Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme-Elmy (née Wolstenholme; 1833 – 12 March 1918) was a British teacher, campaigner and organiser, significant in the history of women's suffrage in the United Kingdom.

[1] Her elder brother, also named Joseph Wolstenholme (1829–1891), was afforded an education, and became a professor of mathematics at Cambridge University,[3] but Elizabeth was not permitted to study beyond two years at Fulneck Moravian School.

[1] Wolstenholme, dismayed with the woeful standard of elementary education for girls, joined the College of Preceptors[4] in 1862 and through this organisation met Emily Davies.

[1] In 1867, Wolstenholme represented Manchester on the newly formed North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women.

[6] Wolstenholme, was keen for a curriculum aimed at developing skills for employment, whereas Davies wished for women to be taught the same syllabus as men.

[1] She described the "epoch making" outcome as "the greatest victory the woman's cause has ever yet gained, greater even than the passing of the Married Women's Property Acts"[15][page needed] and as a watershed moment in improving the laws governing marriage.

[17] The WEU campaigned for four great equalities between men and women: in civic rights and duties, in education and self-development, in the workplace, and in marriage and parenthood.

[18] Wolstenholme, a long-time friend and colleague of Emmeline Pankhurst,[21] was invited to became a member of the executive committee of the Women's Social and Political Union.

[18] Wolstenholme was on the stage when Keir Hardie and Pankhurst spoke to a large crowd in Trafalgar Square, and also wrote an eyewitness account of the 1906 Boggart Hole Clough meeting and the 1908 Women's Sunday,[1] where she was honoured with her own stand.

She also gave her support to the Lancashire and Cheshire Textile and other Workers' Representation Committee, formed in Manchester during 1903 headed by Esther Roper.

[24] In 1869, she invited Josephine Butler to be president of the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, a campaign which succeeded in 1886.

[25] Wolstenholme met silk mill owner, secularist, republican (anti-monarchist), and women's rights supporter Benjamin John Elmy (1838–1906) when she moved to Congleton, Cheshire.

In her later years, Wolstenholme found travelling from her home to London physically difficult, and public life became limited to writing letters to the press in support of the causes she championed.

[1] Wolstenholme's friend Emmeline Pankhurst described her in later life as: "a tiny Jenny-wren of a woman, with bright, bird-like eyes, and a little face, child-like in its merriment and its pathos, which even in extreme old age retained the winning graces of youth and unbound hair falling in ringlets on her shoulders, which all!

[30] Her writing includes: The British Library holds her papers and those of the Guardianship of Infants Act and the Women's Emancipation Union.

Her name and image, and those of 58 other women's suffrage supporters, are etched on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London, which was unveiled in 2018.

[34] It was designed by sculptor Hazel Reeves and unveiled by Baroness Hale of Richmond on International Women's Day, 8 March 2022.