Born on October 30, 1815, in Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, Elizabeth Rous was educated in Quaker schools in Islington and Croydon and subsequently taught in the Quaker schools in Croydon and Ackworth. In April 1848 she married Leslie Wright, who died three years later. She kept a shop in Bakewell, Derbyshire, until 1854, when she emigrated to Canada and settled in Belleville, Ontario. There she again kept a shop and, inspired by the work of the English Quaker reformer Elizabeth Fry, gradually took on the role of Quaker minister.
In 1858 Rous married John T. Comstock of Rollin, Michigan, where she went to live. Her public ministry quickly came to include abolitionism and work on the Underground Railroad, on which Rollin was a highly active station. A demand grew and spread for her services as a public speaker, not only among Quaker assemblies but also among reform groups and other bodies. In 1862 she addressed the Michigan legislature, and in October 1864 she and a group of other Quaker leaders held a remarkable interview and prayer meeting with President Abraham Lincoln.
During the Civil War Comstock traveled widely ministering to those in hospitals and prison camps and to refugee slaves. Her interest in the plight of the freedmen continued unabated after the war, and she wrote and spoke frequently in their behalf. In 1879╨1880 she served as secretary of the Kansas Freedmen╒s Relief Association after large numbers of dispossessed former slaves had migrated to that state. Prison reform, temperance, peace, women╒s rights, and home-mission welfare work also engaged her attention, and by her emphasis on the last, an early form of social agency work adapted to the rapidly growing cities, she was of considerable influence in reshaping the Quaker social outlook and work to the new realities of an urban-industrial age. In 1885, following her husband╒s death, she settled in Union Springs, New York, where she died on August 3, 1891.
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