Suffrage Alliance Congress with Fawcett presiding, London 1909. Top row from left: Thora Daugaard (Denmark), Louise Qvam (Norway), Aletta Jacobs (Netherlands), Annie Furuhjelm (Finland), Madame Mirowitch (Russia), Käthe Schirmacher (Germany), Madame Honneger, unidentified. Bottom left: Unidentified, Anna Bugge (Sweden), Anna Howard Shaw (USA), Millicent Fawcett (Presiding, England), Carrie Chapman Catt (USA), F. M. Qvam (Norway), Anita Augspurg (Germany).
Gallery of Millicent Fawcett
1913
Hyde Park, London, United Kingdom
Millicent Garrett Fawcett, addressing the crowds in Hyde Park at the
culmination of the Pilgrimage on July 26, 1913.
Gallery of Millicent Fawcett
Gallery of Millicent Fawcett
Gallery of Millicent Fawcett
Millicent Garrett (left), photographed with her sister Agnes.
Gallery of Millicent Fawcett
Gallery of Millicent Fawcett
Fawcett, Mary Blathwayt and Mary Morris at Eagle House.
Achievements
Membership
Awards
Order of the British Empire
1925
In 1925, Fawcett was honored with the Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire and became Dame Millicent Fawcett, a woman's title, equivalent to a man's knighthood.
In 1925, Fawcett was honored with the Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire and became Dame Millicent Fawcett, a woman's title, equivalent to a man's knighthood.
The Women's Victory and After: Personal Reminiscences, 1911-1918
(This book looks back on the history of the women’s moveme...)
This book looks back on the history of the women’s movement from 1911 to 1918, chronicling the advances, that Millicent Garrett Fawcett and her fellow campaigners made – and the obstacles they encountered – during this period.
(This memoir is the best kind of history - the kind, that ...)
This memoir is the best kind of history - the kind, that makes you feel like you are having dinner with John Stuart Mill and Garibaldi. Millicent Garrett Fawcett did have dinner with these men and others among the most interesting people of her time.
Millicent Fawcett was a British feminist, suffragist, intellectual, political and union leader and writer. She was primarily known for her work as a campaigner for women to have the right to vote.
Background
Millicent Fawcett was born on June 11, 1847, in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, United Kingdom. She was a daughter of Newson Garrett, a warehouse owner, and Louisa (Dunnell) Garrett. Millicent was the eighth of her parents' ten children, which included Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, a well-known physician and suffragist. Millicent's father, a prominent and successful businessman, encouraged his daughters to extend themselves beyond the traditional female sphere of needlework and modest musical training.
Fydell Edmund Garrett, a publicist, journalist and poet, and Elsie Garrett Rice, a botanical artist, were among Millicent's most famous cousins.
Education
Millicent obtained very little formal schooling. She attended Miss Louisa Browning's school at Blackheath, but had to leave school at the age of sixteen, when her father suffered a temporary financial crisis. It's also worth mentioning, that she worked as her husband's, Henry Fawcett's, secretary, and she thus obtained an outstanding education in politics and economics from this work and from her association with her husband's colleagues.
In 1899, Millicent received an honorary Legum Doctor degree from the University of St. Andrews.
Career
In her early years, Millicent spent much of her time with her elder sisters in London, where she was introduced to feminist reformer Emily Davies and other radicals and liberals, such as John Stuart Mill and Sir Charles Dilke. In 1865, collaborating with ten other young, mostly single women, Fawcett worked to form the Kensington Society, a discussion group, focused on English women's suffrage. In 1866, her sister - Elizabeth Garrett, her friend Emily Davies and others organized the first mass female petition to Parliament, asking for women to be given the vote on the same terms as it was given to men. At that time, Millicent was too young to sign as she was just 18 years old, however, with her sister Agnes, she went around the streets of Aldeburgh, collecting signatures from women, from the poor, as well as the wealthy.
Fawcett's interest in women's rights began, when she became an active supporter of John Stuart Mill, an early advocate of universal suffrage. At the age of 19, she went to hear a speech of Mill's on equal rights for women. Fawcett was impressed by Mill's practical support on the basis of utilitarianism, rather than abstract principles.
In 1868, Fawcett joined the London Women's Suffrage Committee and excelled at organizing the suffrage movement, becoming one of its prominent leaders by the 1880’s. In 1869, she spoke at the first public pro-suffrage meeting, held in London. In March 1870, Fawcett spoke in Brighton. It was in 1871, that Millicent co-founded Newnham College, Cambridge, and served on its council.
After her husband's sudden death in 1884, leaving her a widow at the age of 37, Millicent made the cause of women's suffrage her life's work. At that time, she became a key member of what would become the Women's Local Government Society. Following the death of the longtime suffrage leader, Lydia Becker, in 1890, Fawcett emerged as the most influential figure in Britain's small band of suffragists. In 1897, when the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies emerged, she became the first president and served there until her retirement in 1919.
In addition, Fawcett was active in the new breakaway Liberal Unionist Party, which cooperated closely with the Conservative Party, but she never put political party over her principles. For instance, in the mid-1890's, she offended many important men in the Conservative-Liberal Unionist alliance, when she tried to hound out of politics a Conservative, who had seduced a young woman and then failed to marry her. In 1901, Fawcett's prominence in Liberal Unionist affairs earned her an appointment to head an investigation of conditions at internment camps for Boer civilians during the South African war. In 1903, she broke with the Liberal Unionist Party because she could not support its leader Joseph Chamberlain in his new policy of tariff reform. Fawcett remained loyal to the mid-19th-century principles of free trade and laissez-faire.
Fawcett struggled to keep her cause alive, when prospects for success seemed remote. But in the early 20th century, women's suffrage could not be ignored. Beginning in 1905, the organization, headed by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, adopted militant tactics: they disrupted political meetings, destroyed private and public property and, when arrested, resisted with hunger strikes. Although Fawcett and her much larger National Union rejected such tactics, the constitutional suffragists benefited from the attention, that the militants provoked.
Probably some form of women's suffrage would have been enacted, sooner or later, even without World War I, but the war of 1914-1918 promoted women's suffrage in many ways. The contribution of women to the war effort converted some former anti-suffragists and allowed others a pretext for a change of position, that political expediency had forced. The desire to enfranchise voteless soldiers forced politicians to deal with a general enlargement of the suffrage. Prime Minister Asquith, an old enemy of women's suffrage, was replaced by the more sympathetic David Lloyd George. On the other hand, the war presented a brief, but severe challenge to Fawcett's leadership of the National Union in 1915. She wanted to use the suffragist organization to work for military victory. In contrast, pacifist-minded officers wanted to negotiate peace without insisting on the defeat of Germany.
In 1918, Fawcett supported the compromise, that enfranchised women, aged 30 and older, and men of the age of 21 and older. Having succeeded in obtaining women's suffrage, she retired as president of the National Union at the beginning of 1919. Remaining active in the promotion of the status of women, she was gratified by the legislation in 1928, that gave women voting rights equal to those of men.
In her late years, Fawcett continued writing books, an activity, that she embarked on in her earlier years, including a book about Palestine, where she had traveled with her sister. Her other books included two books on economics, one of which was written in collaboration with her husband - Henry Fawcett. During her more than sixty-year involvement with the suffrage movement, Fawcett also wrote numerous articles on the subject, published many pamphlets, addressed numberless public meetings and generated a large volume of work on the issue.
It's also worth mentioning, that, during her career, Millicent taught political economy at Queens College, Dublin, and King’s College, Department for ladies.
Although Millicent's religious principles remained essentially agnostic, she often attended Church of England services in her last years.
Politics
Originally a Liberal, Fawcett joined the Liberal Unionist Party in 1886 to oppose the Irish Home Rule. In 1903, she broke with the Liberal Unionist Party because she could not support its leader Joseph Chamberlain in his new policy of tariff reform. For some time, Millicent also supported the Labour Party.
During her political career, Fawcett had backed countless campaigns. A few of those she supported were to curb child abuse by raising the age of consent, criminalizing incest, cruelty to children within the family, ending the practice of excluding women from courtrooms, when sexual offenses were considered, stamping out the "white slave trade" and preventing child marriage and the introduction of regulated prostitution in India. Fawcett also campaigned to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts, which reflected sexual double standards.
Moreover, Fawcett engaged in other political activities, such as supporting worker rights.
Views
Fawcett favored rational thought as opposed to being a radical and eschewed the cult of personality.
Quotations:
"Courage calls to courage everywhere, and its voice cannot be denied."
"No circumstance would prevent over-population so effectually as a general raising of the customary standard of comfort among the poorer classes. If they had accustomed themselves to a more comfortable style of living, they would use every effort not again to sink below it."
"However benevolent men may be in their intentions, they cannot know what women want and what suits the necessities of women's lives as well as women know these things themselves."
"I can never feel, that setting fire to houses and churches and litter boxes and destroying valuable pictures really helps to convince people, that women ought to be enfranchised."
"What draws men and women together is stronger, than the brutality and tyranny, which drive them apart."
"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."
"I am a liberal because liberalism seems to mean faith in the people, confidence, that they will manage their own affairs far better, than those affairs are likely to be managed by others."
"There are many excuses for the person, who made the mistake of confounding money and wealth. Like many others, they took the sign for the thing signified."
"A large part of the present anxiety to improve the education of girls and women is also due to the conviction, that the political disabilities of women will not be maintained."
"I can honestly say, that if I was told at this moment that I was dying, not my first, not my second, but certainly my third thought would be that I should never see Italy again."
Personality
Known for her sense of humor, Millicent never allowed herself to be discouraged: she was an inexhaustible worker, who without the aid of a secretary answered all her correspondence on the day it was received. Though she detested speechmaking, she was an effective public speaker, whose unemotional speeches were distinguished by the clarity of her logic. Self-reliant, she ordinarily traveled on foot to her interviews with politicians, even when that meant walking for miles and, a bit old-fashioned, she refused to have a telephone in her home.
Connections
In 1867, Millicent married Henry Fawcett, a British academic, statesman and economist, who had previously proposed to her sister Elizabeth and to the prominent feminist, Bessie Rayner Parkes. Already committed before her marriage to liberal principles in politics and economics, Millicent Garrett Fawcett fully shared the interests and convictions of her husband and served for several years as his secretary. She also helped her husband to overcome the handicap of his blindness, while he supported her work for women’s rights, beginning with her first speech on the subject of woman suffrage. The couple gave birth to one child - Philippa Garrett Fawcett. Philippa was an exceptional mathematician and the first woman to place above the "senior wrangler" at Cambridge, in 1890.
Father:
Newson Garrett
Mother:
Louisa (Dunnell) Garrett
child:
Philippa Garrett Fawcett
husband:
Henry Fawcett
Sister:
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
Cousin:
Fydell Edmund Garrett
Cousin:
Elsie Garrett Rice
Friend:
Emily Davies
References
Women in Science: Antiquity through Nineteenth Century: A Biographical Dictionary with Annotated Bibliography
From the ancient Greek physician Agamede to physicist and chemist Marie Curie, in descriptions, ranging from a single paragraph to several pages, this work profiles 186 women, who as patronesses, translators, popularizers, collectors, illustrators, inventors and active researchers, made significant contributions to science before 1910. It adds a new dimension to the history of science by rescuing from obscurity the many women, who overcame significant cultural barriers to pursue scientific objectives.