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Amy Eliza Hurlston (1865–1949) was a British journalist, editor, social campaigner and trade unionist.

Family

Hurlston was born in Coventry, Warwickshire, in 1865, and was the daughter Alfred Hurlston, a Spon End watchmaker, and his wife Emma Elizabeth Hurlston (née Deacon).

She was engaged to a man named Theodore Edmond and sued him for breach of contact when he ended the engagement a month before the wedding was due to take place in 1897. She married surgeon William Wright Wilson in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, in 1909.

Career

Hurlston worked as a journalist. She published in the monthly bicycling journal The Wheel World, from November 1884 to June 1885, contributed to the journal Womanhood, wrote to the Coventry Times and Warwickshire Journal and later became "Lady editor" of the Sheffield Weekly Telegraph. She also published a work of fiction, Played Out and Lost, in 1885.

She was a member of the Women’s Trade Union League, and was a Coventry Poor Law Guardian. She persuaded the Poor Law Union board to employ a night nurse for the infirmary in 1901. In 1895, she gave evidence to the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor, explaining how women were disadvantaged in old age after speaking to working class women across the Midlands. Hurlston raised issues women experienced in saving for their future pension provision, including: low wages, marriage, intermittent employment (for example needing to stop working due to the home duties of raising children or caring for other family members and seasonal fluctuations), and life expectancy. She shared how servants in the Midlands were paid about two or three shillings a week, which was not enough to allow them to join a friendly society, let alone save for the future.

Hurlston was also an early member of the Women’s Emancipation Union, an organisation founded by her friend Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme-Elmy, and presented a paper to the annual conference held on 16 March 1893 titled The Factory Work of Women in the Midlands. She was appointed secretary of the Coventry branch in 1905.

Death

Hurlston stepped back from campaigning after her marriage and died in Ledbury, Herefordshire, in 1949.

References

1. ^ Hunt, Cathy (30 August 2018). A History of Women's Lives in Coventry. Pen and Sword. ISBN 978-1-5267-0852-6.
2. ^ Bassett, Troy J. (31 October 2024). "Author: Amy Hurlston". At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837-1901. Retrieved 27 November 2024.
3. ^ Wright, Maureen (19 July 2013). Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and the Victorian Feminist Movement: The biography of an insurgent woman. Manchester University Press. pp. 171–175. ISBN 978-1-84779-762-9.
4. Who was who: a companion to Who's who, containing the biographies of those who died during the period 1916-1928 by London : A. & C. Black. London: St. Martin's Press. 1929. p. 1138.
5. Tricycle Days 1881-1888: The Birth of Three-Wheeling and "Woman on a Tricycle" Column. The Lost Century of Sports Collection. 26 April 2024. ISBN 978-1-964197-54-8.
6. Hurlston, Amy (1904). "What women are doing in the North Midlands". Womanhood. Vol. 13. pp. 346–348.
7. Marchal, Louise (March 2023). "Reform, nonconformists and the press: the role of women's suffrage networks in the early sculpture commissions of Frances Darlington". Sculpture Journal. 32 (1): 35–50. doi:10.3828/sj.2023.32.1.03.
8. Lewis, Jane (1 May 2024). Women's Welfare, Women's Rights. Taylor & Francis. p. 29. ISBN 978-1-040-02546-8.
9. ^ Hunt, Cathy (2014), Hunt, Cathy (ed.), "Coventry: A Case Study", The National Federation of Women Workers, 1906–1921, London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 139–160, doi:10.1057/9781137033543_7, ISBN 978-1-137-03354-3, retrieved 27 November 2024
10. Oral History. Vol. 29–30. Oral History Society. 2001.
11. Lewis, Jane (1 May 2024). Women's Welfare, Women's Rights. Taylor & Francis. p. 29. ISBN 978-1-040-02546-8.
12. Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research. University of London Institute of Historical Research. London: Longmans, Green. 1981. p. 82.
13. Stanley Holton, Sandra (23 September 2004). "Elmy, Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme (1833–1918), campaigner for women's rights". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/38638. ISBN 978-0-19-861412-8. Retrieved 27 November 2024. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
14. Hurlston, Amy. (1903) The Factory Work of Women in the Midlands, Papers of the Women’s Emancipation Union, British Library.
15. Crawford, Elizabeth (2006). The Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland: A Regional Survey. Taylor & Francis. p. 127. ISBN 978-0-415-38332-5.
16. England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1916-2007. Volume 9a, p. 76. Ancestry.com.

• 1865 births
• Writers from Coventry
• Activists from Coventry
• British trade unionists
• 19th-century British women journalists
• 20th-century British women journalists
• 1949 deaths