Ellen Hughes

Ellen Hughes was a Welsh-language writer, temperance reformer and suffragist from Llanengan in North Wales.
Strongly influenced by Sarah Jane Rees, she had a poem published in the Welsh-language women's periodical Y Frythones in 1885, when she was only 18. The year 1907 saw the publication of the essay Angylion yr Aelwyd which she had written in 1899. Now a member of the Undeb Dirwestol Merched y De, the South Wales Women's Temperance Union, her article criticized men's arguments for keeping women out of parliament. The same year she also published Murmur y Gragen. Sef detholion o gyfansoddiadau barddonol a rhyddiaethol.
In her A View Across the Valley: Short Stories by Women from Wales, Jane Aaron describes Hughes as "arguably the Welsh-language author of the period who comes closest to being a feminist in the modern sense". Covering her contributions to the journal Y Gymraes in 1900, she quotes a passage in which Hughes mocks William Gladstone, the prime minister of the day: "The idea that an elder of the wisdom of Mr Gladstone should doubt the capacity of the majority of women to vote in an election strikes us as wonderfully astonishing!".