ABSTRACT
In old photographs of suffrage demonstrations from the early years of this century there occasionally appears a tiny, white-haired figure, still wearing the ringlets of a yet earlier period. Her presence seems anomalous among the ‘militant suffragettes’ of the early twentieth century, and immediately raises questions about the stereotypical images that attach to that designation. Both suffragists and antisuffragists produced ‘a series of representational “types”’ reflecting notions about ‘womanliness’ and ‘unwomanliness’, but this figure seems to fit with none of these.1 Whatever the quaintness of her outward appearance, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy had lived out radical new ways of being a woman. Her presence among the suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) illustrates the tenacity of many of those who initiated the campaign for votes for women in the mid-1860s. It testifies also to the equally hard-fought struggle by women to create new identities for themselves. Yet, though her name will be found in the index of almost every major study of the nineteenth-century women’s movement, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy has remained in the background, a ubiquitous but insubstantial figure.
