Eliza King (1831-1911)

Eliza Mary King (nee Richardson) was a remarkable early New Zealand feminist who wrote her first book, Truth. Love. Joy or the Fruits of the Garden of Eden in New Plymouth after her husband William Cutfield King was killed in 1861 during the Taranaki Wars. The book was published in 1864, a radical attack on Biblical literalism and the use of Scriptural texts to subject women to masculine domination. Eliza returned to England in 1870 to give her daughters, Alice and Constance, an English education. Almost immediately after her return, she joined the campaign for prostitution law reform. She played a prominent role as a fiery speaker and polemicist in the early years of feminist opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts, which regulated prostitution in the English garrison and port cities. Other causes also engaged her in the years that followed - she spoke publicly and published pamphlets and review articles promoting the establishment of co-operative housing, women's suffrage and the role of women in the international movement for world peace. 

Mrs King was best known, however, for her promotion of rational dress reform in England, Canada and the United States in 1881-1892. She published, among other papers, her celebrated pamphlet Women and the Dress of Savages in 1882 and in the following year financed and organised the month-long Rational Dress Exhibition which was held in Princes Hall, Piccadilly.

In 1886 Mrs King bought an orange grove and settled in rural Florida where she lived with her companion Nellie Glen in a house they called 'Kings Glen'. She soon became involved in Floridian agricultural politics as a newspaper columnist and county lecturer for the Farmers Alliance. Together she and Nellie established one of the first women's clubs in Florida. She remained active in women's politics until 1907, when she returned to Taranaki to live with her daughters. Eliza King died on 17 February 1911 and was buried in St Mary's churchyard in a railed gravesite along with her husband William and father Thomas Watkin Richardson.