35 Facts About Jane Cobden

Emma Jane Catherine Cobden was a British Liberal politician who was active in many radical causes.

Jane Cobden's election was controversial; legal challenges to her eligibility hampered and eventually prevented her from serving as a councillor.

Jane Cobden remained committed throughout her life to the "Cobdenite" issues of land reform, peace, and social justice, and was a consistent advocate for Irish independence from Britain.

Jane Cobden stayed in the Liberal Party, despite her profound disagreement with its stance on the suffrage issue.

Jane Cobden was born on 28 April 1851 in Westbourne Terrace, London.

Jane Cobden was the third daughter and fourth child of Richard Cobden, who at the time of her birth was a Radical MP for the West Riding.

Jane's mother was Catherine Anne, nee Williams, the daughter of a timber merchant from Machynlleth in Wales; the older Cobden children were Richard, born 1841; Kate, born 1844; and Ellen, born 1848.

Two further daughters followed Jane Cobden: Anne, born 1853, and Lucy, born 1861.

Jane Cobden was saved from bankruptcy by a public subscription which not only settled his debts but enabled him to acquire the farmhouse in which he had been born in 1804, at Dunford, near Heyshott in Sussex.

Jane Cobden rebuilt the property as a large villa, Dunford House, which became Jane Cobden's childhood home from the beginning of 1854.

Jane Cobden returned to the House of Commons in May 1859, as Liberal MP for Rochdale.

Richard Cobden died after a severe bronchial attack on 2 April 1865, a few weeks before Jane's 14th birthday.

Jane Cobden developed an interest in the question of women's suffrage after attending a conference in London, in 1871.

Jane Cobden became an active Liberal, on the radical wing of the party.

Jane Cobden joined the National Society's finance committee, and by 1880 was serving as its treasurer.

Jane Cobden joined the executive committee of the new body, which encouraged the affiliation of Women's Liberal Associations and hoped that a future Liberal government would grant women's enfranchisement.

Jane Cobden sent money and food to alleviate the Ryan family's distress.

Jane Cobden was in contact with Irish Land League leaders, including John Dillon and William O'Brien, and lobbied for the release of the latter after his imprisonment under the Protection of Person and Property Act 1881.

Jane Cobden was adopted by the party's Bow and Bromley division, and Sandhurst by Brixton.

Jane Cobden's appeal was dismissed, and Beresford Hope was installed in her place.

Jane Cobden faced no such challenge, since her runner-up was a fellow-Liberal who had promised to support her.

Jane Cobden argued that since they had been elected or selected unlawfully, their votes in the council had likewise been unlawful, making them liable to heavy financial penalties.

Jane Cobden was urged by Lansbury and others not to pay even this token, but to go to prison; she declined this course of action.

In 1892, at the age of 41, Cobden married Thomas Fisher Unwin, an avant-garde publisher whose list included works by Henrik Ibsen, Friedrich Nietzsche, H G Wells and the young Somerset Maugham.

The couple settled in South Kensington, from where Jane Cobden continued to pursue her own causes.

Jane Cobden moved closer to the militant wing in 1907 when she endorsed the WSPU's new magazine, Votes for Women.

The WSPU was split when members who objected to the Pankhurst family's authoritarian leadership formed themselves into the Women's Freedom League; Jane Cobden did not join Anne in the breakaway movement, although she supported its associated body, the Women's Tax Resistance League.

In 1911, Jane Cobden was responsible for the Indian women's delegation in the Women's Coronation Procession, a London demonstration organised by suffrage associations from Britain and the Empire.

In protest against the Liberal government's suffrage policies and its harsh treatment of militants, Jane Cobden resigned her honorary presidency of the Women's Liberal Association in Rochdale, her father's last constituency.

Jane Cobden found time to act as secretary to the memorial fund for Emma Cons, after the latter's death in 1912.

Jane Cobden supported Solomon Plaatje's campaign against the segregationist Natives' Land Act of 1913, a stance that led, in 1917, to her removal from the committee of the Anti-Slavery Society.

The Society's line was to support the Botha government's land reform policy; Jane Cobden denounced Sir John Harris, the Society's parliamentary representative, for being a false friend to the native people by secretly working against them.

In 1920, Jane Cobden gave Dunford House to the London School of Economics, of which she had become a governor.

Jane Cobden died, aged 96, on 7 July 1947, at Whitehanger Nursing Home in Fernhurst, Surrey.

Jane Cobden was, Howe says, "a woman of sentiment and enthusiasm who took up causes with a fire which brooked no opposition".