Ethel Holdsworth (née Carnie; 1 January 1886 – 28 December 1962) was a working-class British writer, feminist, and socialist activist from Lancashire.

[7] Robert Blatchford, proprietor of the Clarion, interviewed Ethel Holdsworth at 76 Windsor Road, Great Harwood, in the summer of 1908 for a feature in one of his newspapers, the Woman Worker.

[8] Blatchford offered her a job writing articles and poems for the Woman Worker, in London, which she also edited between July and December 1909.

Holdsworth taught creative writing at Bebel House Women's College and Socialist Education Centre in London in 1913, but returned to Great Harwood before the end of the year.

Holdsworth's daughter Margaret told an interviewer that her mother stopped writing because she was worn out and depressed about the imminent outbreak of World War II.

[11] Bell writes that "at its best, Holdsworth's poetry illuminates the gap between working-class people's desire for liberty, often evident in their imaginative capacity, and the constraints and suffering of their lives".

Holdsworth protested against the introduction of conscription in World War I and chaired local meetings of the British Citizen Party.

[13] During the 1920s she edited and produced The Clear Light, an anti-fascist journal, with her husband Alfred Holdsworth from their home in Slack Top, Hebden Bridge.

[16] In 2022, a plaque for Ethel Carnie was unveiled at the former site of Great Harwood British School, as part of the Pendle Radicals local history project.