The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CONTINENCE AND PSYCHIC LOVE
Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy
Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy made a major contribution to
feminist ideas on sexuality through her books and articles. In a
very active feminist career which spanned 60 years she worked
alongside those women who were taking the most radical stand
on sexuality such as Josephine Butler and Christabel
Pankhurst. Her main campaigning activities were in the areas
of higher education for women, women’s suffrage, reform of
the laws on marriage and the custody of children and the
abolition of the Contagious Diseases Acts. She began her
efforts for the improvement of women’s position by forming an
association of school-mistresses and a society for furthering the
higher education of women in 1861. In 1865 she was a
founding member and honorary secretary of the Manchester
Women’s Suffrage Society. In 1867 she revived the agitation in
support of the Married Women’s Property Act, became
secretary of the Married Women’s Property Committee and
held that office until 1882 when the last Married Women’s
Property Act was passed. The 1882 Infants’ Act, giving
widowed mothers custody of their children, was largely due to
her efforts. While most other workers in the movement for
women’s education stood aloof from the Contagious Diseases
Acts agitation, Wolstenholme Elmy threw herself into abolition
work from the beginning and was a very prominent member of
the committee of the Ladies National Association throughout
its existence.
In 1889 she was a founding member of the Women’s Franchise
League along with Richard and Emmeline Pankhurst and
Josephine Butler, among others. Her connection with the
Pankhursts, severed briefly in 1891 when she founded her own
Women’s Emancipation Union, was later resumed when she
joined the Women’s Social Political Union in which she remained
until 1914 despite the splits, as a devoted supporter of Christabel
and her mother. A statement from the aims of the Women’s
Emancipation Union in 1895 gives an idea of the shape of
Wolstenholme Elmy’s feminism at that time:
[the WEU] recognises that the slavery of sex is the root of all
slavery, and that injustice to womanhood, especially injustice
within the family, is the perennial source of all other injustice,
it seeks the legal, political, social, and individual
emancipation of women, as the vital indispensable condition
of all other true and lasting reforms; and affirms these claims
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