SOURCE: Hamilton, Susan. “‘A Crisis in Woman's History’: Frances Power Cobbe's Duties of Women and the Practice of Everyday Feminism.” Women's History Review 11, no. 4 (2002): 577-93.

In the following essay, Hamilton suggests that Cobbe's Duties of Women instructs women to practice feminism appropriately in everyday life, and to display courage and self-reliance while remaining dutifully conscientious, unselfish, temperate, and chaste.

In 1881, thirteen years before the New Woman made her official appearance, and over twenty years before the advent of militant feminist tactics, Frances Power Cobbe looked at the women's movement around her, and pronounced ‘a crisis in woman's history’.¹ More particularly, Cobbe noted, with increasing dismay, a looseness or slipperiness to the cultural meaning of suffrage, and the emancipated woman who would claim it, that compelled her to step into the fray, offering a strict definition of emancipated womanhood and of who could rightfully claim the vote.

This article...