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‘An Impudent Intrusion?’ Assessing the Life of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, First‐Wave Feminist and Social Reformer (1833–1918)

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09612020902770949

1747-583X

Maureen Wright,

Cultural History and Identity Formation

Abstract This article seeks to re‐evaluate the life of first‐wave feminist Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy through the lens of her own autobiographical fragments and newly‐discovered material concerning her genealogy and childhood familial circumstances. One of the most significant but under‐researched feminists of her generation, the ‘self’ constructed by Wolstenholme Elmy is one that appears to negate the influences of youthful familial circumstances on her later life and career—a career she deemed worthy of auto/biographical narration. This supports her forcefully expressed opinion that analysis of the private ‘self’ was an unsuitable subject for biographical study: an ‘impudent intrusion’ of little value when assessing a subject’s historical merit, a view this article seeks to contend. By acknowledging the complex reflexive nature of the auto/biographical process and thus the biographer’s inability to provide an ‘essence’ of the subject’s ‘self’, the article offers a construction of how the events of Wolstenholme Elmy’s childhood might have impacted on her intellectual and emotional pre‐disposition to adopt the cause of feminism. The portrait of Wolstenholme Elmy as expressed by this article contrasts with the largely negative impression of her character gained from analysis of the headline accounts of the nineteenth‐century women’s emancipation struggle and the ‘classic’ feminist memoirs upon which those accounts were, in part, based. As such the article builds upon recent revisionist accounts that have highlighted the importance of Wolstenholme Elmy’s life to the study of the Victorian feminist movement. Notes I use the term ‘feminism’ throughout, aware that it was not commonly applied until the fin‐de‐siècle, and adopt that definition given by Linda Gordon (1986) What’s New in Women’s History, in Teresa de Lauretis (Ed.) Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p. 29, that feminism is ‘a critique of male supremacy, formed and offered in the light of a will to change it’. [1] My thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their sponsorship of this research, 2005–2007. My thanks also to the Josephine Butler Memorial Trust for their sponsorship of the initial stages of this project. I refer to Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy throughout as ‘Wolstenholme Elmy’, though many of the events in this article occurred prior to her marriage to Benjamin Elmy on 12 October 1874. [2] E. Sylvia Pankhurst (1931) The Suffragette Movement: an intimate account of persons and ideals (London: Virago, 1977), pp. 31–34. [3] Anon. (1893) Report of a Lecture by Mrs Wolstenholme Elmy, ‘The Poet of the 19th Century’, Congleton Chronicle, 9 December. [4] Sandra Stanley Holton (1994) Free Love and Victorian Feminism: the divers matrimonials of Elizabeth Wolstenholme and Ben Elmy, Victorian Studies, 36, pp. 199‐222. [5] Sandra Stanley Holton (1996) Suffrage Days: stories from the women’s suffrage movement (London and New York: Routledge), p. 1. [6] Holton, Suffrage Days. Fran Abrams (2003) Freedom’s Cause: lives of the suffragettes (London: Profile), chapter 1. Elizabeth Crawford (2001) The Women’s Suffrage Movement: a reference guide, 1866–1928 (London and New York: Routledge [originally published UCL, 1999]), pp. 188–205. My own, unpublished account, is as follows: Maureen Wright (2007) Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy: a biography (PhD, University of Portsmouth). [7] Barbara Caine (1994) Feminist Biography and Feminist History, Women’s History Review, 3(2), pp. 247–261, p. 258. [8] Lee Holcombe (1991) Review of Mary Lyndon Shanley Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895, The American Historical Review, 96(2), pp. 514–515. [9] Avron Fleishmann (1983) Figures of Autobiography: the language of self‐writing in Victorian and modern England (London: University of California Press), pp. 9–18. [10] Mary Spongberg (2005) Female Biography, in Mary Spongberg, Barbara Caine & Ann Curthoys (Eds) Companion to Women’s Historical Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 180. [11] As a biographer, consideration must also be given to the ‘shade’ of myself that is written into the appraisal of Wolstenholme Elmy’s life, the conscious knowledge that my own life has been interwoven into the construction of hers. Carolyn Steedman (1992) Past Tenses: essays on writing autobiography and history (London: Rivers Oram Press), p. 163. [12] Keith Jenkins (1999) Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (London: Routledge), p. 101. [13] Fleishmann, Figures, pp. 12–30. [14] Lydia Becker’s Letter Book, Manchester Women’s Suffrage Collection, M50/1/3. [15] Caine, ‘Feminist Biography’, p. 249; Barbara Caine (1992) Victorian Feminists (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Gillian Sutherland (2006) Faith, Duty and the Power of Mind: the Cloughs and their circle 1820–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). [16] Caine, ‘Feminist Biography’, pp. 249 and 252. [17] Olive Banks (1986) Becoming a Feminist: the social origins of ‘first wave’ feminism (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press), p. 9. [18] Roy Pascal (1960) Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 75. [19] Philippa Levine (2003) Feminist Lives in Victorian England: public roles and private commitment (Los Angeles: Figueroa Press, [first published 1990]), p. 258. [20] William Brimelow (1908) Centenary Memorials of the Independent Methodist Church at Roe Green, Worsley (Warrington and London: Mackie & Co.), pp. 6–7. [21] Lee Holcolmbe (1983) Wives and Property: reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in nineteenth‐century England (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press), p. 264, fn. 10. [22] William T. Stead (1910) Honour to Whom Honour is Due, Review of Reviews, September, p. 223. [23] Hilda Kean (1994) Searching for the Past in Present Defeat: the construction of historical and political identity in British feminism in the 1920s and 1930s, Women’s History Review, 3(1), pp. 57–80, p. 67. [24] Frances Rowe to Mary McIlquham, 22 April 1913, 47455, fol. 313. Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy Papers, Add.Mss. 47449–47455. British Library (hereafter referenced by volume and folio number). Reproduced with permission. [25] Johanna Alberti (1997) Striking Rock: the letters of Ray Strachey to her family, 1929–1935, in Trev Lynn Broughton & Linda Anderson (Eds) Women’s Lives/Women’s Times: new essays on auto/biography (Albany: State University of New York Press), p. 73. [26] EWE to HM, 18 March 1900, 47452, fol. 67. [27] EWE to HM, 10 February 1900, 47452, fol. 49. [28] Margaretta Jolly (1997) ‘Life Has Done Almost as Well as Art’: deconstructing the Maimie Papers, in Broughton & Anderson (Eds), Women’s Lives/Women’s Times, pp. 9–10. [29] Ann Morley with Liz Stanley (1988) The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison (London: The Woman’s Press), p. 69. Jolly, ‘Deconstructing’, p. 26. [30] Levine, Feminist Lives, chapter 4. [31] EWE to HM, 29 April 1908, 47455, fol. 170. Jolly, ‘Deconstructing’, p. 25. [32] EWE to HM, 2 November 1906, 47455, fol. 1. Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy & John P. Thomasson (1890) Replies to Mr. S. Smith on Women’s Suffrage (Manchester: Guardian Printing Works), p. 7. [33] EWE to HM, 26 November 1895, 47450, fol. 231. [34] EWE to HM, 23 November 1891, 47449, fol. 197–198. [35] Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy (1886) A Woman’s Plea to Women, Macclesfield Courier, 20 November, p. 3. Anon. [Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy] (1888) The Infants’ Act, 1886: the record of three years’ effort for Legislative Reform, with its results (London: Women’s Printing Society). [36] EWE to HM, ‘St. Patrick’s Day’ 1909, 47455, fol. 239–240. [37] The Poet of the 19th Century, Congleton Chronicle, 9 December 1893. [38] Morley with Stanley, The Life and Death, p.74. [39] Barbara Stephen (1927) Emily Davies and Girton College (London: Constable & Co.), p. 1. [40] Caine, Victorian Feminists, pp. 114–115. [41] EWE to HM, 28 August 1907, 47455, fol. 104. [42] EWE to HM, 12 April 1902, 47452, fol. 283. [43] Holton, ‘Free Love’, p. 217. [44] EWE to HM, 20 November 1900, 47452, fol. 137. [45] EWE to HM, 28 August 1907, 47455, fol. 104. [46] Laura E. Nym Mayhall (1995) Creating the ‘Suffragette Spirit’: British feminism and the historical imagination, Women’s History Review, 4(3), pp. 319–344, p. 323. [47] Michael Roper (2005) Slipping out of View: subjectivity and emotion in gender history, History Workshop Journal, 59(1), pp. 57–72, p. 67. [48] Holton, ‘Free Love’, p. 218. [49] Jane Jordan (2001) Josephine Butler (London: John Murray), p. 6. [50] Ellen Jordan & Anne Bridger (2006) An Unexpected Recruit to Feminism: Jessie Boucherett’s ‘Feminist Life’ and the importance of being wealthy, Women’s History Review, 15(3), pp. 385–412, p. 402. [51] Brimelow, Centenary Memorials, p. 4. [52] Brimelow, Centenary Memorials, p. 8. [53] The early pioneers of the women’s emancipation movement were known colloquially as the ‘Langham Place set’, the designation given because it was there Barbara Leigh Smith and Bessie Rayner Parkes opened the first reading room for women. This London office also became the headquarters of the influential feminist periodical The English Woman’s Journal. [54] Pascal, Design, p. 71. [55] Brimelow, Centenary Memorials, p. 3. [56] Biographical dictionary of St John’s College, Cambridge. Entry for Joseph Wolstenholme, 1 July 1846. Published by permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge. [57] EWE to HM, 12 May 1903, 47453, fol. 120. [58] EWE to HM, 8 August 1899, 47452, fol. 8. [59] EWE to HM, 12 May 1903, 47453, fol. 120. [60] Caine, ‘Feminist Biography’, p. 256. [61] Cobbe, The Life of Frances Power Cobbe, p. 100, quoted in Pauline Polkey (2000) Reading History through Autobiography: politically active women of late nineteenth‐century Britain and their personal narratives, Women’s History Review, 9(3), pp. 483–500, p. 489. [62] Caine, ‘Feminist Biography’, p. 256. [63] EWE to HM, 12 November 1893, 47450, fn. 60. [64] EWE to HM, 21 November 1901, 47452, fn. 221. [65] The Independent Methodists had been formed by a linking of two congregations, one group of breakaway Methodists from Manchester and a group of Quakers from Bolton. The influence of the pacifist element within Quaker belief was adopted in the new sect and Wolstenholme Elmy continued to support the doctrines of non‐violence throughout her life. [66] Emmeline Pankhurst (1914) My Own Story (London: Eveleigh Nash), p. 5. [67] Levine, Feminist Lives, p. 56. [68] EWE to HM, 9 September 1908, 47455, fn. 205. [69] Wolstenholme Elmy, ‘A Woman’s Plea’, p. 3. [70] Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy to the Editor, Why Cotton Lords oppose Corn Laws, Daily Mail, undated, 47452, fn. 305. [71] Wolstenholme Elmy, ‘A Woman’s Plea’, p. 3. [72] Anon. (1886) Fire at Eaton Mill, Macclesfield Courier, 2 October, p. 8. [73] In 1897 Harriet McIlquham, Louisa Martindale and a small cohort of Elizabeth’s admirers established what became known as the ‘Grateful Fund’, whereby Wolstenholme Elmy received the sum of one guinea per week until McIlquham’s death in 1910. [74] EWE to HM, n.d., but probably late August 1897, 47451, fn. 129. [75] EWE to HM, n.d., but probably late August 1897, 47451, fn. 129. [76] Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, p. 31. [77] Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby & Helen Wilcox (1997) ‘Pondering All These Things in Her Heart’: aspects of secrecy in the autobiographical writings of seventeenth‐century Englishwomen’, in Broughton & Anderson, Women’s Lives/Women’s Times, p. 57. [78] Kean, ‘Searching’, p. 69. [79] Lydia Becker, from 1867 a colleague and personal friend of Wolstenholme Elmy’s, wrote on the occasion of her brother Wilfred’s going up to Oxford that she held the ‘conviction that had the same opportunities been placed within [her] reach … [she] could have done as much, and might now have occupied an assured position in the world’. Joan E. Parker (2001) Lydia Becker’s ‘School for Science’: a challenge to domesticity, Women’s History Review, 10(4), pp. 629–650, p. 630. [80] Daphne Bennett (1990) Emily Davies and the Liberation of Women (London: Andre Deutsch), p. 11. [81] EWE to HM, 8 May 1908, 47455, fol. 172. [82] Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy (1865) What Better Provision Ought to be Made for the Education of Girls of the Upper and Middle Classes?, Transactions, National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, pp. 287–291, p. 290. [83] Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, p. 31. [84] Ellis Ethelmer, [Ben Elmy] (1896) A Woman Emancipator: a biographical sketch, Westminster Review, CXLV, pp. 424–428, p. 425. [85] Ethelmer, ‘A Woman Emancipator’, p. 425. [86] Christina de Bellaigue (2001) The Development of Teaching as a Profession for Women before 1870, The Historical Journal, 44(4), pp. 963–988. Wolstenholme, ‘The Education of Girls’; p. 301. My emphasis. [87] Girl Boarders’ Accounts, 1848–1863. D1/1. Fulneck School. My thanks to Ruth Strong, archivist of Fulneck School, for supplying the photocopies from which I worked. Reproduced with permission of Mr. T. Kernohan, Principal of Fulneck School. [88] Martha Vicinus (1985) Independent Women: work and community for single women, 1850–1970 (London: Virago), pp. 12–20. [89] EWE to HM, 14 September 1897, 47451, fol. 145. [90] EWE to HM, undated [but likely to be August 1897], 47451, fol. 129. [91] EWE to HM, ‘St. Patrick’s Day’ 1909, 47455, fol. 239. [92] Anon. [EWE], The Infants’ Act, p. 12. [93] EWE to HM, 26 November 1895, 47450, fol. 231. [94] EWE to HM, 9 February 1896, 47450, fol. 262. [95] Ethelmer, ‘A Woman Emancipator’, p. 428. [96] Holton, Suffrage Days, p. 7. [97] Isabella Tod to Helen Priestman Bright Clark, 16 November 1875. Clark Archive, C & J Clarke Ltd., Street, Somerset. My thanks to the Trustees and staff of the Clarke Archive for permission to quote from this material. [98] Krista Cowman (2005) A Footnote in History? Mary Gawthorpe, Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement and the Writing of Suffragette History, Women’s History Review, 14(3 & 4), pp. 447–466. [99] Emmeline Goulden offered a ‘free’ relationship to her fiancé Richard Marsden Pankhurst prior to their marriage on 18 December 1879. Richard, a colleague of Wolstenholme Elmy, had understood how the impact of her decision to co‐habit had affected her reputation within the women’s movement and hastened to decline Emmeline’s suggestion. June Purvis (2002) Emmeline Pankhurst: a biography (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 16–17. [100] Wolstenholme Elmy was to leave Congleton at the end of January 1873, taking rooms with her stepmother at 63 Finborough Road, London. She lived in the capital until her marriage, carrying out the duties of the secretary of the Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights, later the Personal Rights Association. Her tenacious political lobbying during these months earned her the nickname of the ‘parliamentary watch‐dog’. Ethelmer, ‘A Woman Emancipator’, p. 427. [101] Josephine E. Butler (1896) Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (London: Horace Marshall & Son), p. 83. [102] I. Whitwell Wilson to Henry Wilson, 20 December 1875, 3JBL/14/11, Josephine Butler Papers, Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University. Emphasis in original. [103] Millicent Garrett Fawcett to EWE, 10 December [1875], 9/02, Autograph Letter Collection, Women’s Library. [104] Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1898) Eighty Years and More (London: T. Fisher Unwin), p. 358. [105] Caroline Ashurst Biggs (1882) The Married Women’s Property Act, 1882, Englishwoman’s Review, September, pp. 385–393. [106] EWE to HM, 6 April 1898, 47451, fol. 199. [107] EWE to HM, 23 February 1896, 47450, fol. 269. My emphasis. [108] Ethelmer, ‘A Woman Emancipator’, p. 428. [109] Ibid. [110] EWE to HM, 14 January 1892, 47449, fol. 234. Martin Pugh (2000) The March of the Women: a revisionist analysis of the campaign for women’s suffrage, 1866–1914 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), p. 70. [111] EWE to HM, 11 February 1902, 47452, fol. 245. [112] Charles Bradlaugh (1876) Congleton Christian Civilization, The National Reformer, 8 October, pp. 225–226. [113] Ethelmer, ‘A Woman Emancipator’, p. 424. [114] Ethelmer, ‘A Woman Emancipator’, p. 424. Levine, Feminist Lives, pp. 38–39. [115] Ignota, [Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy] (1906) ‘Pioneers! O Pioneers!’ Westminster Review, April, pp. 415–417. [116] Ignota, ‘Pioneers’, p. 415. [117] Sylvia Strauss (1982) ‘Traitors to the Masculine Cause’: the men’s campaigns for women’s rights (Westport and London: Greenwood Press), p. xviii. [118] Sylvia Pankhurst contends that Ben Elmy had been a ‘violently cruel and unfaithful’ husband, something unsubstantiated in any of Wolstenholme Elmy’s texts. Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, p. 32. [119] Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, p. 31. [120] Isabella Tod to Helen Priestman Bright Clark, 16 November 1875, Clarke Archive. [121] Ignota, ‘Pioneers’, p. 416. [122] Anon. (1896) Review of Woman Free, The Lancet, 14 March, p. 716. [123] Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy (1899) The Marriage Law of England, in Women in Industrial Life: the transactions of the industrial and legislative section of the International Congress of Women (London), pp. 115–119, p. 115. [124] Susan Kingsley Kent (1987) Sex and Suffrage in Britain 1860–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 111. [125] For a full account of the work of the Women’s Emancipation Union see, Anon. [Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy] (1899) Final Report of the Women’s Emancipation Union, WEU Papers, British Library. [126] Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, p. 32. EWE to HM, 3 March 1906, 47454, fol. 221. [127] Ignota, ‘Pioneers’, p. 417. [128] Josephine Butler (1892) Recollections of George Butler (Bristol and London: J. W. Arrowsmith, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co.), p. 175. [129] Only a minority of accounts are sympathetic to Wolstenholme Elmy’s role, including, Ethel Hill & Olga Fenton Shafter (Eds) (1909) Great Suffragists and Why: modern makers of future history (London: Henry J. Drane), pp. 66–70. Also, Dora B. Montefiore (1927) From a Victorian to a Modern (London: E. Archer). [130] Holton, Suffrage Days. Mary Lyndon Shanley (1989) Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (London: I. B. Tauris). Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, pp. 188–205. [131] Caine, ‘Feminist Biography’, p. 258. [132] Fleishmann, ‘Figures’, p. 9. [133] Holcombe, ‘Review’, pp. 514–515.