Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and the Victorian Feminist Movement

Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and the Victorian Feminist Movement
Author: Maureen Wright
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 459
Release: 2013-07-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1847797628

This book provides the first full-length biography of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy (1833–1918) – someone referred to among contemporaries as ‘the grey matter in the brain’ of the late-Victorian women’s movement. A pacifist, humanitarian ‘free-thinker’, Wolstenholme Elmy was a controversial character and the first woman ever to speak from a public platform on the topic of marital rape. Lauded by Emmeline Pankhurst as ‘first’ among the infamous militant suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union, Wolstenholme Elmy was one of Britain’s great feminist pioneers and, in her own words, an ‘initiator’ of many high-profile campaigns from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Wright draws on an extensive resource of unpublished correspondence and other sources to produce an enduring portrait that does justice to Wolstenholme Elmy’s momentous achievements.

Sisters and Sisterhood

Sisters and Sisterhood
Author: Lyndsey Jenkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2021-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192665138

The Kenney family grew up in Saddleworth, outside Oldham, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In 1905, three of the sisters met Christabel Pankhurst, a turning point which changed the rest of their lives. Annie Kenney became one of the leaders of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), Jessie was an organiser at the heart of the organisation, and Nell campaigned outside the capital. Caroline and Jane used their connections within the suffrage movement as the springboard for careers in innovative education on both sides of the Atlantic. While working-class women are increasingly acknowledged in histories of the WSPU, this study is the first to make them the primary focus, and, in doing so, it opens up a new conversation around sex, class, and politics, and how these categories interacted in this period. This is a study of the possibilities for, and experiences of, working-class women in the militant suffrage movement. It identifies why these women became politically active, their experiences as activists, and the benefits they gained from their political work. It stresses the need to see working-class women as significant actors and autonomous agents in the suffrage campaign. It shows why and how some women became politicised, why they prioritised the vote above all else, and how this campaign came to dominate their lives. It also places the suffrage campaign within the broader trajectory of their lives to stress how far the personal and political were intertwined for these women. Although this is a book about 'working-class suffragettes', Lyndsey Jenkins also reveals what it says about women as workers and teachers, religious believers and political thinkers, and friends and colleagues, as well as suffragettes. Above all, it is a study of sisterhood.

British Family Life, 1780–1914, Volume 1

British Family Life, 1780–1914, Volume 1
Author: Claudia Nelson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 2064
Release: 2021-12-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000560856

The five volumes of this collection focus on various aspects of family life. Drawing on rare printed sources and archival material, this collection will provide a balanced, contextualized picture of family life, during a period of intense social change. It will appeal to scholars of social history, gender studies and the long nineteenth century.

The British Women's Suffrage Campaign

The British Women's Suffrage Campaign
Author: June Purvis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2020-12-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000319938

This book brings together twelve chapters from feminist historians from around the world to offer new perspectives on aspects of the campaign for women’s suffrage in Britain. Although the focus is on Britain, this volume signals how the women’s suffrage campaign in Britain embraced both national and global aspects. The historical developments and structures that affected women’s lives and suffrage struggles were not limited to national contexts. Early chapters focus on particular individuals both well and lesser known, including Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Emmeline Pankhurst, as well as Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, Lady Isabel Margesson and Isabella Ford. Later chapters highlight the interrelationship between the British movement and suffrage campaigns across the globe with reference to Austria, Japan, New Zealand, Australia and the USA. The chapters deal with issues around strategies, social class, employment, religion, nationalism, empire and race and explore complex issues about women’s roles in campaigning for their democratic right to the parliamentary vote. Offering the reader a broad view of the British women’s suffrage movement, this is the ideal volume for students of women’s and political history in both its national and international contexts.

Distant sisters

Distant sisters
Author: James Keating
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2020-09-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526140977

In the 1890s Australian and New Zealand women became the first in the world to win the vote. Buoyed by their victories, they promised to lead a global struggle for the expansion of women’s electoral rights. Charting the common trajectory of the colonial suffrage campaigns, Distant Sisters uncovers the personal and material networks that transformed feminist organising. Considering intimate and institutional connections, well-connected elites and ordinary women, this book argues developments in Auckland, Sydney, and Adelaide—long considered the peripheries of the feminist world—cannot be separated from its glamourous metropoles. Focusing on Antipodean women, simultaneously insiders and outsiders in the emerging international women’s movement, and documenting the failures of their expansive vision alongside its successes, this book reveals a more contingent history of international organising and challenges celebratory accounts of fin-de-siècle global connection.

Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood

Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood
Author: Joan N. Burstyn
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2016-11-18
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1315444305

This study, first published in 1980, argues that higher education for women was accepted by the end of the nineteenth-century, and higher education was becoming a desirable preparation for teachers in girls’ schools. By accepting the opponents’ claim that higher education for women had the potential to revolutionise relations between the sexes, this fascinating book demonstrates how the relevance of the nineteenth-century serves to enhance our understanding of the contemporary women’s movement. This title will be of interest to students of history and education.

Banishing the Beast

Banishing the Beast
Author: Lucy Bland
Publisher:
Total Pages: 411
Release: 1995
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781565843073

Discusses the struggles of England's early feminists to resolve the issues of prostitution, birth control, marital reform, and the sexual nature of women

Woman Free

Woman Free
Author: Ellis Ethelmer
Publisher:
Total Pages: 258
Release: 1893
Genre: History
ISBN:

"The Truest Form of Patriotism"

Author: Heloise Brown
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780719065316

This text explores the pervasive influence of pacifism on Victorian feminism. Drawing on previously unused source material, it provides an account of Victorian women who campaigned for peace and the many feminists who incorporated pacifist ideas into their writing on women and women's work. It explores feminists' ideas about the role of women within the empire, their eligibility for citizenship and their ability to act as moral guardians in public life. Brown shows that such ideas made use - in varying ways - of gendered understandings of the role of force and the relevance of arbitration and other pacifist strategies. organizations, from well-known feminists such as Lydia Becker, Josephine Butler and Milicent Garrett Fawcett, to lesser-known figures such as the Quaker pacifists Ellen Robinson and Priscilla Peckover. Women's work within male-dominated organizations, such as the Peace Society and the International Arbitration and Peace Association, is covered alongside single-sex organizations, such as the International Council of Women. Also reviewed are the arguments put forward in feminist journals like the Englishwoman's Review and the Women's Penny Paper. Brown uncovers a wide range of pacifist, internationalist and anti-imperialist strands in Victorian feminist thought, focusing on how these ideas developed within the political and organizational context of the time. movements and to those with an interest in the history of British feminism.

Suffrage Days

Suffrage Days
Author: Sandra Holton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2002-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134837860

This is a history of the suffrage movement in Britain from the beginnings of the first sustained campaign in the 1860s to the winning of the vote for women in 1918. The book focuses on a number of figures whose role in this agitation has been ignored or neglected. These include the free-thinker Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy; the founder of the women's movement in the United States, Elizabeth Cady Stanton; the working class orator, Jessie Craigen; and the socialist suffragists, Hannah Mitchell and Mary Gawthorpe. Through the lives of these figures Holton uncovers the complex origins of the movement and associated issues of gender.