ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy lived just long enough to see women win the parliamentary franchise in 1918, though not long enough to cast a vote in the general election later that year. Her obituary in the Workers’ Dreadnought reported that ‘even in her extreme old age she rose during the small hours of the morning in order that all her housework and cooking for the day might be finished before nine a.m.’. After that she felt free to ‘devote the rest of her time to toiling for the cause of women and progress’.1 On the advice of those close to her, her funeral was ‘held after the manner of the Society of Friends’ as being ‘most in accordance’ with her own outlook, although she had never joined the Quakers. It was attended by representatives from the NUWSS, the Manchester Women’s Trade and Labour Council, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, suggesting that she had maintained her lifelong commitment to internationalism and pacifism alongside women’s rights until the end, and that she may thereby have become alienated from erstwhile friends among the super-patriots in the WSPU leadership.2
