Vicwardian women’s emancipator Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy is best known for her work as a campaigner for the parliamentary vote for British women. However, that is far from the only cause she espoused.
Born in the twilight of the reign of William IV, on 1 December 1833, Elizabeth was the youngest of three children and doubly orphaned by the time she was 11 years old. Born into a family of godly Independent Methodists she lived her childhood and youth in the environs of Manchester, becoming the Headmistress of her own middle-class girls’ boarding school in 1854, after coming into a small family inheritance. Wolstenholme Elmy is only now coming into the historical limelight – a position she has long been denied, principally owing to her robust personality, her political radicalism, republican beliefs and atheism.
Historians of second-wave feminism, (those who sought to reclaim the history of women in the mid-20th Century), in common with Elizabeth’s contemporaries in the women’s movement, shied away from narrating the story of this exceptional scholar of the law and parliamentary practice because her life-narrative did not ‘fit’ the history of suffragism they wished to tell. But now, in the post-modern world where the power of diversity and difference is celebrated and acknowledged, Wolstenholme Elmy has found her niche in the recent texts of the suffrage cause – such as those by Elizabeth Crawford and Fran Abrams. My own biography of her however, published in paperback in 2014, is the first to consider her life in a full-length chronological format.
In addition, Wolstenholme Elmy’s image is one of those surrounding the newly erected statute of Millicent Garrett Fawcett in Parliament Square – even though she would certainly not have appreciated the fact that her photograph is placed directly below Fawcett’s right foot, she having been the one to advise Mrs. Fawcett on the content of her first ever speech on votes for women!
The purpose of this blog is to pose the question of how a provincial and relatively poor Headmistress from Cheshire earned herself the epithet of the ‘little Lord Chancellor’? That the nick-name was given to her by the holder of the parliamentary office himself, Lord Selborne (formerly Sir Roundell Palmer, and Chancellor under Gladstone,) shows just how this tiny woman, with a mind like a rapier and a temper to match, had gained a reputation in the corridors of Westminster that was as admired by some as it was criticised by others.
Tracing the early life of Elizabeth Wolstenholme was not a simple task – and involved the portion of good fortune that is sometimes the lot of researchers at their wits end! Prior to locating her as a member of the Clarke family of Worsley, near Salford, she had simply seemed to fall from the sky as a half-formed women’s activist in 1862, when her name is to be found in the list of members of the College of Preceptors – an educational organisation dedicated to campaigning for pedagogical training for teachers. By this point, Elizabeth was almost 30 years of age and had been working as a teaching professional for well over a decade.
It was in the field of education that she would first make her name as a campaigner and in April 1866 she was one of the first four women in the country to testify before a Royal Commission – this the ‘Taunton’ Commission, which was gathering evidence on the nature and standards of education in Britain. The topic of girls’ education was not originally intended to be up for discussion, but Emily Davies – later the renowned Headmistress of Girton College, Cambridge pressed the matter forward. Davies was already in Elizabeth Wolstenholme’s orbit; both interested in the ‘Women’s Question’ and members of the circle of Barbara Leigh Bodichon, Bessie Rayner Parkes and others in the group known as the Langham Place set.
It is in tracing Elizabeth’s connections to this group that we can find the people who both fostered and encouraged her to develop her skills of criticism and deduction and to start the practice she would continue for the rest of her life…that of a ‘scrutinizer’ of parliamentary practice. If only her large archive had survived in full (it took up one whole room of her house in the village of Buglawton, Cheshire but was destroyed in World War I,) we would have found it full of ‘blue books’, copies of parliamentary bills, Acts of Synod, and many other documents from which we could have traced her parliamentary work in minutiae. As it is, the significant extant correspondence archive and official documentation of the many groups in which Wolstenholme Elmy held office, can at least give us a detailed pattern of her involvement.
The ‘hub’ of Elizabeth Wolstenholme’s political life in the 1860s was Cambridge. Her elder brother, Joseph, a mathematician of renown, held fellowships at both St. John’s and Corpus Christi Colleges – taking Holy Orders in order to teach, even though in truth he followed his sister in atheism. Though she continued to teach, both in her home village of Worsley and later in the town of Congleton (from 1867), her holidays were taken in the home of her brother. It was here she was introduced to his network of associates and friends, including Leslie Stephen (whose daughter Virginia Woolf immortalised Joseph as Augustus Carmichael in her novel To the Lighthouse,) and the newly married Prof. Henry Fawcett and Millicent Garrett.
Joseph Wolstenholme’s relationship with Stephen was built on a shared love of literature, including the novels of Balzac, and discussions round Cambridge firesides led to Elizabeth Wolstenholme’s adoption into the Langham Place set – and to the Kensington Society, a female discussion society set up in 1865 and of which she was a corresponding member. Such Cambridge luminaries as Fawcett and Stephen gathered around them other polymaths – including the lawyers Henry and Edward Dicey. The Diceys were correspondents of another woman emancipator, Frances Power Cobbe – and thus Elizabeth’s circle extended rapidly. But it was in 1866 she was to meet the person to whom she might be argued to have ‘owed’ her later role as the ‘scrutinizer’ of parliamentary practice – the wife of the Headmaster of Liverpool College, Josephine Butler.
Josephine Butler is best known to history as the leader of the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (LNA), founded in 1869 to counter the oppressive nature of the Contagious Diseases legislation as it pertained to women. Designed initially to help prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among military personnel in certain garrison towns, the Acts allowed for the forcible medical examination and internment in Lock Hospitals of any woman suspected of practicing prostitution and infecting men with syphilis or other STD. In practice, as the LNA pointed out, it placed any working-class woman under threat of arrest in these districts and was a principal factor in the discussion regarding state regulation of brothels.
The CDAs were repealed in 1886, after a long campaign by many middle-class women who had never before sought a public platform to air their views – for fear of being ostracised among their acquaintances. What few people know, however, is that Mrs Butler was urged to ‘haste to the rescue’ of these poor and oppressed working-class women by Elizabeth Wolstenholme, who believed that only a married woman could discuss such matters in public – and in 1869 she was still a spinster Headmistress.
Wolstenholme worked at the side of Butler and the other women of the LNA, travelling long distances when she was able to speak at public meetings, often in bitter winter weather when her school had closed for the Christmas holidays. It was only a short time after the formation of the LNA that she was to take on the role of the first professional in the women’s movement when, in 1871, she took the post of Honorary Secretary of the newly formed ‘Campaign For Amending the Law in Points Wherein they are Injurious to Women’ organisation at a salary of £300 per year. This cumbersome name was soon changed to the Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights (VADPR).
Formed in March 1871, the VADPR’s membership was never large. However, its members were an interesting cohort of the most radical of Radical-Liberals. Its remit was broader than a single-issue movement, such as those which had secured better Divorce terms for women under the Divorce Act, 1857 or Higher Education provision, such as that established by the North of England Council for the Education of Women (formed by Wolstenholme, Butler and others in 1867). Rather, the VADPR understood that the laws binding women in subjection to men were not only socio-economic, but culturally and sexually based. It is certainly true that the VADPR’s membership were almost unilaterally in favour of Votes for Women and one of its male supporters, Jacob Bright MP introduced the Women’s Suffrage bill of 1870 to the House of Commons, where it was roundly defeated.
For Wolstenholme Elmy, though, her time at the VADPR saw her stalking the corridors of power at all hours and becoming, in the words of one friend, an habituée of the Ladies Gallery at the House of Commons. The sight of her slight figure caused Members of Parliament some little discomfort, and one of her admirers, James Stansfeld, bestowed upon her the title of the ‘Parliamentary Watch-Dog’ as she regularly cross-examined members she met in passageways and made detailed notes of division votes and comments from speeches.
The talents she honed during this period of her life were to ensure she was set fair for a career in women’s service that would last well over fifty years. She was in the House for many debates on the Contagious Diseases Acts certainly, but she also oversaw the wording of the bill for the Married Women’s Property Act, 1870 and (on behalf of the VADPR) helped push forward an ultimately fruitless challenge to the passage of the Marine Mutiny Act, 1873 – intended to alleviate distress to mariner’s families in cases of desertion. Wolstenholme’s most active period in parliament was 1873-4, when she took up residence in London – but it was her secularism and her private life that brought all her endeavours (at least her public labours) to an end in the autumn of 1874.
On her removal to Congleton in 1867 Elizabeth Wolstenholme had met the owner of a small group of textile mills, Benjamin (Ben) Elmy. Elmy was, in her words, an ‘advanced socialist’ and took it upon himself to pay the women workers wages into their own hands, rather than into the grasping paws of their husbands, who would often leave their families to starve so they might enjoy the rowdiness of the public house.
Both Elizabeth and Ben were secularists and Ben was anxious, when it was clear the two were going to set up home together, that Elizabeth would not lose her independent legal status – as she would if they undertook the traditional marriage ceremony. Instead, they took vows before witnesses, including Josephine Butler, in the spring of 1874 – something which Butler later claimed would have equated to a legal marriage in Scotland. But the Wolstenolme Elmys (as both named themselves afterwards,) were south of the border and such was the furore when Elizabeth’s pregnancy became obvious by the autumn, that the two were forced to wed in Kensington Registrar’s Office on 12 October.
Ben never forgave the women who had forced them to take the step which made his wife subject to the battery of legislation concerning women’s inferiority in the eyes of the law that she was trying her best to overturn. It can be argued that the feelings of class consciousness that prompted the browbeating of the couple had more weight at that moment than ‘sisterly’ affection between fellow campaigners.
The result of all the disagreement and distress was that the new Mrs Wolstenholme Elmy gave up her position at the VADPR and the couple returned to the town of Congleton and Ben’s home in the adjacent village of Buglawton. And from there it was that an international correspondence hub concerning women’s issues developed, extant right through to the militant era of the suffragettes. Elizabeth would go back to the Houses of Parliament again throughout the Edwardian era, to lead processions and to speak on one memorable occasion from the site of the statue of King Richard I.
One tribute to Elizabeth Wolstenholme seems to encapsulate best the period of her life between 1869-74 that gave Lord Selborne cause to name her as the ‘little Lord Chancellor’. And it is this, written by social reformer, journalist and ‘white-slave’ campaigner William T. Stead. Stead, who died on the Titanic in 1912 wrote of his long-standing colleague that her brilliant mind had shaped critiques of ‘many of the Bills by which a wealthy and luxurious society sought to smoothe [sic] its crumpled rose leaves by crushing the liberties of the poor in the name of philanthropy and humanity’. Though a little florid, it is an apt assessment.
By Dr Maureen Wright
Author of: Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and the Victorian Feminist Movement: the biography of an Insurgent Woman, (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2014, [first published, 2011]).
Founder and lead: www.womenspolitcalrights.uk
Twitter: @womenspolitics
Associate Lecturer: University of Chichester, UK.
