E. M. King

In 1870 Mrs E M King, as she was thereafter known, returned to England with her daughters, where she almost immediately joined Josephine Butler in the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts, which regulated prostitution in the English port cities.

[3] In 1870–72 King was active as a street protest organiser, speechmaker, polemicist and member of the Executive Committee of the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts.

In 1873 King commissioned the architect, Edward William Godwin, to draw plans for an associated living complex that would provide accommodation for 100 or more residents.

In 1884 King left England with her companion Elizabeth, ‘Nellie’ Glen (1848?–1900), for Canada and the United States, where they continued the campaign for rational dress reform.

In 1886 King and Nellie Glen bought an orange grove in Melrose in northern Florida, where she soon became involved in the agrarian reform movement of the Farmers Alliance as a newspaper editor, columnist and ‘county lecturer’.

She was buried in a railed enclosure in the grounds of the Taranaki Cathedral Church of St Mary, with her husband, William Cutfield King and her father, Thomas Watkin Richardson.

She argued that the differences were amplified, to the disadvantage of both sexes, by the prevailing political, theological and domestic conventions and prejudices of British and American society.