(Annie) Elizabeth Hopkinson was born in England on February 12, 1883, the daughter of William and Annie Hopkinson. The Hopkinsons immigrated to the United States in 1889, when Elizabeth was a young child, and lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

Elizabeth Hopkinson met Leona Huntzinger while working in the lace mills in Philadelphia. They became close friends and possibly lovers. Huntzinger moved in as a boarder in the Hopkinson home, where she essentially became a member of the family. They worked in the mills for more than fifteen years before becoming suffrage activists. 

In May 1916, the two women moved to Chicago, where they found temporary employment as housekeepers and lived in a boarding house with other domestic service workers. Huntzinger and Hopkinson made the decision to head back east when offered new job opportunities as suffrage speakers with the New York State Suffrage Association. They toured the state in a car, delivering suffrage speeches out of the back seat during the day and sleeping in the car at night.  

After their suffrage work, Huntzinger and Hopkinson purchased Three Springs Farm in Bacton, Pennsylvania. By 1930, they had adopted four young boys (aged 7 to 13), who lived and worked with them on the farm. Huntzinger passed away in 1937. Hopkinson never married and passed away on March 10, 1976, at the age of 93. She is buried in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

For more on Hopkinson, see Michelle Katherine Pettine Moravec and Hope Smalley, “Stunts and Sensationalism: The Pennsylvania Progressive-Era Campaign for Women’s Suffrage,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 87, no. 4 (Autumn 2020): 631–656; Wendy Rouse, Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Suffrage Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2022). For an OutHistory exhibit that addresses Hopkinson, see The Queer History of Women's Suffrage: Scholarship and Censorship in 2025, by Wendy Rouse.