The Practice of Everyday Feminism: Frances Power Cobbe, Divorce, and the London Echo, 1868-1875

The Practice of Everyday Feminism: Frances Power Cobbe, Divorce, and the London Echo,1868-1875Author(s): Susan HamiltonSource: Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Fall, 2002), pp. 227-242Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Research Society for VictorianPeriodicalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20083887 .

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The Practice of Everyday Feminism: Frances Power Cobbe, Divorce, and the

London Echo, 1868-1875

SUSAN HAMILTON

Working three mornings a week, from December 1868 to March 1875, Frances Power Cobbe was second-leader writer for the London Echo, an

evening paper that inaugurated the new half-penny format. Though she was not the first woman to write regularly for the daily newspaper press, Cobbe's tenure at the Echo is a significant incident in the history of Victo rian feminism. First is its sheer value as "fact" about the kinds of work

Victorian women did. But Cobbe's time at the Echo also allows us to

explore the ways in which Cobbe made use of the cultural space opened up by her editorial work.1 Cobbe's leaders are important for the particular ways in which she uses the space of the editorial to offer alternate visions of women's lives, women's value, and ultimately women's history. This

paper approaches Cobbe's Echo writings as crucial sites for examining the non-feminist press's contribution to Victorian feminist practice and for

complicating or

enriching our sense of what constitutes nineteenth-cen

tury feminist practice. Work on the feminist specialised press continues to show the impor

tance of the press to the establishment of a distinctively feminist commu

nity and collectivity of Victorian women. My focus here is on the ways in

which Cobbe uses the daily newspaper editorial or leader in the non-fem inist newspaper press to practise feminist analysis in a form that sets it apart from the committee meetings, specialist journals, memorandum writing, and platform speeches that we commonly think of when we consider nine

teenth-century feminist activity.2 In writing in this distinctive space, Cobbe takes feminism "out" beyond the feminist community, conveying to a non-feminist identified audience how differently the day's news - a

murder, a law suit, a marriage, a divorce - reads through feminist lenses. The newspaper leader offers a distinctive space for feminist strategising.

It also presents challenges to scholarly assessment. As Laurel Brake has



228 Victorian Periodicals Review 35:3 Fall 2002

argued, it is the high-culture volume form, not the serial, that has been

"normalised institutionally" (209) by nineteenth- and twentieth-century

publishers, universities, and libraries. If the "elusiveness and unrecover

ability of full nineteenth-century part-issue and periodical texts hamper

study"(209), their elusiveness has also profoundly shaped the relation of

these materials to our understanding of nineteenth-century feminist prac tice. Print culture studies has shown the various ways in which print forms highlight different constituent elements of the commodified text.

For scholars of nineteenth-century feminism, the stress on "signature" or

the author function - the significant woman leader of a campaign or polit ical organisation

- has led to an examination of those speeches, letters, and

other writings of women that have survived in named archives. Organisa tions like Langham Place or the Ladies National Repeal similarly can

serve as a kind of "author" function; associated titles like the English Woman's Journal, Victoria, and the Cause can then be assessed as docu

ments with significant signatory import. But if an extended notion of "signature" or author function has cut one

key feminist path into the vast tangle of nineteenth-century serial texts,

other serial texts that have something to offer to studies of nineteenth

century feminisms are less amenable to this key category of organisation. The loss of "amenability" means a loss of content, certainly; the sheer heft

of serial engagements with issues of interest to feminist scholars can be

obscured.3 But elements of analysis such as the relations between pricing,

politics, and audience that have profound implications for our under

standing of feminism are also lost to consideration. The unsigned leader

in a half-penny evening paper circulates differently than the letter to the

editor of the Times, the paper delivered at the Social Science Congress, or

the signed piece in the Contemporary Review, even when the words are

identical across all of these forms. It is part of this paper's task to assess

this difference in circulation.

My overarching concern, then, in looking to Cobbe's Echo leaders, is

to explore the relations between cultural location or space (i.e., the daily non-feminist newspaper press), form and style (i.e., the thrice-weekly edi

torial), and analysis as part of an inquiry into the significance of Cobbe's

work at the boundaries between feminist and non-feminist audiences and

spaces to our larger understanding of Victorian feminism. In exploring these relations, I want also to give some sense of the texture of Cobbe's

writing: her humour, her storytelling abilities, and her agility in wielding the 1000-odd word limit available to her three times a week.

Not all of the leaders that I have been able to identify as Cobbe's work

discuss issues which fit easily into the very capacious boundaries of what

we might currently define as "feminist." Philippa Levine has defended the

value of feminism as a term designating the conscious, "thorough and



SUSAN HAMILTON 229

holistic understanding of the pervasiveness and connectedness of a host of

gendered subordinations" (1) that characterises nineteenth-century wo

men's activities. Drawing on that definition, I will focus here on a selec tion of Cobbe's writings about divorce as readily identifiable feminist

activity.4 But I would also insist in starting that the full range of Cobbe's

editorial scope - from anti-Ritualist objections, Church reform appeals,

workhouse governance concerns - requires assessment and attention as

feminist activity. After all, part of the way in which Cobbe occupies the

Echo's editorial space is by attending to a variety of social issues of the

day, from the grandly political to the humorously fleeting. It may be that

part of the negotiation in writing from the mainstream newspaper press -

part of what gets feminism some "say" there - is precisely the willingness to represent feminism as one concern among many. The overall effect of

any regular newspaper feminist voice is to make feminist analysis part of a

larger discussion, both at the level of the individual and across the format of the paper. It is certainly an effect of the format of a non-feminist paper,

made all the more visible by Cobbe's own contribution to and mainte nance of this heterogeneous format. I prefer a reading, however, which sees this range not so much as a strategy

- implying a tactical capitulation

to feminism's marginal political status - but as a crucial representation of

feminist practice. In this way, a key practitioner is seen to be a "citizen" in

the fullest sense, commenting on a range of issues that are not overtly gen dered whilst also insisting on the centrality of gender to all social analysis. In other words, I want to stress the way in which Cobbe's writing for the

Echo shows us nineteenth-century feminism as an analysis serially inte

grated into Victorian culture, as well as identifying feminism as targeting specific reforms or campaigns. Seeing feminism as materially integrated in this way

- within the day's news, within the textual space of a non-special ist paper

- means that we must see spaces like the Echo alongside the spe cialist feminist press, and the signed work of feminist organisations and

figures (including Cobbe), as valuable arenas or fields for feminist action. The London Echo was the first half-penny evening paper in England.

Published in response to the 1867 Reform Bill that increased working class male suffrage, the inaugural issue came out on December 8, 1868. It

quickly rose to a circulation of 100,000, the largest circulation to date of an evening paper. Its success was achieved in the face of initial antagonism towards the paper from newsagents, who refused to handle the paper because of the low profit margin its cover price represented. The Echo used newsboys, girls, and women as deliverers in response. Early adver tisements in the paper assume that the low price was aimed at a working class audience, and ads continued to address working-class male readers

throughout the Echo's run. But the paper, offering racing news and stock

prices from the 11:30 am London Stock Exchange report, became a com




muter paper as popular with city "gents" as with the desired working class readers. Writing three second-leader articles a week, Cobbe earned two guineas for each leader, a sum rather less than the three guineas she

received for a similar column in the Standard or the Daily News. None

theless, Cobbe averaged ?300 per year writing leaders and notes for the

Echo in her seven year tenure there. She left the paper only when her

friend, the editor Arthur Arnold, did - after the paper was sold in 1875.5 When the Echo first appeared in 1868, the Divorce Court had been

issuing separations and divorces for just over ten years. And, like many

newspapers of its time, the Echo considered divorce acceptable fodder for

the front page. The Court, its proceedings and particularly dramatic

divorce suits, received regular front page coverage, with occasional grace notes updating trial progress appearing in its more terse "Notes" section.

Unsurprisingly, then, one of Cobbe's earliest general editorial subjects in

the Echo is divorce. But the relation between divorce and the nineteenth

century newspaper press is rather more complicated than the apparently "natural" fit of the juicy divorce story to newspaper sales might indicate.

In her recent work on the British newspaper press and the Divorce Court

examining the effect of the court on the workings of the press, Anne

Humpherys complements important scholarship on the workings of the

Divorce Court (Hammerton, Shanley, Doggett, Holcombe) that explores its impact on the construction of marriage and gender. As Humpherys

notes, the Divorce Court led to the first "governmental restriction of

newspaper reporting of judicial proceedings" (220). Tracing the emer

gence of a genre of Divorce Court reporting, Humpherys also notes that

by the time of that Court's establishment in 1857, format for court

reportage was well-established and effectively transferred to the reports

coming out of the new Court. In 1875, for example, the official shorthand

reporter in the Divorce Court, as well as other reporters taking general notes, could provide copy for more than one paper at a time, which could

then edit that copy as it saw fit. The genre of the report was comple mented by the established rules governing placement of the reports in the

newspaper. Sensational divorce cases were covered in the news section, where they would be summarised and, occasionally, editorialised. Other

wise, divorce court proceedings often appeared in the "Law Report" sec

tion of the paper, usually in the second-half of the paper and in reduced

type. Humpherys observes that law reports tended to come after both the

foreign and domestic news, parliamentary news, and theatre reviews, but

just before the sports news and entertainment announcements, "thus

emblemizing their liminal cultural status - part record, part entertain

ment" (221). What is most important about Humpherys' work for my purposes here

is her argument that the press was a strong force in "naturalising" divorce



SUSAN HAMILTON 231

and that "Divorce Court and press together both lessened the tolerance

for violence in the family and helped construct the notion of marriage as a

equal companionate relationship between husband and wife" (228). In

other words, seriality - the cumulative effect of repeated coverage

- is a

vital tool for normalising divorce. Cobbe begins writing in the Echo in

1868, eleven years after the establishment of the London Divorce Court

and when the genre of divorce reporting is, by Humpherys' chronology,

long established. Cobbe's work on the Echo can be read in accordance

with the larger patterns that Humpherys identifies, particularly her writ

ing on domestic violence. But Humpherys' work also helps to identify differences from these larger patterns in the specific intervention made by Cobbe's editorial writing in the Echo. We can read the end effect of broad

press coverage of divorce across a variety of newspapers as a "naturalis

ing" of divorce and a reconstruction of marriage, in effect reading divorce as inherently progressive. Cobbe's press work, however, raises the ques tion of the adequacy of divorce law as the primary legal response to con

cerns emerging from the marriage debate. In other words, what we see in

her writings is not a "naturalising" of divorce and an accompanying valourisation of companionate marriage. Instead, Cobbe uses the space of the newspaper leader differently. Capitalising on the press's examination of divorce, Cobbe's leaders constitute the serial production of a feminist discourse. That discourse works in turn to forward an analysis that does not come

ultimately to rest on

companionate marriage as a self-evident or

uncomplicated measure of progress. As Shanley, Holcombe, and others have argued, the existence of a Law

Reform Society that undertook divorce reform prior to the establishment of an organised feminist movement complicated feminist participation in

that reform. The reforms of the 1857 law retained many of the unequal structures that characterised marriage (i.e., differing grounds for the suit for men and women) and hence still required feminist critique. Cobbe

engages serially with divorce in a non-feminist editorial space, pushing forward this analysis to a readership which, perhaps, sees the provisions of the 1857 law as taking sufficient care of the problem of marriage, and so providing sufficient reform. In Cobbe's leaders, marriage

- compan

ionate or not - is not the primary category through which women's lives are structured; nor is it the intent of her writing to agitate solely for mar

riage reform. Cobbe locates her critique of the stories coming out of the Divorce Court prior to the point of marriage, in the conditions that limit women's choices, in women's education, and employment opportunities. In doing so, Cobbe is forwarding a Victorian feminist analysis of mar

riage as a shaping force in women's lives, introducing feminist ideas to an

audience who may or may not be aware of them or supportive of them.7 The earliest Cobbe leader on divorce is the 1869 "A Lesson in Matri




mony," published about two months into her tenure on the paper. Cobbe's focus is on the 212 divorce suits then awaiting adjudication in the

Divorce Court: "[I]f this is not business," she writes, "we should like to

know what is" (18 January 1869). Cobbe's overt purpose in this leader is

to consider the larger social significance of the case numbers and to assess

if the Court's existence can be tallied with the Englishman's boast that

"society [.. .] is in its golden age, and wants absolutely nothing to realize

his perfect beau ideal of the human happy family -

nothing, not even a

Divorce court" (18 January 1869). More particularly, however, her object and vehicle of that analysis is not so much divorce as that "boasting ani

mal," the Englishman himself. He sees that: the numbers are "wonderfully

eloquent in their own way," yet puzzles that the usual "unanswerable

explanation" of class does not apply here. The numbers of cases could be

understood if they had been "sent into the Divorce Court by the lower

class of the community alone [... for t]he state of moral degradation at

which our poor seem to have arrived would account for figures ten times

the sum of these" (18 January 1869). But, Cobbe's focus is on the plaintiffs in the cases themselves, the "class who can afford to pay for peace and do

not mind publicity" (18 January 1869); the class, in other words, to which

the boasting Englishman belongs. Here, she questions, "[H]ow is it that

they make so bad a show, and argue so little in favour of the moral health

of that society of which our typical Englishman is never tired of saying

good things?" (18 January 1869). Cobbe dismisses those who would read

divorce figures as yet another sign that "things have arrived at a very seri

ous pass indeed." Her intent instead is to "give a very simple reason for all

this and urge that our marriages turn out so badly because they are not

well made" (18 January 1869). Her analysis of its poor craftsmanship comes to rest more and more insistently through the course of the edito

rial on the boasting Englishman himself, particularly the gap between his

sense of "what an ideal woman ought to be" and his inevitable disappoint ment when the "perfect marble statue" turns out to be "a dull, foolish

woman, who has no sympathies for anything he undertakes, and knows

no world beyond her next-door neighbour and her dress" (18 January

1869). "A Lesson in Matrimony" concludes with the observation that

there is "something radically wrong about our present matrimonial sys tem" (18 January 1869) without any suggestions for improvement.

There is nothing "new" to Victorian feminism in this editorial, nothing "new" for us to add to Victorian feminism's arsenal of words and thought.

But the "newness" of an idea is a very complicated affair, as much a matter

of audience as of ratiocinative rigour. At the very least, Cobbe's leader

here gets the message out to an audience which, not having read Woll

stonecraft or Cobbe's earliest periodical essays, finds the critique of the

"woman as ornament" school of marriage thought a bracing read. As



SUSAN HAMILTON ?33

Brake has argued, the stratified readership that constitutes the Victorian

publishing market was understood to require and respond to a range of

publishing formats and prices. Leader writing is then a critical strategy in

bringing feminist perspectives to a segment of this stratified readership that may not read, or perhaps can not afford, the Englishwoman's Review or any of the quarterlies and monthlies that published feminist writing from time to time. In addition, we can look to Cobbe's manipulation of

the available cultural space of the leader and its constitutive elements.

Writing under the assumed masculinity of the anonymous editorial signa ture, the routine feminist analysis espoused in Cobbe's leader reads differ

ently. By marking middle-class masculinity as constructed, as the figure

requiring education, the leader inverts the expected relations between

Englishmen, women, and education, repositioning the ornamental woman

on whose behalf a plea for education is more typically made. Here, in the

anonymous, default masculine space of the leader, it is the middle class man who is carried away by emotion, whose fancies about women border on the ridiculous, and whose ideas of love and marriage are "very stupid and uneducated thing[s]" (18 January 1869).

By using the default masculinity of the newspaper leader, Cobbe's

leader questions middle-class masculinity from the inside, thwarting pos sible accusations of feminist bias as she does so. We can also see the default

position of masculinity reframed in Cobbe's usage. Occupying anony mous masculinity, Cobbe does not simply exploit a space in order to be

heard - as we so often read women's use of anonymous and pseudony

mous signatures. She also shows us that this necessary strategy is capa cious enough to enable a critique of masculinity. Rather than merely channeling feminist critique through a masculinity that serves only as a

launching device of approbation, the Echo leader voices an assessment of

masculinity's limits. The default masculinity of the newspaper leader is also inherently expansive. The leader here claims more than just the voice of "one man," however sympathetic to feminist analysis. It is constitu

tively collective. Behind the single voice of its writing stands the weight of the paper as a collective whole.

The brief observations of this early leader serve, in many ways, as a kind

of quick guide to what will be more fully worked through arguments in

Cobbe's later editorials. As Cobbe's dexterity in manipulating what the

textual space of the leader can hold increases, there is a strong sense that

she comes to use the editorial space in more targeted ways to elaborate,

specify, and make concrete her analysis of what is wrong with marriage.

Though later leaders will continue to offer analyses of the Divorce Court's

workings discrete from discussion of particular cases, her writing comes to

separate into the various elements that we see positioned behind these

early comments: the question of domestic violence, middle-class women's




preparation for marriage, the idealisation of women, married women's

legal disabilities, and the representation of working-class women. By

repeatedly focusing on such issues, Cobbe exposes the continued exist ence of a set of power structures that the recent availability of divorce as a

remedy can obscure, if only superficially. Cobbe's consideration of

divorce in a broader framework, her consideration of the numbers of

divorce cases, serves not to lament divorce itself, but to understand that

those numbers point to conditions of marriage that remain unchanged, no

matter how many or few divorces move through the Court. The serial

form of the leader here structurally embodies the power structures she assesses: each day produces case after case for critical commentary.

Let me turn now to Hay ter v H ay ter > the subject of a leader titled

"Money in Women's Hands" written more than a year into Cobbe's time at the Echo. Again, the analysis here is not "new" to those of us familiar

with the feminist traditions supporting nineteenth-century feminist activ

ity. We must expand our remit in searching for the "new" to include

Cobbe's manipulation of the possibilities of the leader space and attend to

her increasing proficiency in using it. Where the early "A Lesson in Mat

rimony" capitalised on the reading of anonymity as masculinity, the case

of Hayter v Hayter shows Cobbe using her now finely-honed storytelling skills to connect larger political processes

- in this case, the movement of

the proposed Married Women's Property Act through the House - to the

daily lives of her readers. Again, it is the space of the leader itself that gen erates a substantial part of the feminist effect of these writings. "Money in

Women's Hands" is leader number 362. It takes its place alongside or

within a vast march of leaders responding, assessing, and commenting on

the day's news, day in and day out. In other words, part of what is negoti ated in the newspaper leader space is time itself, a time that differently reg isters in a

monthly or

quarterly essay, an annual lecture, or a platform

appearance. The leader stresses the sheer dailiness of the events discussed.

Time will bring the material requiring feminist attention - the next divorce

case, the next murder or domestic battery, the next breach of promise -

just as it will bring the next leader's take on those events. Within this daily

space, Cobbe's storytelling skills are vital. She renders distinct a story that must also take its place alongside innumerable stories telling, perhaps, the same or similar tales. Indeed, it is Cobbe's point to capture the similarity of these tales - which she will argue are structurally connected - within a

story that also captures their specificity, their uniqueness, and their per

sonality. In 1865, when a clerk in a mercantile office earning ?400 a year married

the daughter of the secretary of the Duke of Kent with a fortune of ?3000, he did not anticipate that the means by which he dispensed sums to his

wife for household expenses would become the stuff of London newspa



SUSAN HAMILTON 235

pers. But as the Echo second leader, "Money in Women's Hands," reveals to its readers, Mr. Hayter

never gave Mrs. Hayter a separate allowance for

her own use; the result, and one cause for the divorce suit, was a debt for over ?100 payable

to a range of linen-drapers, confectioners, livery-stable

keepers, and boot-makers, for which Mr. Hayter was responsible under current matrimonial law. Other elements of the Hayters' domestic life are

also recounted: "he used to go to his parents to breakfast, and he was

there again in the evenings three to four times a week" (5 February 1870) with Mrs. Hayter frequently left alone with their two young children.

Why does Cobbe partially reproduce the Hayter v Hayter court tran

scripts in "Money in Women's Hands" for her Echo readers? At first

glance, following the line of Humpherys' argument, Cobbe's leader par

ticipates in a larger press phenomenon that naturalises divorce and argues for more companionate ideals than those which surely framed the Hay ters' marriage. But Cobbe is also using those records to convey the daily texture of a specific life, captured in the semi-dramatising format of her

leaders, and the killing detail of one couple's banal disaffection. Where

Cobbe's first divorce leader referred only briefly to women's interest in

dress as a "disappointment" to their husbands, this leader attacks such a

representation of marital relations, showing their source in the emotional

drudgery of daily living. The expected response to the Hayters' woes -

apparently wrought by the wife who flies in the face of the family finances by buying expensive clothing

- might be to "throw all the blame

of such disasters on the folly, vanity, and selfishness of women." But

Cobbe departs from conventional analysis to offer this commentary:

To expect that an adult human being should be at the same time entirely under

control and as irresponsible as a

baby in a cradle, and yet at the same time fully

prepared to exercise all the judgment and self-restraint to be acquired by experi

ence and independence, is just one of those absurd anomalies in which we find

ourselves landed after starting from contradictory premises. (5 February 1870)

Where English stereotypes of women offer the phenomena of extrava

gant wives as irrefutable, if mysterious -

explanations for the Hayters' present dilemma - Cobbe focuses on the strictures of women's day-to

day lives, protesting the "state of hourly dependence" that was Mrs. Hay ter's life and the general degradation of women.

There is no mystery in all this. Women do but follow the universal law which

makes freedom the indispensable condition on which alone the virtue of frugality, as well as all other virtues, must be worked out. If they

are to deal with the dis

posal of money at all, and not sit like little birds in a nest waiting for crumbs to be

dropped into their mouths, they must needs be trained to do so by giving them a




free part in its expenditure, and enforcing on them a stern

responsibility as to the

incurring of debt. (5 February 1870)

Her column ends with a matter-of-fact appeal to the House to pass the

revised Married Woman's Property Bill of the next session and the sug

gestion that women be taught the "value of money" alongside the piano. Cobbe's specific contribution in this leader then is to draw readers' loyal ties away from too pat an understanding of the events. By bringing her

readers up close to the daily humiliations of a woman whose own life

plays out against a backdrop of dependence, drudgery, and an indifferent

husband, Cobbe urges them towards a feminist, politicised analysis of an

individual predicament. Legal reform initiatives, which make their way

through official political institutions using memorials, petitions, and all

the expected forms of political pressure, risk boredom and distance. In

"Money in Women's Hands," these same reform initiatives are presented as part of a story, as part of a life.

A final case, Kelly v Kelly, the subject of two Echo leaders, showcases

Cobbe's ability to use the leader's ability to respond quickly to the day's news in order to connect large political processes to the daily grittiness of

lives. Mr. Kelly, an Irish clergyman of forty-years experience, is sued for divorce on grounds of what we would term mental cruelty. The divorce is

granted, with alimony payable to the wife; though no physical cruelty was

involved, "moral force had been used sufficient to break down health, and

justify the law in interfering for the protection of the wife's person" (11

February 1870). The first of Cobbe's two leaders, "Mr. Kelly's 'Quietus,'" details the nature of Kelly's treatment of his wife, his "quiet domestic

infamy" (11 February 1870) and his attempt to defend his actions as

"affectionate discipline" (11 February 1870). Vilified in front of her hus

band's congregation for her "filthiness of spirit" and her "whore's fore

head," constantly badgered to confess to actions she had not performed, Mrs. Kelly was treated "worse than any child in any school, the butt of

ridicule, the subject for abuse, the object of incessant detraction, the recep tacle for all the venom and filth that can be poured out upon her unoffend

ing head by the one person especially bound to love, cherish, and protect her" (11 February 1870). There are no "explosive" events detailed here;

rather, the leader shows how degradation and subjugation -

explosive events of a different nature - are enacted in time, day in day out ad nau

seam. The leader ends by quoting the last words of Lord Penzance's

judgement:

So much injustice, so much perversion of mind, such abiding

rancour for so tri

fling a cause, so much deliberate oppression under provocation so slight, moral

chastisement so severe, administered with so much system, maintained with such



SUSAN HAMILTON 237

tenacity up to the brink of so perilous

a danger to health, with so utter a

disregard

of consequences, and all to extort confession of acts never committed, and force

repentance for no guilt, will probably

never be witnessed again. (11 February

1870)

The second leader on this disturbing case, "Mr. Kelly Once More!,"

responds to a 263-page pamphlet that Mr. Kelly wrote and published after the completion of the trial, a copy of which was directed specifically to the leader-writer of the Echo. In this pamphlet, Mr. Kelly defends his

actions on the grounds of his wife's criminal failure to fulfill her wifely role, most particularly her failure to sympathise with him "in time of

trouble." The leader is at pains to point out the nature of that "trouble."

Mr. Kelly had lost ?1100 in lawsuits undertaken "to vindicate the liberty of the pulpit" (10 March 1870) and lost further amounts in unsound

investments:

"Again I asked her," he says, indignantly, "Did you console with me on the occa

sion." And the answer is: "You were violently angry with me for not sympathis

ing with you in the loss of ?5000!" "This," says Mr. Kelly, with mournful pathos,

"was not sharing with me in my ministerial trials." (10 March 18)

Again, Cobbe's storytelling abilities, particularly her economical use of

the semi-dramatised report to comment on Kelly's self-justification, show us what the leader can offer to Victorian feminist analysis: timeliness, a

pressing sense of lived injustice, and a feminist critique woven directly into the fabric of reportage. Utilising the leader to set the matter straight directly, to rebut Kelly's narrativisation of his life, Cobbe points out that

the lost ?5000 came to Mr. Kelly through a bequest from Mrs. Kelly's sis

ter, the bequest becoming Mr. Kelly's lawful property upon his marriage:

Lord Penzance's final sentence, decreeing alimony of ?164 a year to Mrs. Kelly, cannot fail to give universal satisfaction, seeing that the greater part of Mr. Kelly's

money was derived from his wife's and her sister's property, and had been wasted

by him in those lawsuits and bad investments in unfortunate results, in which she

so cruelly refused to

"sympathise." (10 March 1870)

The leader ends by recognising the new precedent for divorce set by the case:

Henceforth it is ruled that there exists a line short of either physical cruelty or

adultery, over which, when a husband

- or, we presume, a wife

- trespasses, the

law of the land will interpose to free the sufferer from the yoke. Let domestic des

pots beware! (10 March 1870)




The two leaders addressing Kelly v Kelly tackle the idea of companion ate marriage head on. Mr. Kelly had, in effect, commandeered the com

panionate ideal itself as perverse justification for his actions, and it is his

appeal to "affectionate discipline" that so outrages Cobbe. Divorce cover

age in other newspapers may serve to promote companionate marriage.

But, Cobbe's Kelly v Kelly leaders exploit the genre's immediacy - and

the intimacy that such immediacy can convey - as vital proof that the

companionate ideal of marriage is no guarantee of women's rights and is as liable to malicious contortion as the "lord and master" logic of mar

riage ever was. Reverend Kelly is skewered by his stake in his own self

representation, by his insistence in telling his story, and the ability of the

leader to engage quickly and pithily with his text. The effect is striking. A

story adroitly told, semi-dramatised in the leader, presents the "stuff" of

the argument in support of divorce in a way that the formal exchange of

logical political positions cannot. The work of Cobbe's leaders then is to

give texture to the call for divorce.

Here too we can see the value of reading the newspaper press through the lens of feminist history, and vice versa. Where, for example, Hum

pherys' interest in the shaping effects of the Court on the newspaper leads to an examination of the emergence of a companionate ideal in press cov

erage of divorce - on the affective relations between husband and wife - it

also necessarily displaces from her analysis the feminist concern with the

structural inequities that result under current marriage law and are

retained in the new Divorce Law. Cobbe's writing complicates the field of

the newspaper leader. Her work there shows us that the emerging com

panionate ideal is also necessarily the stuff of feminist analysis. Though she urges the need to establish loving marriages, the Kelly leaders suggest that healthy affective relations between husbands and wives can never

hope to flourish in a climate of such legal disabilities, nor can the compan ionate ideal itself escape ideological manipulation. Where loving relations

may have mitigated the effects of the economic, social, and political asym

metry between the husbands and wives, it would also seem that such lov

ing relations can rarely be the likely end result of those same asymmetries. It would be misleading to suggest that the bulk of Cobbe's second lead

ers concern specific cases then before the Divorce Court or the stories of

dissolving marriages coming from it. They do not. But Cobbe's frequent

writing on divorce law, breach of promise suits, domestic violence, Mar

ried Women's Property Law, and UK marriage laws generally, do consti

tute a significant commentary on the state of marriage, and so participate in the larger phenomenon Humpherys charts. Importantly, the separate treatment of these concerns means that not only is the fullest possible context for understanding divorce put forward, but divorce itself is not

privileged as the exclusive site for the discussion of the state of marriage. Cobbe's use of the editorial space to return repeatedly to discussions of



SUSAN HAMILTON 239

the legal and social terms of marriage, as well as the abuses within mar

riage in her reportage and analysis of domestic violence cases, is one way in which Victorian feminists participated in the larger press's rethinking

of marriage that Anne Humpherys argues is evident in press coverage of

the new Divorce Court proceedings. It is not merely Cobbe's discussion

of divorce cases themselves that performs this work, though they most

clearly participate in the process that Humpherys describes. But all of

Cobbe's discussions of women's legal disabilities within marriage, of wife

torture, of breach of promise actions, partake in this larger press phenom enon. Importantly, though, I would argue that Cobbe's writing works

not to idealise marriage or denaturalise divorce. Rather, Cobbe's writing works to open up the field or domain within which marriage is discussed.

That opening up does not retain marriage (however reformed) as the pri mary category through which women's lives are shaped and assessed but

includes employment and education as categories through which women

stake their life's claims.

As importantly, Cobbe's daily (or thrice weekly) application of femi

nist logic to the day's news uses the space made available through the edi

torial to insist on feminism's relevance, its stake in the daily lives of men

and women. This is a distinctive contribution made all the more signifi cant because it does not take place in a feminist-identified textual space.

The column does not appear in the minutes of a Married Women's Prop erty committee meeting nor in the pages of the Englishwoman's Journal, but in the pages of a half-penny evening daily paper read by those who we

cannot assume were already feminist-identified or interested in becoming so. The Echo leader as a material artifact moves away from presenting feminist ideas and demands as pressure-group politics towards seeing feminism as a political tool for everyday use, responding to day-by-day realities. At a time when there were no feminist dailies, the dailiness of

Cobbe's leaders embody in their material form the value of feminism as

an everyday practice. Cobbe's ability in this cultural space to imagine feminism as a valuable tool in understanding the everyday occurrences in

men's and women's lives demonstrates that feminism is not simply a

demand for change to the sphere of women's actions, but an integrated

perspective from which to assess the world's problems.9

University of Alberta

NOTES

i Both Eliza Lynn Linton and Harriet Martineau, among others, wrote for the

newspaper press. Martineau's work in the Daily News, writing on women's edu

cation, political rights, health, marriage laws, etc., comes closest to the kind of




work that Cobbe did. But it is important to note

key differences between them.

Barbara Caine has noted the ways in which Martineau's autobiography "reveals

the power structures which brought such suffering in her life, and at the same

time refuses in any overt way to see her life as in itself making a case for feminist

rebellion" (EFyi). She also points out, along with Susan Hoecker-Drysdale, that most of Martineau's newspaper work was written under a male pseudonym.

Caine reads Martineau's use of the pseudonym as

emphasising "her disinclina

tion to see herself or her own position

as illustrative of the broader situation of

women" (70), comparing this "lack" to Josephine Butler's up-front and

"signed" call to all women to join each other in the fight against sexual oppres

sion. In comparison, Cobbe's work on the Echo was anonymous, as were all

leader-writers, whilst her work in the periodical press was variously signed,

unsigned, and initialed as the value and meaning of "signature" shifted over the

great changes in the press during the period she worked. It is also important to

stress that Cobbe's autobiography includes a chapter, "The Claims of Women,"

that indicates her investment in representing her life, at least in part, as a

"woman's life," and even, as the term "claims" suggests, as a feminist life. My

point is not to claim Cobbe as a more self-identified feminist than Martineau,

though this may in fact be the case. Rather, I would suggest that this range of

writing practices by Victorian women engaged in the analysis of women's lives

in the press indicates a need to be careful in claiming an absolute meaning for the

significance of signed and unsigned work in the newspaper press.

2 See Hamilton for a fuller discussion of the Victorian feminist press.

3 Valuable case study scholarship on the relation between gender and writer, spe

cific periodical, as a topic, etc., continues. See, for example, Brake (1994; 2000),

Herstein, Levine (1990), Nestor, and Robinson.

4 Though the sample enlisted here is small, it is based on reading all of Cobbe's

leaders from 1868-1875.

5 See Mitchell. For an overview of Cobbe's feminist philosophy, see Caine

(i99*) 6 See Humpherys. 7 Cobbe's unsigned leaders have been identified by a combination of stylistic

analysis and cross-checking with Cobbe's Echo scrapbook. The scrapbook was

discovered by Sally Mitchell (who has shared her work on them so generously with me) and is now lodged in the National Library of Wales. The scrapbook,

in which Cobbe kept her accounts of Echo earnings, presents a good, though

not exhaustive, checklist for Cobbe's leader writing. Since many pages are miss

ing, the scrapbook has not been my sole guide for ascertaining authorship. As

important has been stylistic analysis of the leaders, which combines looking for

distinctive or "signature" constructions, allusions to Cobbe's known published

work, and cross-references between the leaders themselves. Other items in the

newspaper, particularly the Notes and Letters sections, have provided occa

sional clues to leader authorship.



SUSAN HAMILTON 241

8 See Brake (2001), 210.

9 The columns thus participate in what Levine (1987) identifies as Victorian fem inism's characteristic holistic orientation.

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