Academic, biographer and author Dr Maureen Wright, supported by Non Stop News UK, works in the field of Women’s Political Rights and the Women’s Suffrage movement in Britain from 1865-1918. She has published widely in this field for the last twenty years. She was an Associate Lecturer in the Department of History and Politics at the University of Chichester, specialising in teaching women’s and gender history. She has previously worked and taught at the University of Portsmouth. Since retiring from her teaching commitments, Dr Wright has undertaken studies in Theology, leading to a MA in Theology, Imagination and Culture (2024). As a researcher who specialises in interpreting documents that narrate people’s lived experience, her dissertation centred around ministers of religion who are living in the grip of trauma following catastrophic cases of Moral Injury and/or PTSD. Dr Wright is intending to publish the findings from her thesis in due course. One (2021) paper, which centred on the initial findings of the research project (details below) has already been published.
Dr Wright is author of the book ‘Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and the Victorian Feminist Movement: The biography of an insurgent woman‘ (Gender in History MUP), first published in 2011 (paperback in 2014). The 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. She was a pacifist, humanitarian ‘free-thinker’ and 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. Dr Wright draws on an extensive resource of unpublished correspondence and other sources to produce an enduring portrait that does justice to Wolstenholme Elmy’s momentous achievements.
This biographical study reveals activist Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy as a radical feminist whose contribution to constructing an egalitarian discourse of social, gender and political rights was crucial in securing an increased role for women in the public sphere and who, as a feminist theorist, helped transform the ideals upon which citizenship for women was based. More recently (2021) Dr Wright has a chapter in June Purvis and June Hannam (eds.), The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign: National and International Perspectives, published by Routledge.
More about the book and its availability.
Dr Wright’s other publications includes articles tracing the development of Wolstenholme Elmy’s theory of citizenship through the texts and deeds of the Women’s Emancipation Union (2010); the theoretical implications of writing historical biography both through the lens of Wolstenholme Elmy’s life (2009) and with June Purvis, that of other ‘militant’ suffragettes, by applying the auto/biographical texts of the Pankhurst family – leaders of the Women’s Social and Political Union (2005).
Dr Wright’s more recent work in 2014 focused on the construction of cultural expressions of gender equality across social classes in Britain during the late-nineteenth century, and the challenges this posed to the role of the state as the legislator of moral values. By analysing the texts of the Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights (PRA) (founded 1871), she makes assessments of how conflicts and disputes arose among the ‘feminist’ male sympathisers of the House of Commons, and their ‘anti-feminist’ colleagues – who asserted that the work of the PRA was “scarcely needed in a country like England”. The PRA’s texts are almost completely under-researched, and the collaboration between the men within its circle and their ‘First-Wave’ feminist colleagues highlight distinctive discourses of collaboration and respect between the genders which have been hitherto unexplored.
During 2014-15, Dr Wright worked as a Community Historian on the Heritage Lottery-funded Graylingwell Heritage Project. This involved the recruitment and supervision of a team of research volunteers, research into the history of the West Sussex County Asylum (1897-2001) and the delivery and dissemination of research findings to a wide variety of audiences. This collaborative project involved the West Sussex Record Office, the Chichester Community Development Trust, Pallant House Gallery and the University of Chichester. This led to a project book, ‘Beneath the Water Tower’, co-edited by Dr Wright and a series of talks, exhibitions and lectures in West Sussex and nationally.
Dr Wright was also the Research Associate for an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project entitled ‘Chichester and the Great War: Mobilisation, Care and Compassion, and Memorialisation’ – this is linked to the Gateways to the First World War southern region academic grouping.
Books
Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and the Victorian feminist movement: the Biography of an Insurgent Woman, (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2011, Paperback edition, 2014.
Beneath the Water Tower: The Graylingwell Heritage Project, (Chichester: 2015, Co-Editor)
‘A Particularly Interesting Kind of “Heroine” to have’: Marriage, motherhood and votes for women in the archives of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy (1833-1918), feminist, rebel and radical’, 43-59 in The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign: National and International Perspectives, (eds.) June Purvis and June Hannam, (London and New York: Routledge, 2021).
Journals (peer-reviewed)
- ‘A grand day for Congleton: unveiling the statue of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, Britain’s most radical suffragist’, Women’s History Review, Vol.32, No.3,(2023), pp. 415-23.
- ‘Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy comes home to Congleton’, Women’s History Network Blog, 18 July 2022.
- ‘Developing Mental Health provision in West Sussex: Harold A. Kidd, first Medical Superintendent of Graylingwell Hospital, 1896-1926’, Southern History, Vol.38, (2017).
- Niall McCrae and Maureen Wright, ‘Work, Rest and Play: Mental health nursing and constructs of domesticity in West Sussex (1897-1939)’, Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Studies, September (2016). DOI: 10.1111/jpm.12334.
- ‘The perfect equality of all persons before the law’: the Personal Rights Association and the discourse of civil rights in Britain, 1871–1885’, Women’s History Review, Vol.24, No.1, 2015, pp.72-95.
- ‘A reputation ‘[a]s black as the Devil himself’: the radical life of Benjamin J. Elmy, secularist, anti-eugenicist and ‘First-Wave’ feminist (1838-1906), Gender and History, Vol.26, No.2, 2014, pp.263-86.
- ‘The Women’s Emancipation Union and Radical-feminist politics in Britain, 1891-99’, Gender and History, Vol.22, No.2, 2010, pp.382-406.
- ‘An Impudent Intrusion?’: Assessing the Life of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, First-Wave feminist and social reformer (1833-1918). Women’s History Review, Vol.18, No.2, 2009, pp.243-64.
- June Purvis and Maureen Wright, ‘Writing Suffragette History: the contending autobiographical narratives of the Pankhursts’, Women’s History Review, 14, (3 & 4), 2005, pp; 405-434.
Interviews with Dr Wright include
Supporting open source
WordPress.org photo directory contributor – submitted photos.
Theology
Dr Wright, on her retirement from academic teaching in 2020, opted to investigate a different specialism and, as a confirmed and active member of the Church of England since the 1970s enrolled at Sarum College in September 2021 to study an MA in Theology, Imagination and Culture. She has already published in this area (2021) and fully intends to publish elements of her thesis upon completion of her studies (autumn 2024). Her supervisor for this work was Dr. Karen O’Donnell, Academic Dean, Westcott House, Cambridge and Dr Wright received full funding for the final year of her studies.
Dr Wright then plans to merge her interest in history with her theological studies to undertake a research degree in 2026, supervised by Dr Michael Hahn at Sarum College. This will be an investigation to whether or not there can be said to be a particular ‘Beguine Mysticism’, a mysticism common to the grouping of north European lay women as expressed in their writings in the twelfth century.
The History of Many Things
Dr Wright has a wide interest in history – as her very eclectically organised bookshelves attest! The website will feature some of this diversity as new books arrive to add to her increasingly large ‘to be read’ pile. Recently added to this tottering tower were Dr Estelle Paranque’s Thorns, Lust, and Glory; Al Murray’s Commando; Prof. Saul David’s Sky Warriors and Prof. Peter Caddick-Adam’s concise biography entitled simply, Churchill. Recently read books include Clare Mulley’s excellent biography entitled Agent Zo, which details the extraordinary life of a Polish wartime international intelligence courier.
Books soon to appear are Dr Dan Jones’s new biography of Dr. Wright’s favourite English King, Henry V and, from Dr James Holland, the harrowing narrative of the battle of Monte Cassino in World War II, entitled Cassino 44.