Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett

Posted by Barbara on July 8, 2024 in Blog, Dame, feminism, Human rights, Social welfare, Women's equality issues | 2 comments

Here at damesnet we love our dames, and continue to invite all our readers to nominate women for damehood.  But there are of course many actual dames worthy of our attention, and I am saluting one of the UK’s most important figures in the history of female emancipation.

Born in 1847, Millicent Garrett was the younger sister of Elizabeth Garrett, the first British woman to qualify as a physician and a surgeon. Both sisters were suffragists, and for 50 years Millicent led the movement for women’s suffrage in England. Her marriage to Henry Fawcett was mutually beneficial: he was a radical politician and professor of political economy at Cambridge University, who had been blinded as a young man in a shooting accident.  Millicent helped him overcome this handicap, and Henry supported her campaign for women’s rights.

Inspired by the work of John Stuart Mill, who was a passionate advocate for equal rights for women, in 1866 she became the Secretary of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage. In 1868 she joined the London Suffrage Committee, where she made her first speech on the subject.  She wrote and published essays and text books; the first of these was Political Economy for Beginners, published in 1870.

She did not agree with the confrontational and at times violent activities of the Pankhurst family and their supporters in the Women’s Social and Political Union; Millicent felt that their militancy was working against public opinion, and promoted a more moderate approach. In 1890 she became the leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), a post she held until 1919, a year after some 6 million women over the age of 30 in the UK were granted the vote, providing that they or their husbands met a property qualification. During the First World War she kept up the NUWSS campaign, and the organisation contributed to the cause by drawing attention to how women were helping and supporting the war effort.

Alongside her campaign for voting rights, Fawcett worked hard to improve the provision of higher education for women, co-founding Newnham College at Cambridge in 1875. She also supported numerous other campaigns to improve conditions for young women and girls. They included efforts to combat child abuse by raising the age of consent.  In 1885 the age of consent was raised to 16, only 10 years after it had been raised to 13 in 1875. Millicent also campaigned for incest and cruelty to children in the family to be criminalised. She fought to have the Contagious Diseases Acts repealed; they required prostitutes to be examined for sexually transmitted diseases, and to be imprisoned if they were found to be infected, or even if they refused to undergo painful examinations. Their male clients, however, were not required to be examined.  Apart from her ongoing battle for women’s suffrage, this was one of the more successful campaigns she fought.

She was awarded a damehood in 1925, four years before her death. In 2018 a statue of Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett was erected in Parliament Square. It was commissioned for the centenary celebrations of The Representation of the People Act, passed in 1918.  Dame Millicent is the first woman to be honoured with a statue in this iconic location.  Let’s make sure she is not the last.