth century, therefore, science was providing weight and authority to the exclusion of women fiom the political fianchse and from

public life generally. For Cobbe, such exclusion meant that women were unable to bring their compassion to bear on social issues and this angered her profoundly. Science had

prockirned itself as a masculme space and brought with it corresponding 'masculine' values that Cobbe saw as detrimental to a hture based on moral and ethical principles.

Moreover, it turned Cobbe's idea of sexual difference into a non-liberating, force of

oppression Submerged in scientific discourse that suggested that women were governed

by their bodies was the traditional duahty that saw women as associated with the body

'B Flavia Alaya, *'VictorianScience and the .Genius7of Woman," Journal ojrhe Hirroty of Ideas. 382 (1977): 265. '9 Richards, "Redrawing the Boundaries," 12 1. SO~laya,261-262. and men with the mind; the naturelculture dichotomy that was established and served to rernforce female association with the animal, via nature, and man with culture via the mind. Therefore, female identification with anunals as being similarly oppressed by men was problematised as women increasingly attempted to divest themselves of an association that they saw as non-liberating.

To Cobbe the appropriation of medicine as male-controlled space and the consequent exclusion of women created several practical problems for women as patients. Fist, it destroyed women's genuine sentiment of modesty to hzve to turn to a man to discuss "the many ills to which female flesh is heir." Innate modesty would then make women reluctant to consult a physician until it was too late and the disease had progressed beyond help. IS however, a doctor gained entrance to a woman's sick room, he would manage to convince her she was suffering from an illusory illness. That the medical profession had created an entire class of invalids by feeding on the common idea that there was something lady-like m "hvalidism, pallor, small appetite, and a languid mode of speech and manners'"' was one of Cobbe's most pointed criticisms. She believed that doctors were prlnardy motivated by the desire for gain and not the physical betterment of their patients. They created invalids on purpose because "chronic sufferers... represent[ed] to them an annual income of 50 pounds or perhaps 200

The real caw of most women's problems was, in Cobbe's opinion, constrictive clotlung, lack of physical and mental exercise, and an unhappy home sit~ation.'~Cobbe

3 1 Frances Power Cobbe, "The Little Health of Ladies," The Contemporary Review 3 1 (1878): 294-295. 3= Ibid, 28 I. 33 Ibid, 293. stIbid, 276-288. noted of friends who had succumbed to invalidism that, "A singular immunity from the

seizures, seemed to be enjoyed when any pleasant society was expected, or when their

husbands happened to be in a different part of the country. "" By failing to inform them

of the real causes of their illnesses, Cobbe believed that male doctors were exerting their

power over women Implicit in this argument was the notion that female doctors would

not faU victim to the same kind of avarice as male doctors, thus suggesting that Cobbe

was in fact more suspicious of the motives and actions of men than of medical science

specmcally.

In addition to the desire for financial gain doctors were also motivated by the

possibility of getting a "good case." In Cobbe's view doctors saw patients, female

patients in particular, as experimental subjects and hospitals as places where students of

medicine could be trained rather than patients cured. Healing was subordinated to the

gaming of scientific Working-class women were particularly vulnerable to

such exploitation by the medical profession Unable to afford a personal physician they

were forced to go to charrty hospitals where they had to accept treatment on condition

' that they allow students and other doctors to inspea their cases. A clear parallel was

drawn here between the treatment of women and the treatment of animals. One of the

main concerns of anti-vivisectionists was that anirnals were subjected to painful

experiments merely to allow students to gain manual dexterity. Women in the chari~

wards of hospitals, therefore, became vivisected animals useful only for what they could

be used to demonstrate." Cobbe argued that "patients are sacdiced not merely at the

35 Ibid, 2 89. " Cobbe, "Medical Profdon and its Morality," 3 10. 37 bid, 3 11. shrine of knowledge, but on the anvil of manipulative skill."" She described the practice of forcing working women to reveal their condition to an array of male doctors and nudents as "moral torture," using the angry language of her anti-vivisection rhetoric to stress the moral degeneracy of the rndcal profession.

Nowhere was the vulnerab* of women at the hands of the state and the medical profession more apparent than in the implementation of the "Contagious Diseases Acts."

Cobbe certainly had them in mind when she wrote of the power that the medical profession had over wornenjg The CD Acts, as they were called, were a series of measures designed to reduce the occurrence of venereal diseases in specific areas where they prohferated, maL7iy port cities such as Portsmouth The Aas, passed in 1864, 1866, and 1869, allowed for the apprehension and forcible exmination of suspected prostitutes in order to asceh whether they had a venereal disease. Women could be detained for twenty-four hours and if found to be ill they could be held for treatment in Lock

Hospitals for up to three months. Resistance could result in an arrest.M The Acts only targeted women thus reinforcing the sexual double standard in whch women who had transgressed the privatdpublic divide were held responsible for the sexual actions of both themselves and the men who purchased their services. Ant i-vivisect ionists exploited the fear among women that the CD Acts were legitimating institutional rape through the use of the speculum, the "steel penis" of the medical profession and the state, and thus

Ibid. 39 Cobbe, "Medical Profession," 32 1-322. * Levine, Feminist Liws, 83. encouraged women to identrfy themselves with ::rd as potential victims of male

Josephme Butler who led the campaign to repeal the CD Acts rested her case against the exploitation of women on moral grounds just as Cobbe had. For Butler the iiberation of women from the yoke of male authority was essential to advance the moral progress of the nation Indeed, she believed that she was leading a holy mission to which she had been called by ~od."In her writing Butler frequently used apocryphal language that suggested that the perpetrators of state-sanctioned rape would suffer judgment by those who upheld a higher law. She raged,

It is the voice of a woman who has suffered, a voice calhg to holy rebellion and to war. It wiil penetrate. Then by and by we shall come down on our opponents with the heavy artillery of facts and statistics and scientific arguments on every side. We dlnot spare them, we will show them no mercy. We shall tear to pieces their refuge of lies, and expose the ghastliness of their covenant with death, and their agreement with hell. We and our successors will continue to do thyear after year until they have no ground to stand upon.4'

Both Cobbe and Butler's indictment of male violence as morally anti-progressive was reflective of the larger conflict in Victorian society between religion and emerging notions of evolutionary change. What such ideas were offering British society were new secular explanations of human progress that were competing with ideas of religious or moral progress rooted in Christian doctrine. For both Butler and Cobbe the threat to moral progress was nowhere more evident than in the growing strength of medicine as a branch of science whose crude materialism was antithetical to the hlgher goals of

" Mary Ann Elston, "Women and Anti-vivisection m Victorian England," in P'ivirecrion ijr Historical Perspective, ed. Nicolaas A. Rupbe, (New Yo&: Croom Helm, 1987), 279. See also, Judith R Wakotvitz, City of Dreadfir1 Delight: ~Varativesof Se#ral Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 92. spiritualrty. CD agitation and anti-vivisection, therefore, both exposed the cultural tension between confhcting visions of the &re of the nation.

Cobbe frequently accused surgeons of performing unnecessary operations for the

"sake of either [their skill or [their] fee" rather than for the benefit of the patient.u The increase in gynaecological procedures such as ovariotomy, for example. provided tangible evidence that women were being used as experimental subjects. Death rates from the operation were so high that even some doctors believed that it was an experiment that benefited the surgeon and not the woman.45 Although ovariotomy was not necessarily reflective of mere 'medical misogyny' because some feminists and female doctors believed it could be beneficial, the unease that greeted its increased practice exposed concerns that by destroying a woman's reproductive capacities they were also destroying her mherent womanliness; in effect, doaors were wexing her. The procedure was frequently called spaying or vivisection by some doctors and by other critics of the practice."

By I* women imaginatively with animals as victim of experimental medicine,

Cobbe played on existing fears and latent suspicion of medical science. As Judith

Waikowitz has pointed out, "popular fears of surgeons, -eynaecologits, vaccinators, vivisectors, and dissectors as violators of. .. the innocent bodies of women, children and animals, had found considerable expression in a range of popular health and anti-medical

- - " George and Lucy Johnson, eds, Josephine E. Buk.ln Autobiogmphical Memoir (London: Slrnpkin. Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Company Ltd., 1909), 87-97& 10 1. 43 bid, 15 1. Cobbe, "Medical Profession," 3 12. " Eldon, "Women and Anti-vivisection,' 278. 46 Ibid, 279 and Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Searolity and the Ear& Feminists, (New Yok: The New Press, 1995): 6547. campaigns of the 1870s and 1880s.'~~In the early part of the nineteenth century, fear of

the medical profession was generated by the increasing demand for human corpses to

supply the demand of anatomists. The difficulty in obtaining bodies for dissection led to

an illicit trade in body snatchg and grave robbing which tied anatomists directly to the

criminal undenvorld. Although the poor and criminals were the group whose bodies were

most frequently dssected, those of the middle class feared that no fresh grave was safe

from bodysnatchers. In the 1820s reports of murders being committed in Edinburgh by

Burke and Hare and in London by the Williams gang in order to supply the growing

demand for bodies greatly disturbed the public."8 By the late nineteenth century,

therefore, the idea that doctors possessed privileged knowledge and technical skill that

was unavailable and indeed carefully hldden from the public made them a suspect group.

As already mentioned, by the 1870s and 1880s science had yet to prove itself

conclusively to the Victorian public. Although there was widenmg interest in science and

professionalisation of it as a discipline, its increasing strength was greeted mh a

sigruficant amount of discomfiture. The idea that animal experiments increased general

' physiological understanding meant little to the Victorians who did not connect the

acquisition of abstract knowledge with medical progress.'g The Ripper murders of 1 888

London were illustrative of the cultural unease surrounding the esoteric nature of medical

science. One of the first and most enduring 'theories' about the true identlfy of Jack the

Ripper was that he was a physiologist gone berserk, a "mad scientist" who had moved

" Walkowia, Cip of Dreadhl Delight, 199. 'W. F. Bqaum, Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century, (New Yo*: Cambridge Universitqr Press, 1994), 12. "Tuner, Reckoning with the Beast? 1 1 2- 1 15. from vivisecting animals to vivisecting womens0 The mutilation of the female victims

was therefore directly analogous to the mutilation of vivisected animals.

The imaginative lurking of women and anrmals was not exclusive to Cobbe's

thmkmg and writing. Indeed it was a popular and recurring theme in much Victorian

Irterature. Coral Lansbury argues that the image of woman as horse was one of the most

frequent and explicit largely because the most obvious instances of animal cruelty in

Victorian society were to horses. Beaten, starving, and exhausted carthones were a

commonplace sight on the streets of Engbh cities. If the suffe~gof women was to be

compared to the suffering of anunals, then the horse was the most obvious ~hoice.~'

Anns Seweii's 1877 work Black Beaury was a case in point. It was credited as being a

major impetus behind the campaign to ban the controversial bearing rem which was a

device used to keep a hone's head up hgh and fashionable looking but which caused

great pain to hones and damaged their windpipes." Bluck Beauzy was ostensibly the

autobiography of a horse, but as Lansbury points out it might also be read as the

autobiography of a woman.53The warning of Black Beauty's mother to her son in many

- ways echoed Cobbe's to women Sewell's character cautioned,

There are a great many kinds of men; there are good, thoughtful men keour master, that any hone may be proud to serve; but there are bad, cruel me& who never ought to have a horse or dog to call their own. Besides, there are a great many foolish men, vain, ignorant, and careless, who never trouble themselves to thmk; these spoil more hones than aU, just for want of sense; they don't mean it, but they do it for all that. I hope you will fall into good hands; but a hone never knows who may buy hun, or who may drive him; it is all a chance for us. "

50 WalkouiiR 2 1 1-2 12. " Lansbmy. The Old Brown Dog, 63 & 98-99. '' F-n, 76-77. " Lambuy, 98. 54 SewelI, Block Beuup, 18- 19. Cobbe had spoken in very sunilar terms, cahg marriage a "lottery" in which a woman could become trapped with a 'violent and cruel' husband? Later, in one of the most tragic passages in the book, the figure of Gmger told why she fmlly gave in to the power of men She said, "men are strongest, and if they are cruel and have no feelins, there is nothmg that we can do, but just bear it, bear it on and on to the end. "56 The powerlessness of the horse in both the passages conjured up the similar plight of women who had no real ability to control their destiny. They were at the mercy of fathers, husbands, or brothers. Even Cobbe, by all accounts a very capable and independent woman, had been threatened with disinheritance when her father discovered her religious heresy."

The tmage of woman as the suffering horse was commonplace in much Victorian literature and was particularly evident in a plethora of pornographic novels of the period in whch female characters were flogged, sodomized and raped by riding masters with depressing frequency. A large proportion of such works used the language of the stable to describe what was done to the women and virtually all placed an emphasis on cruelty, not eroticism In stories like "Birch in the Boudoir" (189?), for example, young women were raped and flogged by the stable boys at Greystones School. The consummation of masculine pleasure came only once the women were bridled and harnessed like horses and then 'seduced'.5sLikewise, m "Miss Coote's Confe~sion~~,a story published in the pages of the Pearl, a serialized set of novels, short stories, ballads, poems, and anecdotes published between 1879 and 1886, a woman was literally tied to a contraption called the

" Cobbe, CeIibacy versus Maxiage' 234. " SeweU, Black Bemy, 1 39. " Cobbe, Life. I, 89-93. Lansbuq, 103 - 104. horse and wtupped until she bled. '' All of these works offered the same message: women

had to submit to male authority and male brutam? much as a hone had no choice but to

submit to the power of men"

The devices used to restrain women in many Victorian pornographic stories bore

striking resemblance to the gynaecological apparatus available to doctors and the

vivisectional equipment of physiologists. Trade catalogues for physicians and surgeons

provided descriptions of gynaecological operating chairs and tables, often illustrated with

drawings or photographs that showed a woman strapped down6' Similarly, in the pages

of Lazttenschlager 's Trade Calalogue of Vivisectional Apparcms, which was the major

source of equipment for physiologists, antmals were &played strapped to boards ready

to be vivisected with an array of scalpels, vices and saws. The image of a cat stretched

out on a table, its legs outstretched as it was stimulated by an electric shock in one of Sir

Victor Honely and Professor Gotch's experiments upon the spine, was replicated in

many anti-vivisection propaganda posters, placards and pamphlets.6' Cobbe used the

image of a dog stretched out on a table in several of her anti-vivisection pamphlets in the

* 1880s and the 1890s." The presence of so many explicitly misogynist images in

Victorian pornography and the iconography of the bound woman or animal in trade

catalogues for gynaecological or vivisectional equipment was reflective, not only of the

deep cultural unease that greeted women's increasing demand for access to male-

controlled space, but also the identification of both woman and animals as mferion who

" Anonymous, Miss Cooie's Coafessionn in Wicked Victori~ns,ed. Gordon Gnmley, (London: Ody- Press, 1970)- 17-3 1. Lansbuy, 103. Ibid, 123. '= Ibid, 124. must submit to male authority and power. Lansbury remarks that pornography is our

"buried river subtly changing the Iandscape above it.. . the condition of women and that of

vivisected animals was like a conditioned refleq one image evoking the other even when

they served contradictory ends.

The issue of vivisection was aIso addressed in much mainstream fiction of the

Victorian period. The dark figure of the physiologist was a stock character in many of

these works and was usually portnyed as a dangerous and morally corrupt character.

WiUue Collins, the Victorian novelist best known for hls detective stories, The Woman in

White and the Moonstone, wrote an anti-vivisection novel that was serialized in

Belgravia, a London literary magazine, in 1882. Colh wrote Hean and Science to aid

the cause of anti-nvlsection Though he was not a member of any of the societies he was

hendly with many activists and in fact corresponded with Cobbe over details that he

wanted to include in his work? In Hean and Science the vivisector was described as a

"living skeleton," a man named Dr. Benjulia who was attempting to discover a cure for

'brain disease' by vivisecting all rnanner of animals in a laboratory on his dark and

. secluded property.66 Benjulia's total indifference to the suffering of animals was set in

comparison to the anti-vivisectionist protagonin, Ovid Vere, in an early scene when Vere

expressed regret that Benjulia had trod on a beetle. Benjuh's total "astonishment at

fin- an adult male human being (not in a lunatic asylum) anxious to spare the life of a

------63 See for empie, Frances Power Cobbe, 1IIustrarion.s of Fivisection; or, Experimenw on Lmng .4nimals, fi-om the Ct'bAs of Physiologistr. (Philadelphia: American Anti-Vivisection Society, 1888) and Cobbe. -Light in Dark Places,' Pamphlers on Vivisecrion (London: VSS, I 882- 1887 1. %ambuy, 129. " Steve Farma, "Introduction,' in Hean and Science. (Peterborough: Broadview Press, i 996). 17 and Cobbe, Life, 11,503. WieCobs, Heart and Science,95. beetle" reflected the persistent anti-vivisection belief that the practice "hardened" men!'

Many other anti-vivisection themes were submerged in Heart and Science. For example,

Benjulia was described as living m a house "in a desolate field, in some lost suburban neighbourhood that nobody can cisco~er,"~*echoing Cobbe and others perception that vivisection was carehlly hidden from the public eye because of the cruel nature of the experiments. In addition, the idea that people might ultimately become fn subjects for experimentation was also revealed in the book. In the reader's first meeting with Benjulia he places hs fingers on the spine of the child Zoe and presses, obsemg her with "as serious an interest as if he had been conducting a medical experiment."69 Ths link is made explicit later in the book when the character of Carmina becomes a subject of one of Benjulia' s experiments. He deliberately withholds the dormation that she is suffering from a We-threatening brain disease so that he can observe the progression of the disease and thereby help his own research. Benjulia's ultimate defeat at the hands of the humanitarian OMd Vere, who had found the cure for the disease that Benjulia had been researching without usmg vivisection, was reflective of the common theme of so much anti-vivisection rhetoric that moral actions would bring the greatest reward.

Hean and Science was one of a number of polemical anti-vivisection novels that linked both women and animals together as bnrtalized victims of scientfic men There was often a sexual undercurrent in these works that suggested that such men were driven to lust and cruelty out of the impulse to dominate and control weaker ~reatures.'~

Vivisection was made analosous to rape and other sexualised practices because both

'' Ibtd, 103. ibid, 97. ibid, 96. entailed the penetration of the animal or the female body. Other works such as Ouida's

Puck, Sarah Grand's The Berh Book, H. G. Well's The Island of Dr. Moreazr and much of

Mona Caird's work also deah explicitly with the subject of vivisection What these works had in common was that they all emphasised the associations between medical treatment of women and animals."

In addition to novehsts, many poets added their voices to the anti-vivisection cause.

Cobbe called them the "prophets of humanity" who were arrayed against the "priests of science."" Alfred Lord Temyson described vivisectors as "those who carve the living hound," in his poem "In the Children's Hospd" and he signed lus name to every petition and memorial whch Cobbe sent to him He was a member of the VSS and was

Vice-President of the society for a short time? Robert Browning wrote several poem with an explicit anti-vivisection message. "Tray" was part of a series of poems called

"Dramatic Idylls" (1879) and described how a dog rescued a drowning child and was repaid by being delivered to the vivisector.

Why he dived,/ His brain would show us, I should say./ 'John, go and catch--or, if needs be, / Purchasethat animal for me! / By vivisection, at expense / Of half-an-hour and eighteenpence, 1 How brain secretes dog's soul, we'll see!."

An 1889 poem, ''Fidehty Rewarded", by Dora Greenwell, surularly described a loyal dog being bayed through vivisection75The poet and critic Matthew Arnold supported anti-

------" Sarah Theobold-Hall, .lr the Borders of Hurnroniq: .Animok, Fomen and the -4nti-vivisection .\lownlenr in La:e ~Vinereenrh-CenruryLiterantre, (Unpublished PbD. Didon:University of Tuk1 998). " Ibid, 7-8. r. Cobbe, Lif, 502. Ibid, 497. vivisection in spirit though he refused to sign Cobbe's memorial inviting the RSPCA to undertake legislation for the restriction of vivisection on the grounds that the cause would not benefit kom the signature of literary people who would "be disposed of as a set of unpractical sent irnentalists. "" Co bbe, nevertheless, felt an affhty with Arno Id because she believed that he loved animals, dogs particularly, as much as she did. Such feelings were expressed in hi poem Geisr 's Grave. whch described the death of a beloved dog.

Cobbe's primary objection to vivisection was that it was the exploitation of the weak by the strong and she questioned how far such thmking would take society. Would the theory that the weak had no clams against the strong soon be applied to "the idiots in our asylums, to criminals, to inEants, to ~ornen?"'~By associating vivisection with exploitation of the weak she implicitly connected the fate of women and animals because both groups were at the mercy of male violence in its myriad forms.79It was not just gender, however, that domed Cobbe's condemnation of the increasmg power of science. Although she believed that new scientific techniques were primarily threatening to women, she was also afraid that other politically and socially dis-empowered groups

'such as the working class would be vulnerable to exploitation For example, havins heard that scientific experiments were being conducted by a Dr. Charcot and "a coterie of medical men7' upon the patients of the Salpetriere, in Paris, Cobbe feared that a young paralysed woman she had once met there might still be alive and a victim of the

74 Robert Browming, -'Trav." in Heart and Science. Appendix H, ed. Steve Farmer, (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1996), 379. all, 1. - Cobbe, Lge, Q 420. ' ' Ibid, 428. 78 Frances Power Cobbe, ~LIota2.Ispects of Vivisection, (London: Peweess and Co.. 1884). 9. See also. Frances Power Cobbe, The iLtew :Morality ondon: VSS, t 882-1 887J), 13 for Cobbe's discussion of the weakness of the 'might is light- argument ;9 Cobbe, "Medical Profession and Its Morality," 322. experiments." Anti-vivisection supporters frequently expressed the idea that vivisection would lead to human experimentation George Jesse of the Society for the Abolition of

Vivisection for example, argued that scientists would use humans before animals if they could get away with it?' Such fears were not completely unfounded because in 1883 two scientists, William Murrell and Sidney Ringer, administered large doses of sodium nitrate to charity outpatients at the Westminster Hospital All of the patients became ill and subsequent tests on animals proved the drugs to be poisonous. Details of the mcident were published and brought serious criticism from the public but Murrell and hger were ultimately exonerated by the Censors Board of the Royal College of ~h~sicians.''

That the patients/victims of Murrell and Ringer were all worlung class was probably the main reason that the two men were vindicated. Indeed, In a letter to the Srandard, a Dr.

A De Wattevllle argued that such patients should be made to serve as experimental subjects to compensate for their lack of pecuniary support of chanty hospitals.s"

Women doctors like Elizabeth Blackwell and Anna Kingsford both saw the treatment of working-class women as analogous to vivisection Wle studying at the

Geneva College in Western New York, under the tutelage of a Dr. Webster, Blackwell witnessed the gynaecological examination of a woman that troubled her deeply.

Blackwell wrote, "Twas a horrible exposure; indecent for any poor woman to be subjected to such a tome ; she seemed to feel it, poor and ignorant as she was."

Accordmg to Lansbury, such examinations were common practice. The woman would

" Cobbe, Life. L 295. s1 George Richard J- Digesr of Evidence Taken Before the Rqwl Commissxon on the Pmctice of Subjecting Live to Eqrerimena for Scienrific Purposes, (London: 1876), 3 1. " Lansbq, 59. " Ibid. " Elizabeth 2lacltwel1, Pioneer Work in Opening the .bfedicol Pmfession ro Women. (New Yorli: Schocken Books, 1977), 72. likely have been strapped to a hewrth her pelvis raised and her feet in stirmps or footrests. This was standard procedure at the time but Blaclnvell was appalled that the woman was treated as nothq but a subject who could not, it was believed, feel shame or embarrassment at being so exposed.

Like Blackwell, Kingsford was horrified by the treatment of workinpclass women in charity hospitals and wrote in particular of her experience of a woman dyng in a Paris medical ward. The woman was not left alone to die quietly but forced to provide another lesson in exchange for her charity. In Eom of a bevy of medical students a physician forced her eyes open by sticking a pin under them and once he had roused her he placed hs ear to her back and shook her violently in order to hear the liquid in her chest. Kmgsford was also aghast to learn that surgical operations were frequently performed on workq-class men and women without benefit of anaesthetics. Such patients were classed with animals as "fitting subjects for padl experiment."86

If the working class were most frequently the victims of human vivisection the& in Cobbe's opinion, the middle class were the perpetrators. Cobbe's class-consciousness always coloured her view of vivisection. She never lost a sense of herself as a member of the landed gentry despite her reduced circumstances after her father's death and the faa that she embraced certain middle-class values such as religiosrty and respectability. She remained a staunch conservative her entire life and viewed middle-class liberalism with

disdain She believed that their interest in business and commerce was wlgar and

detracted from a study of "higher" pursuits, particularly morals and religion Though

many anti-vivisectionists found anirnal experimentation particularly disturbing, specrfically because it was performed by men who were supposed to be the guardians of

respectability, kindness and humanity, Cobbe saw it as a practice that attracted members

of a less gentile class than her own She believed that the medical profession often drew

"the sons of men of the secondary professional classes or of tradesmen, and in some cases

(especdy in Scotland) of intelligent artisans."" Such men entered the profession

pnnranly because the preparatory education was cheaper and the average income higher

than many other professions.88

As members of a new class, scientists were introducmg what she called a new vice

into society and subsequently attempting to dismantle the old order wth impunq. It

was, in her opinion, middle-class ascendancy that was responsible for such new scientific

techruques as vivisection. As Moira Ferguson puts it, for Cobbe, "the glory of science

was not synonymous with the glory of ~n~land''*~and so she rejected it and instead

embraced an older ideal. Cobbe's alternative was to posit a world based on what she

considered traditional English values that included improved care of the working class

and kindness toward animals. Her vision of progress was therefore directly at odds with

' that of the scientific establishment who were attempting to create new space for

themselves in a discipline that defined itself specifically against an older and more

privileged order.

Cobbe viewed vivisection as a morally anomalous practice in a society that was

moving toward a "millennium of mercy." She argued,

the main work of chtion has been the vindication of the rights of the weak, it is not too much, I thmk, to insist that the practice of vivisection, in

- --- 8: Cobbe, "Medical Profession," 300. Ibid, 301. 89 Ferguson, 105. 90 Frances Power Cobbe, The ~bfomlAspects of Vivisection, 4. which ths tyranny of strength cuirmnates, is a retrograde step in the progress of our race; a backwater in the onward flowing stream of justice and mercy, no less portentous than deplorable.g'

Cobbe's objection to vivisection was based on moral and ethcal principles. She could not accept that a loving god would sanction the diction of unnecessary suffering on animals and so she viewed vivisection as a violation of God's moral law. She considered it a religious duty to oppose the practice, believing that God was "not good to some of

His creatures and cruel to other^."^' Further she could not accept that God would allow a sentient creature to be born to a life that was nothing more than a curse to it.

Cobbe's indictment of vivisection and her condemnation of scientists as a goup had grown more vitriolic after the weakening of the regulation bill. Her outrage was unmistakable in her post 1876 writing on the subject. After the success of the scientific lobby in securing the amendments that made the bill virtually useless in the eyes of

Cobbe and other anti-vivisectionists, she began to feel increasingly threatened by the power of science. She attempted to counter their advantage by consistently questioning their motives and the premises on which they justdied the practice. Cobbe suggested that vivisectors were more interested in fxthering their own careers than in helping humanrty, just as doctors were more interested in malung money or getting a "good case" than in helping women recover 6om illness." She accused scientists of beins motivated by the power of prestige that could be secured by discovering some new scientific 'truth.'

Animals, she argued, were sacrificed at the ahof scientific progress and not for the

9 1 Ibid, 17-18. See also Frances Power Cobbe, In he Long Run, (London: VSS, 1882-1887), 4-5. Cobbe, Lile.1.85. " Cobbe, .Lioraf hpecu of t'ivisection. 1 3 - 17. good of She believed that scientists had proven that they cared little for the

suffering of animals and humans. The interests of both were secondary compared to the

"achievement of a correct diagnosis, to be venfied by a successful post mortew." 95 This

was an opinion frequently articulated by anti-vivisectionists. For example, in an address

given at the 1883 Annual Meeting of the VSS, the Bishop of Odord maintained that

while performing an experiment a scientist was so "absorbed in hls work. and his desire

for knowledge, that he is incapable of appreciating the pain which he causes; he has, in

point of faa, put that matter entirely out of court."" Similarly the surgeon Lawson Tait

alleged that scientists often followed the example of the continental researcher Claude

Bernard who himself had written that whlle performing an experiment he was so

"possessed and absorbed by a scientific idea [that he does not] hear the animals' cries of

pain. He is blind to the blood that flows. He sees nothmg but his idea, and the organisms

which conceal fiorn him the secrets that he is resolved to discover. "gl

Cobbe could not argue on terms of equal authonty with scientists with respect to

the efficacy of most scientific endeavours, and so she returned to her fimdamental stance

' that she did not have to prove that science was not usefbl because she could prove that it

was not moral. She held vivisection up as an evll in which the end could never justify the

means.'' By pkclng the demands of the corporeal body ahead of those of the spiritual

" Cobbe, Life,whrme 11.607. '' Frances Power Cobbe, The Scienrifc Spirit of the Age and Oher Pleas and Disnrssions. (Boston: Ch. H Ellis, 1888), 26. % -4ddrrssofrht Bishop of or the Annucrl Meeling of the Victoria Smer Society,(London: VSS. 1883). 97 hctsfrom =Iddresses of Mr. hsonTair, the Eminent Enlgirh Surgeon, and Others at the -4n~zual Meeting of the Victoria Smet Society, (London: VSS, 1882), 3. Frances Power Cobbe, The Higher Expediency: .4dd~scof Miss Frances Power Cobbe to the .\fenben of the RichmondRdtenaeum, (March 6,1882), 3-4. body, scientists were risking the moral progress of the nationg9 She called it a heathenish assumption that people would privtlege the health of their bodies over the health of their souls.'" Most feeling people would, she believed, find it unacceptable to torture even one animal to save multitudes of people because to do so would be a refutation of moral progress."' Other anti-vivisectionists, notably Anna Kingsford, expressed similar concerns about the growing obsession with bod@ health She argued,

even were it true (which it is not) that physical human Me could be saved, and bodily advantages obtained by means of cruel and tyrannical practices, such practices would still be, from the human point of view, completely unjustifiable. The human race can not be saved or enriched by acts whch destroy and rob humanity. lo'

Like Cobbe then, Kingsford held vivisection up to a moral test and found it wanting. She believed that a method that was morally wrong could not be scientifically right. "' Where

Kingsford dfiered from Cobbe, however, was m her belief that it was not the acquisition of scientific knowledge that was problematic but its ill use. She recognized that knowledge could be empowering and she consciously chose to become a doctor in order to help animals.

Iroriically, both Co bbe and Kingsford reidorced the hierarchy that placed animals in laboratories in the first place. Their basic arguments against vivisection were premised on paternalistic notions of andas weaker or "inferior" creatures who needed to be cared for and protected Annals were not seen as innately valuable living beings who

99 Frances Power Cobbe, The Right of Tomenring, 8-9. IrnIbid, 9 and Cobbe, Scientijic Spirit of the Age, 14 & 24. 101 Cob be, ~Uoral.&pectr of Yivisection, 14. Ice Anna Kingdord, "Unscientdic Science: Moral Aspeas of Vitisection> Spirilual Thempeutics: or, Divine Science, .4pplied to ibforul,Menral and Physical Hannony, Twelve Lectures. Third Edition By W. J. Colville (Chicago: Educator Publishing Company, 1890), 2%. 'm~amwlHopgod Hart ed, LiJ, Dia~and Work of Anna Kingsford By her collobomror Edward .Maitland. Third Edition. Two volumes, (London: John M. Watkins, 19 13), 76. had a right to lrve free fiom human abuse and exploitation Within such a worldview it was difficult to elminate the idea that animals were commodities whose sole function and purpose was to benefit humans. Consequent&, emphasis was virtually always placed

on the human duty to reduce suffering, not to liberate animals from the yoke of human

domination Both Cobbe's and Kingsford's arguments against vivisection used this as their starting point. Cobbe wanted to abolish the practice altogether because she believed that there was no way to prevent dfrom suffe~gonce delivered to the laboratory and not because she believed humans had no right to use animals. Kingsford offered a

potentially radical viewpoint when she argued that eating meat degenerated the sympathy of people and thus led directly to vivisection. lM hgsford was herself a committed vegetarian who believed that the two causes had a natural affinity and that to espouse

anti-vivisection while still eating meat was mwnsistent. Nevertheless, she viewed some

animals as less worthy of compassion than others, calling wolves and tigers "noxious"

Cobbe and bgsford had no understanding that the actions of "noxious

animals" could be justified or understood outside human constructs such as morality.

Carnivorous animals, therefore, were naturally seen as cruel and savage.

New explanations of the origin and evolution of species provided fodder for both

sides in the vivisection battle. Darwin's On'gi'n of Species (1 859), though often viewed as

the sigdi*mt work that unleashed ideas of evolution on an muspectins world, was but

one contribution to the newly-emerging debate over the origins of biological life.

Attempts to reconcile the hdmgs of geology with biblical interpretation had been going

on at least since the 1833 publication of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology. It was with the 1844 publication of Robert Chambers (1 802-71) Vestiges ofrhe Narzrrczl Hislory of Creation, however, that British society was first offered a secular and progressive view of human development. Chambers was a successful bookseller with an amateur interest in geology and hi book was written for the lay reader. It was quite a popular success, although scientific specialists took issue with many of its detads. Darwin's book provided a more scientifically grounded work that was, therefore, imbued with greater weight and authority by the scientific comrnuruty.'" His achievement was to reconcile the long geological record wah a convincing theory of species change. Darwin's works was problematic for Cobbe, however, because it obviated the necessny of God as an explanation for change. The theory of "natural selection" provided a convincing mechanism of change that operated without interruption &om the beginfig of time. God then became redundant as anythmg more than a remote and deistic, "First Cause", the power that set the process of evolution in motion.lo7 In addition, Darwin's work offered a dark and unforgiving vision of the world in which Mother Nature was the arbiter of life and death By penomfjmg nature as female and yet innately cruel Darwin was

' destroying Cobbe's vision of female as more compassionate and nurturing. Thus, for

Cobbe, Danvin's Mother Nature had betrayed her sex by in effect appropriating masculine characteristics.

Cobbe did, however, use some of Danvin's conclusions when they suited her purposes. For example, Darwin's judgement that animals and humans shared a common ancestry and that the difference between the two was merely one of degree, was used by

Cobbe to argue that such a tie ought to have increased rather than decreased human

106 Robin Gibnour, The r'?c~orianPeriod: The InieUechtal and Cultuml Conrerr of English Lirerntu~v. 1830-1890, (New York: Longmu, 1993), 121-124. compassion for animals because they could clearly suffer very much as humans could suffer.lo8 She was outraged, however, when supporters of vivisection appropriated the

Darwinian notion of "natural selectioq" or "sunival of the fittest" as Herbert Spencer described it, to buttress their claims to authority. In particular, she condemned the contention that because nature was extremely cruel humans could do no better than to follow nature. For Cobbe, thwas erroneous because moral truths could not be gleaned from the physical world. It was only through the study of moralny that such questions as right and wrong applied to the treatment of animals could be answered.'*

Cobbe attempted to reveal the lnherent moral weakness of the doctrine of survival of the fittest, or the "might is right" argument as she called it, by offering a scathing parody m which scientists became experimental subjects in a laboratory of angels. In

Science in Ercelsis angels decide to tear open scientists using their own physiological treatises as guidebooks and offering the same justifications for their right to do so. Cobbe thus revealed the tenuous nature of claims to power and argued that that such power as any person or groups possessed needed to be tempered with mercy. ' l"lngsford

'engaged with the issue as weil stressing the responsibil~that came with power and arguing that the superior evolution that humans enjoyed was a "royal privilege" that required compassionate admmistration. Ill-used power was detrimental to mord progress.

She argued that the "unjust king is no longer a kmg, but a tyrant. Vivisection has upon its hands the blood of violence and of abuse of force."'"

'ribid, 125-128. 'Eobbe, oral Aspects of Chisection. 8-9. '@Frances Power Cobbe, The Fumn of rhe Lower AnimaIs, (London: VSS, n. d.), 6. 110 Frances Power Cobbe, Science in Excehis: -4 Mew Vision of Judgment (London: Williams and Norgate, 1882-1887), 19. Kingdord, "Unscientific Science," 297-298. Where Cobbe offered a radical new dimension to the debate about the nature of

animals was in her suggestion that the act of vivisection made animals immortal. The

notion that animals might have immortal souls was not a totally unfamiliar one to the

Victorians. John Wesley, for example, believed that animals had souls and had

consistently preached hdness and mercy toward them As pets became ever more

present in middle-class households, questions about their future lives came to be the topic

of some serious debate."' But it was by no means an accepted notion and even Cobbe

was not wilhg to afford a soul to all animals. But she could not uphold her notion of a

compassionate god and still accept that the vivisected animal suffered in the one and only

l$e it had been given Such an idea destroyed the very foundation of her faith because her

god would not create a "sentient creature, unoffendmg, nay incapable of offence," whose

very existence was made a curse.""' In the face of a practice that was clearly not going

to disappear, the only way she could reconcile that ha with her idea of a benevolent god

was to conclude that the tortured amdwas made immortal through the very act of

vivisection She conveniently extricated herself fiom the possible trap that scientists

- would offer up vivisection as a moral good by virtue of its result by arguing that agnostic

scientists who could not see a future life for humans could not argue about one for

animals nor use it as the basis for their explo itat ion 'I'

Cobbe's perception that most scientists who performed vivisection were

irreligious served to confirm her belief that the practice was a serious threat to the moral

progress of society. Cobbe's vision of a world of kindness and compassion could not

-- - -- 'I' Hilda Kean, Animal Righis Politicul and &cia[ Change in Blitain since 1800. (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). 2 9 and Keith Thomas, Ahand the ~VahtrulWorld: Changing .-ltrintdes in England 1500- 1800 (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1983), 140-14 1. '* Cobbe. Fumm ofthe LowerAnimak. 5. exist m the atheistic view of a godless world. She believed that scientists were attempting to estabhh a new and klse faith, rooted in the new vice of vivisection ' I' She saw science as so antithetical to true religion that it doused religious sentiment "like a candle in an airless vault. ~r I16 To allow vivisection to continue was to give authority to this new view of Me and few prospects were quite as alammg to Cobbe as one in which the world was ruled by "an order of men who, as a rule, reject and despise those ultimate faahs of the human heart in God and Duty and Immortality, which ennoble and purlfy mortal life as no physiological science can ennoble, and no physical 'sanitation' pur~.117

Kingsford also suggested that science was a new faith or creed. She frequently referred to vivisection as a crime analogous to that perpetrated by the priests of the Inqui~ition."~

Ths new religion had created a living hell for numerous sentient creatures. She spoke of the "unspeakable torment" whch animals suffered and argued that vivisection meant the

"denomination of the race; the reconstitution of human society on the ethics of hell; the peopling of the earth with fiends instead of wnh beings really human."'1g

Cobbe clearly believed that it was her duty to deliver both women and animals

- from male violence. It was essential for the moral progress of the nation that the exploitation of the weak at the hands of the strong be obliterated. She raged asahst an

dirsystem that forced abused wives to stay with their husbands and placed women at the mercy of male doctors, but she reserved her most impassioned defence for the animals subjected to scientific cruelty. Female victim could be problematic. Working-

"'Ibid, 6. 'Is Cobbe, Li/c, II, 6U6. Cobbe, Scientific Spirir of the Age, 32. 11' Cobbe, "Medical Profession and Its Morality," 308. 'I8 Kingsford, "Unscientific Sdenfe " 300-301. 'I9 Kingsford, Lif, Diary and Fork 50. class women, the main victims of domestic violence she argued, were often "coarse and unrefined" and she viewed middle-class invalids as vacuous and incompetent in many cases. But animals were totally innocent and totally at the mercy of humans, and therefore the most in need of compassion and help. CONCLUSION

The Victorian faith in progress informed the vivisection controversy in its broadest dimensions. Scientists and anti-vivisectionists had different ideas of what progress meant, however, and so they battled over whose vision of the future would prevail. Scientists envisioned a world that stressed the acquisition of rational and secular knowledge and the improvement of treatment of the physical body while anti- vivisectionists emphasised a world in which the development of human moral capacities and the growth of the soul superseded the acquisition of knowledge. Scientists labelled anti-vivisectionists as sentimental "old maids" who were ill informed about the scientific processes that underlay vivisection and anti-progressive in their desire to hold on to a traditional and antiquated worldview that placed God rather than knowledge m a position of pre-eminence, while Cobbe and other anti-vivisectionists accused scientists of being morally anti-progressive in their materialist focus. They believed that scientists were unfeeiing, hard-hearted men who were sacnficing their moral principles for the benefa of their own careers. Cobbe, in particular, was troubled that such men were attempting to lead British society into the future.

At the heart of the anti-vivisection controversy as a moral issue was the problem of pain. On every poster, placard and in every pampNet dealing with the subject the

Victorian revulsion from pain was made madest. It was not that scientists were killms animals that so disturbed anti-vivisectionists but that they were idhcting unimaginable tortures on them Moreover, the FdCt that the anirrals most frequently used for vivisection were considered pets profoundly disturbed a predominantly middle-class movement because such animals figured prominently m notions of domesticity that were fundamental to middle-class identrty. Although animals suffered under many other practices, as scientists were always pointing out, the context of vivisection made it particularly troubhg. For many anti-vivisectionists the idea that it was respectable and educated men of the middle class who were primarily engaging in the practice made it doubly disturbmg. Cruelty from the lower orders was bad enough and was even expected to a certain extent, but such calculated cruelty from a cuitivated segment of society upset the comfortable middle-class assumption that they were the guardians of humanity, compassion and progress.

Scientists were put on the defensive by the strength of anti-vivisection sentiment as it emerged in the 1870s. Their strategy for countering the prestige and persistence of the anti-vivisection lobby was to deny akgations of deliberate cruelty and to emphas~se that men of science abhorred suffering and were primarily motivated in their endeavours by a desire to eradicate it. After the "Cruelty to Animals Bill" was passed in 1876 scientists formed the A4MR in order to protect members of their profession from what they believed were arbitrary denials of licenses under the Aa. The AAMR managed to secure a very favourable arrangement between their organisation and the Home Secretary whereby scientists were essentially making decisions about the licensing of members of their own profession Such strategies helped to tip the balance of public opinion in sciences' favour and placed virtually no restrictions on the practice of experimental medicine.

Although anti-vivisection was not a feminist cause per se, the arguments that emerged out of the controversy were necessarily gendered because women formed the majority of the anti-vivisection side while men dominated the scientdic profession Frances Power Cobbe, leader of the movement, consciously connected the fate of women and animals in many of her writings in the 1870s and 1880s. She implicated male violence as the primary cause of the suffering of both groups. Moreover, she called on women to embrace what she perceived were their innate compassionate and nurturing qualities, and bring them to bear on social issues including vivisection. In Cobbe's opinion, it was such quahies that distinguished women from men and made them uniquely capable of helping animals. Cobbe saw hditference as an empowering tool by whch women could lead British society into a more -civilised and moral world.

The questions that arose fiom the anti-vivisection controversy of the nineteenth century continue to resonate with contemporary animal advocates as they explore the nature of human obligations to animals. Cobbe's belief that women had sorneth~ng unique to bring to causes like anti-vivisection has particular implications for both the feminist and animal rights movements today. For women who have been involved in animal rights campaigns over the last thrty years, an emphasis on compassion as the motivation for helping animals provides a more satisfyrng way to engage in animal advocacy than many women have found in the rights-oriented approach taken by Peter

Singer and Tom Regan Both Singer and Regan have tended to downplay the emotional dimension of animal liberation out of a fear that it wil discredit the movement. But emotion should not be viewed as a public relations problem and women in the movement are increasingly coming to celebrate their emotional response to the suffermg of animals as a legitimate starting point for advocacy. Primarv Sources

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