Dame Millicent Fawcett | |
|---|---|
 Fawcett,c. 1873 | |
| Born | Millicent Garrett (1847-06-11)11 June 1847 Aldeburgh, Suffolk, England |
| Died | 5 August 1929(1929-08-05) (aged 82) Bloomsbury, London, England |
| Monuments | Statue of Millicent Fawcett |
| Occupation(s) | Suffragist, union leader |
| Spouse | |
| Children | Philippa Fawcett |
| Parent(s) | Newson Garrett Louisa Dunnell |
| Relatives | Elizabeth Garrett Anderson,Agnes Garrett (sisters) Louisa Garrett Anderson (niece) |
Dame Millicent Garrett FawcettGBE (née Garrett; 11 June 1847 – 5 August 1929) was an English political activist and writer. She campaigned forwomen's suffrage bylegal change and in 1897–1919 led Britain's largest women's rights association, theNational Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS),[1] explaining, "I cannot say I became a suffragist. I always was one, from the time I was old enough to think at all about the principles of Representative Government."[2] She tried to broaden women's chances of higher education, as a governor ofBedford College, London (nowRoyal Holloway) and co-foundingNewnham College, Cambridge in 1875.[3] In 2018, a century after theRepresentation of the People Act, she was the first woman honoured by astatue in Parliament Square.[4][5][6]
Fawcett was born on 11 June 1847 inAldeburgh,[3] toNewson Garrett (1812–1893), a businessman from nearbyLeiston, and his London wife Louisa (née Dunnell, 1813–1903).[7][8] She was the eighth of their ten children.[3]
According to the Stracheys, "The Garretts were a close and happy family in which children were encouraged to be physically active, read widely, speak their minds, and share in the political interests of their father, a convert from Conservatism toGladstonian Liberalism, a combative man, and a keen patriot."[9]
As a child, Fawcett's elder sisterElizabeth Garrett Anderson, who became Britain's first female doctor, introduced her toEmily Davies, an English suffragist. In her mother's biography,Louisa Garrett Anderson quotes Davies as saying to her mother, to Elizabeth and to Fawcett, "It is quite clear what has to be done. I must devote myself to securing higher education, while you open the medical profession to women. After these things are done, we must see about getting the vote." She then turned to Millicent: "You are younger than we are, Millie, so you must attend to that."[10]
Aged twelve in 1858, Millicent Fawcett was sent to London with her sister Elizabeth to attend a private boarding school in Blackheath. Millicent foundLouisa Browning who led the school to be a "born teacher" whereas her sister remembered the "stupidity" of the teachers.[11] Her sister Louise took her to the sermons ofFrederick Denison Maurice, a socially aware and less traditional Anglican priest, whose opinions influenced her view of religion. In 1865, she attended a lecture byJohn Stuart Mill. The following year, she and a friend, Emily Davies, supported theKensington Society by collecting signatures for a petition asking Parliament to enfranchise women householders.[3]
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John Stuart Mill introduced Millicent Fawcett to many other women's rights activists, includingHenry Fawcett, aLiberal Member of Parliament who had intended to marry her sister Elizabeth before she decided to focus on her medical career. Millicent and Henry married on 23 April 1867.[3] Henry had been blinded in a shooting accident in 1858 and Millicent acted as his secretary.[12] Their marriage was said to be based on "perfect intellectual sympathy"; Millicent pursued a writing career while caring for Henry, and ran two households, one in Cambridge, one in London. The family together held strong beliefs in favor ofproportional representation, individualistic andfree trade principles, and advancement for women.[3] Their only child wasPhilippa Fawcett, born in 1868, who was much encouraged by her mother in her studies. In 1890 Philippa became the first woman to obtain top score in the CambridgeMathematical Tripos exams.[13]
In 1868 Millicent joined the London Suffrage Committee, and in 1869 spoke at the first public pro-suffrage meeting held in London.[3] In March 1870 she spoke in Brighton, her husband's constituency. As a speaker she was said to have a clear voice.[3] In 1870 she published her shortPolitical Economy for Beginners, which was "wildly successful",[14] running through 10 editions in 41 years.[3][14][15] In 1871 she contributed an article toMacmillan's Magazine entitled "A short explanation of Mr. Hare's scheme of representation," concerningsingle transferable voting.[16] In 1872 she and her husband publishedEssays and Lectures on Social and Political Subjects, containing eight essays by Millicent.[3][17] In 1875 she co-foundedNewnham Hall and served on its council.[18]
Despite many interests and duties, Millicent, withAgnes Garrett, raised four of their cousins, who had been orphaned early in life:Amy Garrett Badley,Fydell Edmund Garrett,Elsie Garrett (later a prominent botanical artist in South Africa), and Elsie's twin, John.[19]
After Fawcett's husband died on 6 November 1884, she temporarily withdrew from public life, sold both family homes and moved with Philippa to the house of her sister, Agnes Garrett.[3] When she resumed work in 1885, she began to concentrate on politics and was a key member of what became theWomen's Local Government Society.[20] Originally a Liberal, she joined theLiberal Unionist Party in 1886 to opposeIrish Home Rule. She, like many English Protestants, felt that allowing home rule for Catholic Ireland would hurt England's prosperity and be disastrous for the Irish.[21] In 1885, she had also voiced her support forW. T. Stead over his term ofimprisonment.
In 1891 Fawcett wrote the introduction to a new edition ofMary Wollstonecraft's bookA Vindication of the Rights of Woman.Lyndall Gordon calls this an "influential essay"; Fawcett reasserted the reputation of the earlyfeminist philosopher and claimed her as an early figure in the struggle for the vote.[22]
Fawcett was granted an honorarydoctorate of law bythe University of St Andrews in 1899.[3]
Fawcett mainly fought for women's suffrage. She stated that Irish home rule would be "a blow to the greatness and prosperity of England as well as disaster and... misery and pain and shame".[21] At a young age she published essays on the need for proportional representation, "electoral disabilities of women", "education of women" and addressing the national debt.[23]
Fawcett began her political career at the age of 22, at the first women's suffrage meeting. After the death ofLydia Becker, Fawcett became leader of theNational Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), Britain's mainsuffragist organisation. Politically she took a moderate position, distancing herself from the militancy anddirect actions of theWomen's Social and Political Union (WSPU), which she believed would harm women's chances of winning the vote by souring public opinion and alienating members of Parliament.[24] Despite the publicity for the WSPU, the NUWSS with its slogan "Law-Abiding suffragists" retained more support.[25] By 1905, Fawcett's NUWSS had 305 constituent societies and almost 50,000 members, compared with the WSPU's 2,000 members in 1913.[26]
She explains her disaffiliation from the more militant movement in her bookWhat I Remember:
I could not support a revolutionary movement, especially as it was ruled autocratically, at first, by a small group of four persons, and latterly by one person only.... In 1908, this despotism decreed that the policy of suffering violence, but using none, was to be abandoned. After that, I had no doubt whatever that what was right for me and the NUWSS was to keep strictly to our principle of supporting our movement only by argument, based on common sense and experience and not by personal violence or lawbreaking of any kind.[27]
TheSouth African War gave a chance to Fawcett to share female responsibilities in British culture. She was nominated to lead a commission of women sent to South Africa,[3] sailing there in July 1901 with other women "to investigateEmily Hobhouse's indictment of atrocious conditions inconcentration camps where the families of the Boer soldiers were interned."[3] No British women had been entrusted before with such a task in wartime. Millicent fought for the civil rights of the Uitlanders "as the cause of revival of interest in women's suffrage".[3]
Fawcett had backed countless campaigns over many years, for instance to curb child abuse by raising the age of consent, criminalise incest and cruelty to children within the family, end the practice of excluding women from courtrooms when sexual offences were considered, stamp out the "white slave trade", and prevent child marriage and the introduction of regulated prostitution in India.[3] Fawcett campaigned to repeal theContagious Diseases Acts, as reflecting sexualdouble standards. They required prostitutes to be examined forsexually transmitted diseases and if found to have passed disease to their clients, to be imprisoned. Women could be arrested on suspicion of being a prostitute and imprisoned for refusing consent to examinations that were invasive and painful. The men who infected the women were not subject to the Acts, which were repealed through campaigning by Fawcett and others. She believed such double standards would never be erased until women were represented in the public sphere.[3]
Fawcett wrote three books, one co-authored with her husband, and many articles, some published posthumously.[21] HerPolitical Economy for Beginners went into ten editions, sparked two novels, and appeared in many languages. One of her first articles on women's education appeared inMacmillan's Magazine in 1875, the year when her interest in women's education led her to become a founder of Newnham College for Women in Cambridge. There she served on the college council and backed a controversial bid for all women to receive Cambridge degrees.[3] Millicent regularly spoke at girls' schools, women's colleges and adult education centres. In 1904, she resigned from the Unionists overfree trade, whenJoseph Chamberlain gained control in his campaign fortariff reform.[3]
When the First World War broke out in 1914, the WSPU ceased all activities to focus on the war effort. Fawcett's NUWSS replaced her political activity with support for hospital services in training camps, Scotland, Russia and Serbia,[28] largely because the organisation was markedly less militant than the WSPU: it contained many morepacifists and support for the war within it was weaker. The WSPU was calledjingoistic for its leaders' strong support for the war. While Fawcett was no pacifist, she risked dividing the organisation if she ordered a halt to the campaign and diverted NUWSS funds to the government as the WSPU had. The NUWSS continued to campaign for the vote during the war and used the situation to its advantage by pointing out the contribution women had made to the war effort. She held her post until 1919, a year after the first women had received the vote under theRepresentation of the People Act 1918. After that, she left the suffrage campaign and devoted time to writing books, including a biography ofJosephine Butler.[29]
In 1919 Fawcett was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Birmingham.[3] In the1925 New Year Honours she was appointed Dame Grand Cross of theOrder of the British Empire (GBE).[30]
Fawcett died in 1929 at her London home inGower Street, Bloomsbury.[31] She was cremated at theGolders Green Crematorium although the final resting place of her ashes is unknown.
In 1932, a memorial to Fawcett, alongside that of her husband, was unveiled inWestminster Abbey with an inscription: "A wise constant and courageous Englishwoman. She won citizenship for women."[32]
Millicent Fawcett Hall was constructed in 1929 inWestminster as a place for women's debates and discussions; presently owned byWestminster School, the hall is used by the drama department as a 150-seat studio theatre.Saint Felix School, near Fawcett's birthplace of Aldeburgh, has named one of its boarding houses after her.[33] Ablue plaque for Fawcett was erected in 1954 by London County Council at her home of 45 years in Bloomsbury.[34] The archives of Millicent Fawcett are held atThe Women's Library, London School of Economics, which in 2018 renamed one of its campus buildings Fawcett House in honor of her role in the British suffrage movement and her connections to the area.[35]
In February 2018, Fawcett won aBBC Radio 4 poll asking Britons to name the most influential woman of the past 100 years.[36]
TheMillicent Fawcett Mile is an annual one-mile running race for women, inaugurated in 2018 at theMüller Anniversary Games inLondon.[37]
In 2018, 100 years after the passing of theRepresentation of the People Act, for which Fawcett had successfully campaigned and which granted limited franchise, she became the first woman commemorated witha statue in Parliament Square, by the sculptorGillian Wearing. This followed a campaign led byCaroline Criado Perez, in which over 84,000 online signatures were gathered.[4][6]
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Fawcett's statue holds a banner quoting from a speech she gave in 1920, afterEmily Davison's death during the 1913 Epsom Derby: "Courage calls to courage everywhere".[5] At its unveilingTheresa May said, "I would not be standing here today as Prime Minister, no female MPs would have taken their seats in Parliament, none of us would have the rights we now enjoy, were it not for one truly great woman: Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett."[38]
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Fawcett, Millicent Garrett (1878)."Communism". In Baynes, T. S. (ed.).Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 6 (9th ed.). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 211–219. ***Please note that a wikilink to the article on [Communism] in [EB9] is not available***.This article on Communism was written by Fawcett for the 9th (Scholars) Edition ofEncyclopædia Britannica, but truncated and no longer attributed to her inthe 11th edition's article
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