Frances Power Cobbe

Frances Power Cobbe was an Irish feminist philosopher, journalist, and social reformer whose prolific writings touched on ethics, religion, animal rights, and women's suffrage. A committed theist, she argued against materialism and the mechanistic view of nature, grounding her ethics in a direct moral intuition of duty she believed was implanted in human beings by God rather than derived from experience or calculation.

Cobbe was one of the first women to gain recognition as a serious philosopher and was a pioneering campaigner against vivisection, founding the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection in 1898. Her essay Wife Torture in England raised public awareness of domestic violence decades before it became a recognised social problem. She represents a strand of Victorian feminism grounded in religious rather than secular values, and her arguments for animal welfare were unusually principled for her era.