Frances Power Cobbe (4 December 1822 – 5 April 1904) was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, religious thinker, social reformer, anti-vivisection activist and leading women's suffrage campaigner.

She founded a number of animal advocacy groups, including the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) in 1875 and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) in 1898, and was a member of the executive council of the London National Society for Women's Suffrage.

She was born in Newbridge House in the family estate in present-day Donabate, County Dublin.

[6] In letters and published writing, Cobbe referred to Lloyd alternately as "husband," "wife," and "dear friend.

Returning to England Cobbe tried working at the Red Lodge Reformatory and living with the owner, Mary Carpenter, from 1858 to 1859.

Her 1878 essay Wife-Torture in England influenced the passage of the 1878 Matrimonial Causes Act, which gave women of violent husbands the right to a legal separation.

[12] They proposed regular inspections of licensed premises and that experimenters must always use anaesthetics except under time-limited personal licences.

In response Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Burdon Sanderson and others drafted a rival Playfair's Bill which proposed a lighter system of regulation.

Cobbe later came to think the Victoria Street Society had become too moderate and started the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection in 1898.

It had been such a friendship as is rarely seen – perfect in love, sympathy, and mutual understand.”[14] They are buried together at Saint Illtyd Church Cemetery, Llanelltyd, Gwynedd, Wales.

Cobbe persuaded Charles Darwin to read Immanuel Kant's Metaphysics of Morals.

[20] Darwin had a review copy of Descent of Man sent to her (as well as to Alfred Russel Wallace and St. George Jackson Mivart.

[26] Her books included The Pursuits of Women (1863), Essays New and Old on Ethical and Social Subjects (1865), Darwinism in Morals, and other Essays (1872), The Hopes of the Human Race (1874), The Duties of Women (1881), The Peak in Darien, with some other Inquiries touching concerns of the Soul and the Body (1882), The Scientific Spirit of the Age (1888) and The Modern Rack: Papers on Vivisection (1889), as well as her autobiography.

For example, Margaret Oliphant in The Victorian Age of English Literature, when discussing philosophy, said "There are few ladies to be found among these ranks, but the name of Miss Frances Power Cobbe may be mentioned as that of a clear writer and profound thinker".

[27] A portrait of her is included in a mural by Walter P. Starmer unveiled in 1921 in the church of St Jude-on-the-Hill in Hampstead Garden Suburb, London.

[28] Her name and picture (and those of 58 other women's suffrage supporters) are on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London, unveiled in 2018.

[29][30][31] Her name is listed (as F. Power Cobbe) on the Reformers’ Memorial in Kensal Green Cemetery in London.