Elizabeth Price Martin was born on December 14, 1864 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the daughter of J. Sergeant and Sallie (Baker) Price. Her grandfather, Eli Kirk Price, 1797-1884, her brother, Eli Kirk Price, 1860-1933, and her father were all distinguished members of the Philadelphia bar; the family had long been influential in the Society of Friends.
She early showed an aptitude for community activity that in certain lines became statewide and even national in its scope. Not content with gardening as a hobby, she formed the Garden Club of Philadelphia and then founded and became first president of the Garden Club of America. A member of the committee for the improvement of Rittenhouse Square, she was an originator of the flower marts now held there annually. Among her religious activities, she was for some time chairman of the Woman's Diocesan Committee of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania. Party politics also enlisted her keen interest. In 1924 she attended the Republican National Convention at Cleveland, the first woman delegate at large from the state of Pennsylvania; and as head of the committee on permanent organization she was the first woman to serve as chairman of a major committee and make its report from the platform. For some years she was president of the Pennsylvania Council of Republican Women and in 1928 was chairman of the Pennsylvania division of the national committee for Hoover. The First World War offered her unusual opportunity for the exercise of her dynamic energy. She gave herself whole-heartedly to work for farm gardens, liberty loans, national defense, and the Red Cross, as well as to the extensive activities of the Emergency Aid of Pennsylvania, of which she was an organizer and a vice-president. Of the many organizations which she either founded or helped to mold, perhaps none gave more scope to her talents for quick response to crises than did the Emergency Aid. The relief work for Belgium carried on under its auspices was one of her most notable undertakings. As chairman of one of its committees she helped for years to care for 1, 016 children stricken with infantile paralysis during the spring of 1916. Until her death she was chairman of the board that built and managed Warburton House, a hotel for working women, another enterprise of the Emergency Aid.
Elizabeth Price was the first woman to serve as commissioner of public welfare for Pennsylvania, was vice-president of the women's advisory council of the Philadelphia department of public health, and in 1928 was foreman of the grand jury that investigated conditions in the Eastern Penitentiary so thoroughly that drastic reforms and the building of the new prison at Graterford were undertaken. As chairman of the Women's Committee of 1926 her wise management made possible the reproduction of the old High Street of Philadelphia as a successful feature of the Sesqui-Centennial Exposition. The committee later restored and opened Strawberry Mansion, a beautiful eighteenth-century house in Fairmount Park, as a Hall of Fame for Pennsylvania women. A volume published by the Committee of 1926, entitled Notable Women of Pennsylvania, is dedicated to her as the leader under whom the work was begun and whose "contemporaries recognized her character and citizenship as their standard of public spirit. "
She was a woman of distinction in all the relationships of life and a pioneer leader of women in public life in the new era of emancipated womanhood. Frank and sincere, of sturdy character and unusual force, quick to see a need and tireless in energy to meet it, she developed a capacity for leadership that grew steadily stronger through forty years devoted to the cause of human betterment.
In 1886 Elizabeth married Jonathan Willis Martin, who died in 1930; they had two daughters and a son.
