Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy was an ardent ‘woman emancipator’ from the 1860s, and the most significant British feminist theorist of her generation. Her principal contribution to feminist ideology was made in 1895, as honorary secretary of the Women’s Emancipation Union (WEU), a numerically small and short-lived parliamentary pressure group. Wolstenholme Elmy was the first woman ever to speak from a public platform on the sensitive topic of conjugal rape, and her pamphletWomen and the Lawrefashioned the discourse surrounding female bodily autonomy in order to link the issue of ‘consent’ to maternity to ‘consent’ in matters of government.² She argued...

The most well-known portrait photograph of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy presents an image of a petite, frail-looking elderly woman.¹ Her hair is dressed in a cascade of grey ringlets and she gazes out at the viewer with penetrating, dark eyes. At the base of her throat a large cameo brooch is pinned to a dark dress. It is her only visible jewellery.

While few of these images remain today, Elizabeth was proud that a professional photographer employed by the WSPU had travelled to her home in Buglawton, Cheshire for the sitting in 1907.² Many of the photographs were sold to raise...

Elizabeth’s admission to the College of Preceptors marked the beginning of her public role. At the age of twenty-eight, she was now an experienced headmistress, following a profession she had consciously chosen. Her work suited both her abilities and her temperament. She believed passionately in the worthiness of her occupation and was convinced that young women shared both the rationality of their male peersandtheir aptitude for study. Mid-Victorian gendered ideology had, she argued, deliberately denied girls’ intellectual needs by moulding them into preening, pious ‘angels’.¹ Domesticity had left many stunted and unfulfilled and she was determined to break...

When considering Elizabeth’s lifelong commitment to feminism, it is difficult to single out one period of particular endeavour. Nonetheless, the years between 1868 and 1874 were among the most demanding. She worked until January 1873 from her school at Moody Hall. By then, however, her religious scepticism had grown so pronounced that she felt unable, with a clear conscience, to teach the Christian doctrine that was central to the prescribed curriculum. Though heart-sore, she abandoned her profession, taking up, instead, an offer to become the first professional employee of the women’s movement at a salary of £300 per annum.¹ As...

The circumstances of Elizabeth’s pregnancy could not help but cause comment once the matter came to public attention. However, the exact moment when the furore began is open to debate – though many surviving sources attest to the salacious gossip which flourished as her pregnancy advanced. The reason for these spicy exchanges was obvious, as prevailing bourgeois ideology insisted that any ‘woman freed [from legal] “restraints” on her sexuality [had] crossed the threshold into vice’ – the sordid, lawless and godless domain of the prostitute.¹ For a key spokeswoman of the women’s movement to be regarded in this way was both divisive...

Elizabeth rejoiced that the bells of the New Year of 1883 had rung in a new era of justice for her sex. ‘The legal position of every wife in England’, she wrote, ‘had change[d] from that of her husband’s chattel to that of a responsible human being.’² She did not, however, rest on the laurels of the MWPC’s success. Rather, buoyed by its achievements, she turned her attention to the persistence of the sexual double standard in matters of divorce and the guardianship of children. While her work was pursued with as much enthusiasm as before, the latter 1880s were...

In the aftermath of her resignation from the Women’s Franchise League, Elizabeth joined her husband in working for the Fair Trade alliance. By this time, Ben had been elected to the General Council of the Fair Trade League and his literary battles with free trader rivals often featured in both the national and regional press.¹ Although asked to take a more prominent role in the national movement, he refused, and elected to work principally in the Macclesfield district. His health was no longer robust and, following his retirement from business, he appreciated having more time to write. He hoped, indeed,...

The winding up of the WEU, the organisation to which Elizabeth had given her time as a ‘labour of love’, did not signal a period of rest. Within three weeks, she had written a topical polemic on the suffrage question for theManchester Guardian,entitled ‘Our “outlanders” at home’, castigating the government for preparing to defend the rights of disenfranchised male settlers in the Boer Republics of South Africa while every British woman remained without a political voice.² Cleverly, ‘Outlanders’ turned the tables on those who considered weakness a consideration in the matter, for Elizabeth pointed out that if matters...

Though Elizabeth privately lamented the loss of her husband she seldom reflected on their lives together in her correspondence after 1906. As always, she resolutely overcame distress and looked to the future. Ben’s death afforded her a chance to travel more widely and to ‘make holiday’ – though journeys often combined work with pleasure.² One such trip was made to Manchester on 30 June 1906 to witness Christabel Pankhurst’s graduation as a Bachelor of Law at the Whitworth Hall. She greatly enjoyed the ceremony, and noted that the crowd’s cries of ‘Why haven’t you brought your banner?’ as celebrity suffragette Christabel...

After Elizabeth’s death the colleagues with whom she had shared the struggles of women’s emancipation remained strangely silent. She received a meagre tally of obituaries: one, anonymously authored, appeared in the NUWSS journal, theCommon Causeand another (also anonymous) in theManchester Guardian– this reprinted in her local paper, theCongleton Chronicle.¹ The third and most detailed was authored by Sylvia Pankhurst and published in the socialist Workers’ Dreadnought on 23 March 1918.³ In her 1931 autobiography, Sylvia endeavoured to portray Elizabeth as a worthy and progressive activist, but also condemned her notoriety as a scandalous, ‘free-love’ secularist. Also,...