Stories

Many people have been inspired to write about Elizabeth. Here is a selection of stories and other writings about her.

Elizabeth and Education – by Vicki Hesse (Majestical)

Young, determined and triumphant Elizabeth said goodbye to her brother Joseph in 1846 when he was accepted at Cambridge University. At the time she was denied that same opportunity. Shortly after she begins to campaign for girls to be given the same access to education. And by 1853 she founded a school for girls in Manchester which she later moved to Moody Hall. That building still stands proudly in our home town Congleton to this day 

With the unveiling of ‘Our Elizabeth’s’ statue in Congleton, this is even more significant for us and makes us proud of what Elizabeth achieved for girls across the UK.

‘Elizabeth Hears the News’ by Siobhan Tebbs

A fictional-based-on-fact tale of Elizabeth close to the end of her life, hearing that women have got the vote for the first time.

Elizabeth Hears the News

‘By the time of her death on 12 March 1918, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy had guided the cause of women’s emancipation in Britain for over fifty years from her modest home in … Congleton.’ Maureen Wright, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and the Victorian Feminist Movement, 2011

‘When others faltered because the cause was unpopular and the goal seemed far away Mrs. Elmy remained constant and steadfast, and accomplished an immensity of work. … The women of to-day and to-morrow will never know how much they owe to her.’ Sylvia Pankhurst, ‘A Suffrage Pioneer,’ The Workers’ Dreadnought, 23 March 1918

Elizabeth opened her eyes to darkness as the clock struck four. Ever since Frank had been born, she had risen at this early hour to pen her papers and pamphlets before the day started. This morning there would be no getting up. The heaving pain in her left hip was not going away. Last week’s fall down the stairs was troubling her shoulders, her belly, her toes. Something told her she wouldn’t survive it. Doctor’s orders were to stay in bed, and it was the first time in her eighty-five years that her body had called for it – except when about to give birth.

As the unfamiliar bedroom took shape, a winter shiver ran down Elizabeth’s spine. She still wasn’t used to waking up in Frank’s little Manchester townhouse, but she was getting too old to cope by herself. At least Frank had agreed to move her old rosewood desk with her. She could make out the pen standing on it, beside the pages of her half-written article. Who on Earth would finish the article if she died?

At the thought of a torch, Elizabeth shuddered. She had a sneaking suspicion that the Pankhursts would stir up women to start the violence again when the War was over. More window-smashing and more arson were the last thing the country needed.

This was the subject, indeed, of that article on the desk. She had begun by noting her honour at being named one of the first members of the Women’s Social and Political Union when invited by Emmeline Pankhurst. But thirteen years later the rampant burning down of MPs’ houses under Christabel’s leadership had crossed a line.

‘I am all for taking a radical stance,’ she remembered writing, ‘As you know from my protracted refusal to enter into marriage with Ben while women were still not allowed to own property. My pregnancy cost me the greater part of my reputation and my paid position with the women’s movement – Parliamentary Watchdog, or “Scourge of the Commons” as they called me.

‘But I believe now as I did before the War that burning down other people’s houses will never cultivate solidarity. It will just alienate normal women, who know how precisely much of oneself it takes to make a home.’ She felt particularly pleased with the next sentence: ‘I suppose that Christabel Pankhurst wouldn’t understand, having grown up with servants making hers.’

Her plan was to have an article ready to be published after the latest vote for women’s suffrage was defeated by the Lords. They were to vote this week – and Lord Curzon held a lot of sway with his abhorrent National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. Elizabeth didn’t hold out much hope that it would pass. It was too soon. While the ongoing War had thrown women’s efforts into the political limelight, not enough Lords were yet sympathetic.

Her long refusal to marry Ben had planted a seed in some people’s minds that the blatant unfairness of marriage law could be questioned. She had almost, but not quite, lost her closest friend Harriet McIlquam over the matter. Indeed, radical steps had a place, but most of the time progress was more measured than that. It required sculpting. It was the hard graft of her Committee in getting the Married Women’s Property Act passed in 1882 that had really mattered.

The door opened cautiously. It was Frank, coming in to check on her. She looked at the clock: half past nine. She must have fallen back to sleep. Voices and wheels could be heard outside as the city came alive: a world away from her quiet home in Congleton.

‘Should I ask Molly to help you get up?’ he asked.

‘I won’t be getting up today,’ Elizabeth replied. ‘And I’m rather concerned about my article. I wondered if you’d let me dictate.’ Her voice was hoarse with determination.

Frank faltered for a moment, wondering whether he should encourage her to get out of bed, but then saw how frail she had become and simply said:

‘All right, Mother. Let me read out where we’re up to.’

When Frank sat down at the desk, Elizabeth’s mind flashed to her father. A lifetime ago it had been his desk, where he would pen his sermons and from which he had flatly refused to allow Elizabeth to continue her education although her brother was being given the best schooling they could afford.

She heard Frank snigger to himself as he read her swipe at Christabel Pankhurst. Frank was less political than Elizabeth and Ben had hoped, but he treated others with warmth and respect and believed in women’s emancipation. She and Ben had consciously aimed to inculcate in him the view from both the sexes.

Elizabeth began to dictate: ‘I remember the celebrations in my village when the Corn Laws were repealed in 1846. I was thirteen, and I drank in the full-bodied relief on those people’s faces that soon they were to be able to afford foods as staple as grains, that landowners were going to have to deal with the foreign competition rather than simply lining their pockets. That was the first time I saw the connection between legislative change and a more hopeful future.

‘We need to educate people so that they can hope. It is not through antagonism and war-mongering that a nation can improve itself. I think we have enough grief right now as evidence of that.’

The idea of hope reminded her above all of the year when she had first moved to Congleton. Taking her girls’ school to the town had been a wonderful time, its success encouraging her to set up the Manchester Schoolmistress Association, then later join the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women in 1867. She had felt in bloom in those days: on the charge.

Elizabeth continued, ‘Hope for a better life is possible when common folk come to understand that mothers are bearers of the future. I consider motherhood the most important piece of work I’ve done.’ She saw Frank smile to himself while writing this down. ‘Offering up their bodies in childbirth as soldiers do on the battlefield, mothers are potent stakeholders in this world. They must be free to choose whether and when to enter into this contract with society – and, since we have no laws to prevent men forcing their wives, women are not free to choose. As you can see, the personal is itself highly political…’ Elizabeth was about to continue dictating when a whinny could be heard outside over the city morning bustle.

Frank went to answer the door and Elizabeth sighed deeply. The personal is political. Her whole life had been spent trying to get people to understand that. Many struggling women around her still did not support women’s suffrage. It was because they were ashamed of their struggles, because their dependence on men’s elevation meant that it was of more immediate benefit to them to play by the rules, submit, and appear happy. They didn’t connect the fact that they were dying in childbirth with the fact that women’s health was just not a priority for the government. They lived in a numbness born of fear.

Elizabeth could happily say that fear had never stopped her. Having your parents die as a child makes you tough. Elizabeth had stood up for women even when it made her unpopular. She had fought the corner of prostitutes under the Contagious Diseases Acts with her colleague Josephine Butler – until they were finally repealed in 1886. Until then, girls and women were imprisoned if they had contracted a disease, where the men walked free, gaily perpetuating the spread! The scandal wasn’t prostitution: it was the viciously oppressive thinking behind laws like this.

Yes, one needed to play by the rules at certain well-judged moments.Without the stamina and the wherewithal to find and convince the right powerful men – like Lord Selborne, who had helped to see through the Guardianship of Infants Act in 1886 – she would not have had any laws changed. But this caution was valid only where it was for the greater purpose of change in the longer-term. When would womankind wake up? And had the War shaken things up quite enough for the Lords to understand the disgrace of a nation that depends on women but does not allow them a voice?

Elizabeth heard footsteps coming hurriedly up the stairs. Frank burst into the room and ran over to her, lips trembling.

‘That was a message from Ruth,’ he said. Ruth was Harriet’s oldest, a rosy-cheeked girl turned steely negotiator. Frank’s face was almost white, and Elizabeth wondered for a moment whether someone had died.

‘Well? What’s the news, sweetheart?’

‘They’ve done it,’ he said. ‘It’s gone through the Lords. Eight million women have been given the vote. A hundred and thirty-four to seventy-one against. Lord Curzon didn’t even vocalise opposition. He must have seen it was a lost cause.’

‘Well, would you believe it!’ she replied as she felt the bed sink beneath her, pulling her down into an ocean of … what was it? Relief? Exhaustion? Grief for all the millions of blighted lives that had made this happen, whether in the home or on the battlefield?

‘Ruth is coming up to see you,’ added Frank, breathing heavily from his dash up the stairs. The sound of the horse’s hooves was slowly dissolving into the city hum.

She felt a flame in her belly. It was a proud sense of vindication that her life’s work had finally resulted in women having a say in parliament. But there was something darker in there as well: a lingering anger towards her father. How dare he refuse her an education? And how dare he die in his prime, leaving her grandfather to send her off to learn embroidery and little else?

Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy – on Humanist Heritage

This excellent article about Elizabeth’s life argues that Elizabeth’s atheism and her unconventional attitudes to sex were reasons why her legacy was overlooked for a long time. It quotes fellow free-thinker Zona Vallance who said

“The original author of the enterprise was a lady whom the women of England ought to bless every morning when they rise. I allude to Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy, whose self-sacrificing life and labours have been a more or less hidden mainspring of the women’s movement during more than thirty years. Through every kind of obstacle she has worked all those years for fourteen and fifteen hours a day; and, tiny woman as she is, has played the part of a giant and of one of the generals of the women’s movement in destroying the vile C. D. Acts, in carrying the Married Women’s Property Act through, and also the act which gave mothers the few rights they now enjoy in regard to the custody and control of their own children. Besides this, our readers will be interested to know that purely human and natural ethics, and not theology, was the source of this pioneer woman’s enthusiasm for justice, even before an Ethical Society had been conceived; and that she joined the Moral Instruction Movement before the League had ceased to be a mere Conference; and has given her services gratis in seeking financial support for this paper and in promoting its spread.”

Zona Vallance, ‘The Women’s Suffrage Convention’ in Ethics, Vol. VI. No. 43, October 24 1903

Read the Humanist Heritage Article here

CW12 2DW, by Lily Smith

23 Buxton House.

Who bothers? Peers closely.
Ordinary building: extraordinary history.
A blue sphere of recognition; a cursory stamp bled into red brick
A modest token bestowed by the local civic society.
Another forgotten fragment of English heritage.

23 Buxton House.
Who knows? Inclines to care.
Home sweet 54 year home to an activist driven by equality:
‘The brains of the suffragist movement’.
Heralded by Emmeline Pankhurst- a name
Etched in history, complimenting a name
Whose power and influence have ceased to exist.
The forgotten of the suffragist movement.
Perdita. Oblitus. Ignota.  

23 Buxton House.
Who grants acknowledgement?
Marches and speeches;
1600 petitions and 7000 letters.
A human being with humane beliefs.
For 80 years she fought,
Challenged the patriarchal status quo.
It seems disrespectful
To laud her for ‘women’s lib’, when humanity was what she was fighting for.

23 Buxton House.
Who treasures this history?
Birthplace of the National Society of Women’s Suffrage;
Office of the pioneer crafting the Women’s Emancipation Union;
Residence of one listed on the Millicent Fawcett statue,
Parliament Square, London.
A 185 mile route to equal rights, navigated by determination and rewarded by
Reform rather than recognition.

23 Buxton House.
Who is implicit? Pays homage.
Education. Civil liberty. Marriage.
Our choice. Our freedom. Our truth.
Unattainable luxuries in the 19^th Century.
Corset-renouncing crusaders revolutionised tradition and
Freed the female voice.

23 Buxton House.
Who knew? Not me, for shame.
The dawn of change; a mile from my home.
Ironic that the crib for so many letters should be the post office of my mother’s youth.
Buried under sacks of 20^th century mail,
7000 ideas started as one.
History shrouded from local women;
Unaware they passed this wellspring of emancipation;
Seeing only simple red brick,
Indebted, but oblivious.

23 Buxton House.
Who knows? Now you do.
One letter.
One belief.
One suffragist.
One blue stamp of approval.
23 Buxton House.
Lost but now found.
Elizabeth Wolstenholme-Elmy.
Constituo. Recordatus. Notissima.

Read on 8th March 2022 at the unveiling of ‘Our Elizabeth’ in Congleton

What does Elizabeth mean to me? By Helen Banks

What does Elizabeth mean to me?

As a young woman who is both politically conscious and dedicated to her education and academic pursuits, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and her life’s work are an inspiration to me, Elizabeth was a passionate, dedicated woman who spent her life fighting for the causes she believed in, especially the equality of women.

Elizabeth was a leading suffragist and campaigned tirelessly for women to have the right to vote and to be elected into positions of power through the Women’s Emancipation Union, an organisation she herself founded in 1891 which became the forerunner to the Women’s Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline Pankhurst.

However, to me her work in securing education for girls is just as important. I am currently in Year 12, roughly a third of the way through my A-Levels and getting ready to begin my bid for Oxford. These all things that would have been impossible for me in the time in which Elizabeth was campaigning for educational equality, and they would still be impossible for me today without the diligent work put in by generations of strong, powerful women who wouldn’t take no for an answer- of which Elizabeth is one.

After being limited to just two years of formal education herself, unlike her elder brother who was afforded a full and rigorously academic schooling, Elizabeth dedicated herself and much of her life to improving access to education for girls across the country. From becoming the Headmistress of her own girl’s school, which eventually found itself established here in Congleton, to sitting on multiple committees dedicated to discussing female education, Elizabeth had a profound impact on the state of education for women.

Not only did she seek to improve more basic primary education, she also campaigned relentlessly for women to be given equal access to higher education as men, in a time in which the admission of women into our most prestigious universities was either severely limited or entirely out of the question. In fact, in the course of this diligent campaigning, Elizabeth actually became one of the first women to give evidence to a parliamentary select committee, not only proving that women deserved a place in educational settings but in politics too.

Thanks to the work of this brilliant woman, and many others, myself and other British women have the right to vote, the right to a comprehensive education and much greater access to higher education, all of which have had and will have a profoundly positive effect on my life.

Elizabeth is an inspiration to me and therefore, I hope that her statue will raise her profile and that her life and work will go on to inspire many more for generations to come.

Read on 8th March 2022 at the unveiling of ‘Our Elizabeth’ in Congleton

‘Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy’ – the Fiesty Feminist? by Mary Holmes

Author Mary Holmes writes blog posts about aspects of Elizabeth’s life and has written a book about Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and the Victorian Feminist Movement – The Biography of an Insurgent Woman, by Dr Maureen Wright

Dr Wright’s detailed biography of Elizabeth and her contribution to the emancipation of women in the UK is available from all good booksellers.

We also have a collection of Schools Materials about Elizabeth