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Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy (1833–1918) was one of the most significant pioneers of the British women's emancipation movement, though her importance is little recognised. Wolstenholme Elmy referred to herself as an ‘initiator’ of movements, and she was at the heart of every campaign Victorian feminists conducted — her most well-known position being that of secretary of the Married Women's Property Committee from 1867–82. A fierce advocate of human rights, as the secretary of the Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights, Wolstenholme Elmy earned the nickname of the ‘parliamentary watch-dog’ from Members of Parliament anxious to escape her persistent lobbying. Also a feminist theorist, she believed wholeheartedly in the rights of women to freedom of their person, and was the first woman ever to speak from a British stage on the sensitive topic of conjugal rape. Wolstenholme Elmy engaged theoretically with the rights of the disenfranchised to exert force in pursuit of the vote, and Emmeline Pankhurst lauded her as ‘first’ among the infamous suffragettes of the Women's Social and Political Union. As a lifelong pacifist, however, she resigned from the WSPU Executive in the wake of increasingly violent activity from 1912. A prolific correspondent, journalist, speaker and political critic, Wolstenholme Elmy left significant resources, believing they ‘might be of value’ to historians. This book draws on a great deal of this documentation to produce a portrait that does justice to her achievements as a lifelong ‘Insurgent woman’.
] questioned everything’.41 Elizabeth called this incident her ‘first little bit of martyrdom’, and it was her earliest defiance of the doctrines of Christianity.42 Religious scepticism was, however, a notable feature of Victorian feminist experience.43 The consequences of such spiritual dilemmas could be extremely painful for all concerned; although Elizabeth’s tender years had ensured she received physical chastisement rather than other, more subtle, punishments. One of her colleagues, Frances Power Cobbe, was banished from her father’s house when he became unable to bear
This book explores for the first time women’s leading roles in animal protection in nineteenth-century Britain. Victorian women founded pioneering bodies such as the Battersea Dogs’ Home, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and the first anti-vivisection society. They intervened directly to stop abuses, promoted animal welfare, and schooled the young in humane values via the Band of Mercy movement. They also published literature that, through strongly argued polemic or through imaginative storytelling, notably in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, showed man’s unjustifiable cruelty to animals. In all these enterprises, they encountered opponents who sought to discredit and thwart their efforts by invoking age-old notions of female ‘sentimentality’ or ‘hysteria’, which supposedly needed to be checked by ‘masculine’ pragmatism, rationality and broadmindedness, especially where men’s field sports were concerned. To counter any public perception of extremism, conservative bodies such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for long excluded women from executive roles, despite their crucial importance as donors and grassroots activists. However, women’s growing opportunities for public work in philanthropic projects and the development of militant feminism, running in parallel with campaigns for the vote, gave them greater boldness in expressing their distinctive view of animal–human relations, in defiance of patriarchy. In analysing all these historic factors, the book unites feminist perspectives, especially constructions of gender, with the fast-developing field of animal–human history.
‘women’ and ‘peace’. Much work has been done on women pacifists during the First World War, and in relation to women’s resistance to the presence of nuclear weapons in Britain, particularly regarding the Greenham Common missile base, in the 1980s. Yet, in its early years, organised feminism in Britain also demonstrated a concern with pacifism and the issue of women’s (imagined) relationship to peace. This book charts the development of these debates within the Victorian feminist movement to illustrate the centrality of such ideas to many strands of late Victorian
, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s Unionist politics stood her in better stead with a Conservative government than did Hobhouse’s Liberalism. Fawcett was active in the women’s movement from the late 1860s until her death in 1929. She was strongly influenced by liberal economic and political ideas, taking many of her early views from the work of John Stuart Mill, and was one of the few late Victorian feminists to be uninfluenced by, and indeed indifferent to, Evangelicalism. Most active in the suffrage movement, she was also involved in campaigns for equal education and
Contagious Diseases Acts and founded the short-lived London branch of the Women’s International Peace Association in 1873. She publicly argued as early as 1872 that women should be afforded ‘the right to be heard or represented’ in the settlement of international disputes.9 Victorian feminists, of course, used arguments of patriotism in the service of other causes. Florence Balgarnie, for example, argued at a suffrage meeting in 1884 that ‘We, women, live in the country, we are citizens of the country, and we, women, I venture to say, love our country. It is because we do
difficulty of their existence – their lack of opportunity – became a major preoccupation of British feminists, who put much time and energy into reforms such as promoting access to education, which would enable single women to live independent lives. As Barbara Caine has written, for Victorian feminists in Britain, ‘the plight of single women was of the utmost importance’. 28 In
. The Langham Place group attracted a number of women who concentrated on legal and economic changes to help women. Smith, for example, stressed the disabilities of married women, and many women shared her reservations. For example, Florence Fenwick-Miller did not take her husband’s name when she married in 1877; others omitted the word ‘obey’ from their ceremonies.14 In short, like the Radical Unitarians, most mid-Victorian feminists chose to marry, if on liberated terms. In Barbara Caine’s words, most concluded that ‘unless they proceeded in a decorous and cautious
’s suffrage. There is a case for arguing that, for Elizabeth, the suffrage question was a subsidiary concern during the mid-1860s. Nonetheless, and as readers of mid-Victorian feminist histories know well, the election to Parliament of John Stuart Mill in July 1865 prompted the ladies of the Kensington Society into a flurry of activity. Mill had agreed to present a petition in respect of women’s parliamentary enfranchisement (under the householder franchise) – something which had been outlawed under the provisions of the Reform Act 1832. And though this earned him the
, ‘Reflecting on Suffrage History’, A Suffrage Reader: Charting Directions in British Suffrage History, eds Claire Eustance, Joan Ryan and Laura Ugolini (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), 24. 30 See Carroll Smith-Rosenburg, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America’, Signs 1 (1975): 1–29. 31 See Philippa Levine, Victorian Feminists 1850–1900 (London: Hutchison Education, 1987); and Gleadle, The Early Feminists. 32 Nineteenth-century feminism has attracted increased investigation by historians such as: Barbara