ABSTRACT
We have only a limited knowledge of the early life of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy (1833-1918). Much of this conies from a short article written in 1895 by ‘Ellis Ethelmer’, a pseudonym often used by Ben Elmy, whom she married in 1874. The picture it paints is thus based on intimate knowledge and is one to which, presumably, she had lent her approval.1 It is a representation which provides, then, a valuable insight into the identity she built for herself. Here the young Elizabeth Wolstenholme is depicted as typical of those ‘surplus women’ around whom early discussion of ‘the woman question’ often centred in the mid-nineteenth century. Women, that is to say, who had shown themselves superfluous to the needs of society, in failing to find a husband, and in being otherwise without the means to maintain their middle-class status. By her late twenties, however, this account shows that Elizabeth Wolstenholme had, through her own example, done much to challenge the assumptions which lay behind such an understanding of the place of women in society. She had recreated herself as an ‘independent person’.2 From this position she began a long career as a ‘woman emancipator’. In old age she celebrated, in her own writings, the emergence of those she dubbed ‘insurgent women’, the ‘militant suffragettes’ of the Women’s Social and Political Union, formed by her friend, Emmeline Pankhurst, alongside whom she spent her last years of active campaigning.3
