Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and the Victorian Feminist Movement

Maureen Wright’s meticulously researched biography of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy offers the first in-depth account of the life and work of a woman who, though central to so many Victorian and Edwardian feminist campaigns, has played only a ‘walk-on’ part in subsequent histories. This biography is therefore an important and useful reappraisal, long overdue. Wolstenholme Elmy died aged 85 in 1918, living just long enough to witness the apparent culmination of her long-standing work for women’s suffrage in the Representation of the People Act. Yet Wolstenholme Elmy proved too radical for many of the leaders of the suffrage movement—a factor which surely contributed to her exclusion from its early chronicles. She was not only a consistently oppositional voice within successive feminist campaigns but also a Secularist and outspoken critic of Christianity. Worse still, she had entered into a ‘free union’ with fellow Secularist Ben Elmy, only marrying him in the face of immense pressure from the more moderate (and, indeed, dominant) wing of the women’s movement when she became pregnant in 1874. Yet, as Wright’s biography demonstrates, Wolstenholme Elmy’s opposition to marriage was no mere rebellious whim but part of a clear and coherent feminist vision that she enacted in numerous political campaigns over the course of her long life

Art history · Biography · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Suffrage · Wright · Cultural History and Identity Formation · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law