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.

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. Hopkins co-founded the White Cross Army, a men's Christian organization, in 1883 with Bishop J. B. Lightfoot of Durham. "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. 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, 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.

Personal life Multiple chronic health issues led Hopkins to withdraw from public life in 1888.