Millicent Fawcett

Millicent Garrett was born on June 11, 1847, in Aldeburgh, a small town on the Suffolk coast, the eighth of ten surviving children of Newson Garrett, a prosperous merchant and maltster, and his wife Louisa Dunnell ^[1]. The Garrett household was unusual for its time. Newson Garrett encouraged his daughters to read widely, argue at the dinner table, and take themselves seriously, and several of them went on to public careers. Millicent's elder sister Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became the first woman to qualify as a physician in Britain, and her example shaped Millicent's sense of what determined women could accomplish ^[2].

Millicent was educated at home in Aldeburgh and then, from the age of twelve, at a boarding school in Blackheath, London, run by Louisa Browning, an aunt of the poet Robert Browning. The school gave her a grounding in literature and languages, though like most girls of her generation she had no route to a university degree ^[1].

A formative moment came in 1865, when the eighteen-year-old Millicent heard John Stuart Mill speak during his election campaign for Westminster. Mill's argument that women deserved the parliamentary vote struck her with the force of a revelation, and she later traced her lifelong commitment to that encounter. Through her sister Elizabeth and the circle around Mill she was drawn into the earliest organised suffrage work in London while still in her teens ^[3].

In 1867 Millicent married Henry Fawcett, the Liberal Member of Parliament for Brighton and professor of political economy at Cambridge. Henry had been blinded in a shooting accident in 1858, and Millicent acted as his secretary, reader, and political partner, an arrangement that gave her an insider's education in parliamentary life ^[2]. Their only child, Philippa Fawcett, was born in 1868. Philippa later achieved fame in 1890 by scoring above the Senior Wrangler in the Cambridge mathematical tripos, a result that made national news and delighted her mother as proof of women's intellectual capacity ^[4].

Marriage did not confine Millicent Fawcett to a supporting role. In 1868 she joined the London Suffrage Committee, and in 1870 she published Political Economy for Beginners, a compact textbook that went through ten editions and established her as a writer in her own right ^[1]. She also spoke on public platforms at a time when a woman addressing a mixed audience could still provoke ridicule; her first suffrage speech, delivered in 1869, drew hostile comment in sections of the press.

Education remained a parallel cause. Fawcett was among the founders of Newnham College, Cambridge, which opened its first house for women students in 1871, and she served on its governing body for decades ^[3]. Anyone asking who was Millicent Fawcett in the 1870s would have found a young writer, lecturer, and organiser already at the centre of the movement for women's advancement.

Henry Fawcett, by then Postmaster General in Gladstone's government, died suddenly of pleurisy in November 1884. Widowed at thirty-seven, Millicent sold the family homes in Cambridge and Westminster and moved with Philippa to Gower Street in Bloomsbury, sharing a house with her sister Agnes. Freed from the duties of a political wife, she gave herself fully to public work ^[2].

During the late 1880s and 1890s Fawcett widened her range. She campaigned against the exploitation of children, supported efforts to raise the age of consent, and wrote steadily: a biography of Queen Victoria appeared in 1895, and Some Eminent Women of Our Times, a collection of short lives intended for young readers, in 1889 ^[1]. She broke with Gladstone's Liberals over Irish Home Rule, aligning herself with the Liberal Unionists, a decision that placed her at odds with many suffragist colleagues but reflected her fierce independence of judgement.

In 1897 the scattered regional suffrage societies merged into the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), and Fawcett soon emerged as its leader, formally becoming president in 1907 ^[3]. In 1901 the government sent her to South Africa to lead an all-women commission investigating conditions in the concentration camps of the Boer War, the first time a woman had headed such an official inquiry. The Fawcett Commission's report confirmed much of the criticism raised by the campaigner Emily Hobhouse and recommended practical reforms that reduced the death rate in the camps ^[5].

The central question of Fawcett's later career was method. From 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union pursued militancy: heckling ministers, window-smashing, arson, and hunger strikes. Fawcett held the NUWSS to lawful means: petitions, by-election work, mass demonstrations, and the slow conversion of MPs. She admired the courage of imprisoned suffragettes and initially defended them in public, but concluded that violence alienated the parliamentary majority the cause needed, and after 1912 she distanced the NUWSS firmly from militant tactics ^[3].

Under her presidency the NUWSS became by far the larger wing of the movement, growing to more than 50,000 members in over 400 affiliated societies by 1913, when it organised the Great Pilgrimage, a six-week march of law-abiding suffragists from across England and Wales that converged on a rally in Hyde Park ^[6]. In 1912 she backed an election fighting fund that supported Labour candidates, since Labour was the only party formally committed to women's suffrage, a striking move for a woman of her Liberal Unionist background.

When war broke out in 1914 Fawcett suspended active suffrage campaigning and urged NUWSS members to sustain the national effort, telling them that women must show themselves worthy of citizenship whether the vote came or not. The decision split her organisation, and several pacifist officers resigned in 1915 when she refused to send delegates to the international women's peace congress at The Hague. Fawcett judged that wartime service would strengthen the suffrage case, and events bore her out ^[2].

Wartime politics reopened the franchise question, since millions of servicemen had lost their residence qualifications. Fawcett led suffragist deputations to ministers and pressed the Speaker's Conference of 1916 to include women in any settlement. The Representation of the People Act 1918 enfranchised women over thirty who met a modest property qualification, roughly 8.4 million voters, and later that year women gained the right to stand for Parliament ^[3]. Fawcett watched the Commons pass the measure from the gallery, having worked toward that moment for over fifty years.

She stepped down from the NUWSS presidency in 1919 as the organisation refounded itself as the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship under Eleanor Rathbone. In retirement she remained a working writer. The Women's Victory and After appeared in 1920, her memoir What I Remember in 1924, and a life of the reformer Josephine Butler, written with E. M. Turner, in 1927 ^[1]. She travelled widely, including visits to Palestine, and continued to argue for equal franchise.

Honours arrived late. She was appointed a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire in 1925 ^[2]. Three years later Parliament passed the Equal Franchise Act of 1928, giving women the vote on the same terms as men at twenty-one. Fawcett was present in the gallery once more for the final debate. She died at her home in Gower Street, London, on August 5, 1929, at the age of eighty-two ^[1].

Any honest account of Millicent Fawcett achievements must begin with persistence. She joined the suffrage movement as a teenager in the 1860s and led its largest organisation through the decades when victory seemed remote, holding to constitutional methods when militancy dominated the headlines. Historians continue to debate the relative weight of suffragist persuasion and suffragette pressure, but most agree that the NUWSS's disciplined lobbying made the 1918 settlement politically possible ^[6].

Her name is now attached to institutions she never sought to have named for her. The London Society for Women's Service became the Fawcett Society in 1953, and it remains the United Kingdom's leading charity campaigning for gender equality ^[7]. The Fawcett Library, long the movement's principal archive, grew into what is today The Women's Library at the London School of Economics.

Public recognition reached a new scale in April 2018, when a bronze statue of Fawcett by the artist Gillian Wearing was unveiled in Parliament Square, marking the centenary of partial women's suffrage. It was the first statue of a woman, and the first by a woman, to stand in the square, and its banner carries words from her 1920 tribute to Emily Davison: "Courage calls to courage everywhere" ^[8]. For readers of any Millicent Fawcett biography, the statue's location opposite the House of Commons is fitting: she spent her life persuading the people inside that building, and in the end they moved.