E. M. King

Eliza Mary King (née Richardson, 1831–1911), better known as Mrs E M King, was a New Zealand feminist who campaigned in England and the United States for repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts; world peace, co-operative housekeeping, rational dress reform and the agrarian reform policies of the American Farmers Alliance.

Eliza Mary Richardson was the third child of Thomas Watkin Richardson, an Oxford-educated lawyer of the Inner Temple, and Mary Anne Richardson (Whittington). Like her elder siblings, Katherine (de Vouex) and William, who died young, Eliza was born in Offenbach am Main, Germany. In 1852, some years after their return from Germany to England, the family migrated to New Zealand and settled at New Plymouth in the Taranaki region. Eliza married William Cutfield King (1829–1861) and by him had two daughters, Constance Ada (1859–1955) and Alice Mary (1855–1932). Her father, Thomas Richardson died in January 1861 and William King, a captain in the Taranaki Rifle Volunteers and newly elected to the New Zealand Parliament, was ambushed and killed in the Second Taranaki War a month later. After this double bereavement, and with New Plymouth under siege from the Maori forces, Eliza, her daughters and the remaining members of her family sought refuge in Tasmania.

She was not long in Tasmania. Early in 1863, Eliza, Constance and Alice returned to New Plymouth where she wrote Truth. Love. Joy. or the Fruits of the Garden of Eden, a polemical feminist critique of the Old Testament and the gospel of St Paul. The theologian John Colenso was an important influence. The book was published in 1864 in Australia and England where it was promoted by the atheist George Holyoake. Her name is shown on the title page as E. M. King, an authorial designation that she preserved in all subsequent publications. In the preface she revealed, after some hesitation, that she was a woman and that she had taken Ralph Waldo Emerson as her inspiration for independent thought.

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