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Emily Faithfull (27 May 1835 – 31 May 1895) was an English women's rights activist who set up the Victoria Press to publish the English Woman's Journal.
Faithfull joined the Langham Place Circle, composed of like-minded women such as Barbara Bodichon, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Jessie Boucherett, Emily Davies, and Helen Blackburn. The Langham Place Circle advocated for legal reform in women's status (including suffrage), wider employment possibilities, and improved educational opportunities for girls and women. Although Faithfull identified with all three aspects of the group's aims, her primary areas of interest centered on advancing women's employment opportunities. The Circle was responsible for forming the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women in 1859.
In 1864, Faithfull was implicated in a divorce case between Henry Codrington and his wife Helen Jane Smith Codrington (1828–1876). Codrington was accused of attempting to rape Faithfull. These charges were dropped and Faithfull declined to provide testimony. It was also suggested that Faithfull and Helen were lesbian lovers. As a result of Faithfull's limited involvement and association with the case, her reputation suffered and she was shunned by the Langham Place Group. It was after this association with the case that Faithfull moved to destroy all of her private papers, in particular letters written to and from her family, leaving little behind besides her professional publications and a few treasured letters and clippings.
Of her nephews, one was the actor Rutland Barrington and another the Indologist John Faithfull Fleet, ICS. Among her friends she counted Richard Peacock, one of the founders of Beyer, Peacock & Company, Manchester locomotive manufacturers, to whom she dedicated the Edinburgh edition of her book Three Visits To America with the words to my "Friend Richard Peacock Esq of Gorton Hall" in 1882. She was a witness to the marriage of Peacock's daughter Jane Peacock to William Taylor Birchenough, the son of John Birchenough, another silk manufacturer cited approvingly in Three Visits To America for his treatment of women employees.
In 1888 Faithfull was awarded a civil list pension of £50. She died in Manchester.
She is a protagonist of Emma Donoghue's 2008 novel, The Sealed Letter, which is based on the Codrington divorce case of 1864.
In 1863 she began the publication of a monthly, Victoria Magazine, in which for eighteen years she continuously and earnestly advocated the claims of women to remunerative employment.
She was a member of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women. She considered compositor's work (a comparatively lucrative trade of the time) to be a possible mode of employment for women to pursue. This was opposed by the London Printer's Union, which was open only to men and claimed that women lacked the requisite intelligence and physical skill.
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