Ellis Ethelmer (1833–1918)

Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme Elmy was born in Eccles, Salford, part of Greater Manchester, England, the daughter of the Rev. Joseph Wolstenholme, a Methodist minister and his wife Elizabeth. Her mother died when she was a newborn and after her father's death in about 1843, she was brought up by her stepmother. She only received two years of formal education but determinedly educated herself at home until she came of age. In 1853, with funds from a small inheritance, she opened a private girls' boarding school in near Worsley, Lancashire. Believing that teaching should be a skilled profession that required training, in 1865 she founded the Manchester Schoolmistresses Association; and two years later, with Josephine Butler, established the North of England Council for the Higher Education of Women. In 1865, she met in London with a discussion group of women that included Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies, Dorothea Beale, Anne Clough, Helen Taylor, and Elizabeth Garrett that decided to draft a petition asking Parliament to give women the vote. Eventually their group grew into the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. Elizabeth gave up her work in education to become a pioneer of the women’s emancipation movement. She served as secretary of the Married Women's Property Committee, a group dedicated to changing British common law to permit a wife to own, buy, and sell her own property. In the 1870s, she began living with Benjamin Elmy, a poet and textile mill owner, whom she married -- under some duress from colleagues -- in a civil ceremony shortly before giving birth to their son in 1874. Among the reforms she championed were the Married Women's Property Act, finally passed in 1882, improved custody rights for mothers after divorce, and protection for prostitutes. Elizabeth published a long feminist poem, Woman Free (1893), two sex education manuals, The Human Flower (1894) and Baby Buds (1895) and numerous pamphlets, including Woman's Franchise: The Need of the Hour (1907). She died in March 1918 just a few days after British women won the right to vote.