Being a feminist in Victorian England required courage and a capacity for independent thought. These qualities Barbara Bodichon (April 8, 1827 to June 11, 1891) had in good quantities. She was a close fiend of Hilaire Belloc's mother and George Eliot to name a few 19th century luminaries. Bodichon was an artist and social reformer, activism for which her lineage and wealth prepared her. She for instance gave Girton College at Oxford a great deal of money. She died at one of her homes, Scalands Gate in Sussex, a place for which she had wanted a dovecote for owls, but was informed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti that cats would climb into it and kill the owls.
Bodichon did not speak out against vivisection, because she thought (according to a source I cannot find right now) "it were better for women [not] to support vivisection, rather than in the science world, get singled out as an opponent of an aspect of that world." Like I said, independent thought.
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