Suffrage Days

A Man ‘[a]s Black as the Devil Himself’: The Radical Life of Benjamin J. Elmy, Secularist, Anti‐Eugenicist and ‘First‐Wave’ Feminist in Britain (1838–1906)

“…93 Broadly, they subscribed to what Sandra Stanley Holton has defined as 'the distinctive nature of the Radical suffragist conception of the citizenship of women', namely a holistic approach to their subjection which placed an equal stress on civil and political disabilities. 94 While such an eclectic coalition arguably had little realistic chance of pressurising the legislature to secure the reforms it demanded, Wolstenholme Elmy had been encouraged to form the group after the Manchester Guardian newspaper published her résumé of the effects of the legal judgement in the case of Regina v. Jackson the preceding spring. 95 Edmund Jackson had sought restitution of conjugal rights after abducting and imprisoning his wife Emily against her will, but after the Court of Appeal released her under a writ of habeas corpus the public outcry over this significant challenge to the doctrine of coverture escalated.…”

The Women's Emancipation Union and Radical‐Feminist Politics in Britain, 1891–99

“…The history of British women's suffragism takes place on contested terrain and, as both Holton and Krista Cowman have pointed out, the definition of the 'militant' feminist is one that is impossible to fix. 42 What influences prompted a 'Radical' thinker to become a 'militant' was a matter for the individual's conscience, and women (and some men) moved fluidly between differing forms of protest, more often than not allied to more than one campaigning group. This was true, for example, for Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy who, as a secularist, pacifist, humanitarian with a reputation as the doyenne of 'free love', was a controversial figure among her colleagues.…”

“…50 Thus, in common with the late twentieth-century assessments of Holton and David Rubenstein, these earlier authors understood the necessity of placing the actions of the militants in the context from which they had sprung -the decade of the 1890s -rather than perceiving militancy as an aberration or divergence from tradition. 51 Therefore, though viewed traditionally as a time of 'moribund hopelessness', dormancy and depression, the fin de siècle is now understood as an era of fluidity and evolution among scholars of both citizenship and suffrage. 52 And as we shall see, though it was a numerically small and short-lived society, the WEU helped play its part as a binding agent for women of all social and political backgrounds to foster a sense of solidarity as they fought for a stake in the government of their nation by confronting the evils of the 'brutal, unjust, man-made, judge-made law[s]' which restricted their freedom.…”

Kinship and friendship: quaker women's networks and the women's movement sandra stanley holton

“…[47] Like her father, Helen Clark (formerly Bright) has also recently been identified as part of a current within the Society of Friends that from the 1860s sought to liberalise the discipline of their church, especially with regard to the rule against marrying out. In such ways the contingencies of personal life helped further the public work of members of this circle.…”