Ben Elmy

Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme Elmy (1833–1918) was a British Feminist Women's suffragist campaigner, essayist and poet, who also wrote under the pseudonyms E and Ignota.

Elizabeth Wolstenholme was born in Cheetham Hill, Manchester and baptised on 15 December 1833 in Eccles, Lancashire where her father was a Methodist minister. She was the daughter of Revd Joseph Wolstenholme who died around 1843 much of her formative years were spent in Roe Green with her maternal family. Her mother Elizabeth had died when she was very young and she was brought up by her stepmother Mary (née Lord). She attended Fulneck Moravian School for two years but was not permitted to study further. Her brother Joseph Wolstenholme (1829–1891) became a professor of mathematics at Cambridge University. She opened a private girls' boarding school in Boothstown near Worsley and stayed there until 1865 when she moved her establishment to Congleton in Cheshire.

Wolstenholme, dismayed with the woeful standard of elementary education for girls, joined the College of Preceptors in 1862 and through this organisation met Emily Davies. They campaigned together for girls to be given the same access to higher education as boys. Wolstenholme founded the Manchester Schoolmistresses Association in 1865 and in 1866 gave evidence to the Taunton Commission into education, one of the first women to give evidence at a Parliamentary Select Committee. In 1867 Wolstenholme represented Manchester on the newly formed North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women. Emily Davies and Wolstenholme quarrelled over how women should be examined at a Higher Level and Wolstenholme who had formed the Manchester branch of the 'Society for the Promotion of the Employment in Women' in 1865 was keen for a curriculum aimed at developing skills for employment whereas Davies wished for women to be taught the same syllabus as men.

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