ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Wolstenholme had already formed herself as an ‘independent person’ by the time she encountered a like-minded community in the Langham Place circle and the Kensington Society. Such independence rested both on a professional career and the civil status of a single woman, that of ‘feme sole’. It was an independence she had sought to reinforce in herself, and foster more generally among her sex, through the formation of associations with other professional women, continuing self-cultivation, and involvement in the campaigns to extend women’s rights and opportunities which were well underway by the end of the 1860s. Such independence was hard-won and vulnerable. And this vulnerability increased, as we shall see, when Elizabeth Wolstenholme became an employee of the movement she had helped create, for it was a movement which became increasingly bitterly divided over differing conceptions of the citizenship for women.
