Millicent Fawcett
At the same time as all of this was taking place in the United States, back in Britain, the Suffragist movement was taking root, and one of the foremost names in this movement was Millicent Fawcett.
Millicent Fawcett was another product of the prosperous British middle classes, and she, and her older sister, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, enjoyed a liberal upbringing during which their natural intelligence and social curiosity was encouraged. She was born in 1847, and educated at a private boarding school in south London. Her sister would go on to become the first qualified female doctor in the United Kingdom, and it was through Elizabeth Garrett Anderson that Millicent was first introduced to the liberal Anglican minister Frederick Denison Maurice. Maurice’s sermons on equality and social reform greatly influenced her, as did the views and opinions of Emily Davies, a fellow suffragist who exerted a powerful influence on her early development.
In a letter to her sister, Millicent Fawcett wrote: ‘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.’
Millicent Fawcett identified as a ‘suffragist’, and not a ‘suffragette’. In this regard she advocated a moderate approach, rejecting entirely the violent and confrontational methods of Emmeline Pankhurst and her followers, by then beginning to agitate forcefully.
The thrust of Millicent Fawcett’s advocacy was education for girls. Like Lucretia Mott, she believed that education would found the pathway to equality for women. Rabble-rousing protest and violent confrontation had no place in her philosophy. In 1897, she was elected to the presidency of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and in 1991, along with Emily Hobhouse, she travelled to South Africa to investigate conditions for women in the concentration camps then in operation. Unlike Emily Hobhouse, however, her report was seen as a vindication of the administration of these camps.
Reflecting deep fissures in the movement, Millicent Fawcett’s moderate approach was often at variance with her peers, but nonetheless she remained a steady force in the progress of education for girls, eventually founding Newnham College, Cambridge, one of the first English university colleges for women.
After WWI, she was made a Dame of the British Empire, which, of course, further alienated her from the radical fringe, but nonetheless, she is regarded as one of the primary forces behind the eventual achievement of suffrage for women, finally enacted in the British parliament in 1918.