Ellice Hopkins

Ellice Hopkins (30 October 1836 – 21 August 1904) was a Victorian social campaigner and author. Hopkins co-founded the White Cross Army in 1883, and vigorously advocated moral purity while criticising contemporary sexual double standards.[1]

Ellice Hopkins
Ellice Hopkins, from the 1907 posthumous biography by Rosa Mary Barrett.
Born
Jane Ellice Hopkins

30 October 1836
Cambridge, England
Died21 August 1904
Brighton, England

Early life

Jane Ellice Hopkins was born in Cambridge, the daughter of William Hopkins, a mathematics tutor at the University of Cambridge, and his second wife, Caroline Frances Boys Hopkins. As a girl, Hopkins knew the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. At age 30, after her father's death, Hopkins moved to Brighton with her mother.[1]

Activism

In 1874 Hopkins and rescue worker Sarah Robinson established the Soldier's Institute at Portsmouth, and in 1876 toured several British towns, recruiting thousands of women to the Ladies' Association for the Care of Friendless Girls.[1] Her biographer describes her as "instrumental" in the passing of the Industrial Schools Amendment Act of 1880, which allowed children to be removed from hazardous homes (including brothels) and placed in industrial schools.[1] She also lobbied for the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which raised the female age of consent from 13 to 16, and criminalized male homosexuality.[2] Hopkins co-founded the White Cross Army, a men's Christian organization, in 1883 with Bishop J. B. Lightfoot of Durham.[3] "It was hard that the power which would have been a glory to me if I were a man, should be held a shame and a disgrace to me because I was a woman," she recalled of her work.[3]

Writing

Hopkins wrote in a wide variety of genres, including two volumes of poetry, English Idylls (1865) and Autumn Swallows (1883), and a sensational gothic novel, Rose Turquand (1874).[4][5] An Englishwoman's Work Among Workingmen (1875) was a memoir of her activism. She wrote pamphlets, most notably True Manliness (1883), and Christian devotional works,[6] including Christ the Consoler, A Book of Comfort for the Sick (1879), and A plea for the wider action of the Church of England in the prevention of the degradation of women, an essay in which she criticised the contemporary double standard by which women were disproportionately blamed for sexual immorality.[1] Her last books were The Power of Womanhood (1899), on the role of mothers in "moral evolution",[3] and The Story of Life (1902), a guide intended to help parents teach sex education to their adolescent children.[7]

Personal life

Multiple chronic health issues led Hopkins to withdraw from public life in 1888.[3] She died in 1904, aged 67 years, in Brighton. Fellow activist Rosa Mary Barrett wrote a short biography of Hopkins, published in 1907.[8]

References
  1. Morgan, S. (2004). "Hopkins, (Jane) Ellice (1836–1904)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/33978. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. Morgan, Sue (1998). "'Knights of God': Ellice Hopkins and the White Cross Army, 1883–95". Studies in Church History. 34: 431–445. doi:10.1017/S0424208400013796. ISSN 0424-2084.
  3. Lovesey, Oliver (2011). "Ellice Hopkins (1836-1904)". Victorian Review. 37 (1): 22–26. ISSN 0848-1512. JSTOR 41413868.
  4. Lovesey, Oliver (1 July 2013). ""The Poor Little Monstrosity": Ellice Hopkins' Rose Turquand, Victorian Disability, and Nascent Eugenic Fiction". Nineteenth-Century Contexts. 35 (3): 275–296. doi:10.1080/08905495.2013.806711. ISSN 0890-5495. S2CID 161910068.
  5. Hingston, Kylee-Anne (30 September 2019). Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction. Oxford University Press. pp. 111–114. ISBN 978-1-78962-495-3.
  6. Raphael, Melissa (September 1996). "J. Ellice Hopkins: The Construction of a Recent Spiritual Feminist Foremother". Feminist Theology. 5 (13): 73–95. doi:10.1177/096673509600001305. ISSN 0966-7350. S2CID 144971332.
  7. Hall, Lesley A., Outspoken Women : an anthology of women's writing on sex: 1870-1969. London : Routledge, 2005. ISBN 9780415253727 (pp. 79-80, 329).
  8. Barrett, Rosa Mary (1907). "Ellice Hopkins : a memoir". Wellcome Collection. Retrieved 3 March 2020.

Further reading
  • Morgan, Sue. A passion for purity : Ellice Hopkins and the politics of gender in the late-Victorian church (Bristol, 1999).
  • Morgan, Sue. "Faith, sex and purity: the religio-feminist theory of Ellice Hopkins", Women's History Review, 9 (2000), p. 13.
  • Mumm, Susan. "'I love my sex' : two late Victorian pulpit women", in Perry, Gill; Laurence, Anne; Bellamy, Joan (eds) Women, scholarship and criticism : gender and knowledge, c.1790–1900 (Manchester, 2000), pp. 204–21.
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