Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and the Victorian Feminist Movement: The Biography of an Insurgent Woman by Maureen Wright (review)

When in 1906 the liberal prime minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, entreated a women’s parliamentary deputation for the vote led by Emily Davies to be patient, he was interrupted by a septuagenarian reminding him that she had been waiting since 1865: “Was that not, evidence of patience enough?” (Wostenholme Elmy qtd. in Wright 197). His spirited interlocutor was the veteran suffragist, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, the subject of Maureen Wright’s excellent new biography, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and the Victorian Feminist Movement. Wolstenholme, as she then was, had not only signed the first parliamentary petition for votes for women presented to John Stuart Mill in 1866 but, as Elizabeth Crawford notes in The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928 (1999), had been personally responsible for collecting 300 of its 1499 signatures. Wright’s project is to restore to her biographical subject the importance that was recognized and honored by women engaged in feminist struggles at the time. In 1908 the younger militant suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) gave her an ovation as the Nestor or trusted advisor of their epic struggle. In 1910 contributors to her Grateful Fund collected £500. The signatories to her testimonial collection included Constance Bulwer-Lytton, Emmeline Pankhurst, and William Thomas Stead.

The colon in the title of this biography is significant, for Wright makes the individual life inseparable from wider struggles to secure women rights as full and equal citizens and from the times in which the struggles were a part. When Wolstenholme Elmy died days after the legislation giving women over the age of thirty the vote in 1918, she had served not only on the WSPU national committees and as vice-president of the Tax Resistance League, but also on the committees of some twenty organizations advancing the rights and status of women. Her campaigning history resembles a gazetteer of the key movements for social change for women in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

The local and specific context that accounts for much of Wolstenholme Elmy’s indefatigable reforming energy is the political radicalism of Manchester and northwest England, home of the progressive liberal and Quaker circles associated with Ursula and Jacob Bright and of the radical suffragists. Resenting the denial of a formal education that made possible her brother Joseph’s career as a Cambridge don, Wolstenholme Elmy established her own girls’ boarding school in Lancashire. With Josephine Butler she founded the North of England Council for the Higher Education of Women in 1869, contributing to Butler’s book, Women’s Work and Women’s Culture: A Series of Essays (1869), and giving evidence to the Taunton Commission on education in 1866. The two women were also founding members of the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. Wolstenholme Elmy was an early, courageous, and outspoken opponent of marital rape. In 1867 she helped to set up the Married Women’s Property Committee which successfully campaigned for the Married Women’s Property Act (1882) and the Guardianship of Infants Act (1886). It is curious that while her friend, Butler, and other pioneers of women’s suffrage and education, such as Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Davies, have received considerable attention from historians, Wolstenholme Elmy has remained in relative obscurity.

Wright is not the first historian to have worked on this remarkable woman, but hers is the first full-length biography. Other scholars, such as David Rubinstein (Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s [1986]), Sandra Stanley Holton (Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women’s Suffrage Movement [1996]), and Crawford, have been primarily interested in Wolstenholme Elmy’s importance for revisionist accounts of suffrage history. In the 1980s Rubinstein drew upon Wolstenholme Elmy’s work to contend that the orthodoxy of the 1890s represented a low ebb in the...