SUFFRAGIST, MILLICENT FAWCETT – 2 Gower Street, London, WC1.

Millicent Garrett was born in 1847 in Aldeburgh to Newson Garrett, a warehouse owner, and his wife Louise Dunnell. Newson and Louise had six daughters and four sons who, as well as Millicent, also included Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, later famous as the first woman in the United Kingdom to qualify as a doctor.

Newson's business quickly became a success, and all of his children were educated at a private boarding school in Blackheath, London run by Louisa Browning, the aunt of Robert Browning. Millicent was sent there in 1858, and left in 1863 with "a sharpened interest in literature and the arts and a passion for self-education".

 

When her sister moved to London to study medicine, Millicent visited her there regularly and these visits were the start of Millicent's interest in women's rights. In 1865 Elizabeth took her to see a speech by John Stuart Mill on the subject; Millicent was impressed by this speech, and became an active supporter of his work. In 1866, at the age of 19, she became secretary of the London Society for Women's Suffrage. She was introduced to many other women's rights activists, including Henry Fawcett, a Liberal Member of Parliament who had originally intended to marry Elizabeth before she decided to focus on her medical career. Millicent and the politician became close friends, and despite a fourteen-year age gap they married in 1867.Millicent took his last name, becoming Millicent Garrett Fawcett.

 

In 1868 Millicent joined the London Suffrage Committee, and in 1869 she spoke at the first public pro-suffrage meeting to be held in London. The death of her husband on 6 November 1884 made Millicent temporarily withdraw from public life. She sold both family homes and moved into the house of Agnes Garrett, her sister.She resumed work in 1885, and began to concentrate on politics.After the death of Lydia Becker, she became the leader of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the main suffragist organisation in Britain. She held this post until 1919, a year after the first women had been granted the vote. After that, she left the suffrage campaign for the most part, and devoted much of her time to writing books.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, while the WSPU ceased all of their activities to focus on the war effort, Fawcett's NUWSS did not. This was largely because as the organisation was significantly less militant than the WSPU, it contained many more pacifists, and general support for the war within the organisation was weaker. The WSPU, in comparison, was called jingoistic as a result of its leaders' strong support for the war. While Fawcett was not a pacifist, she risked dividing the organisation if she ordered a halt to the campaign, and the diverting of NUWSS funds from the government, as the WSPU had done. The NUWSS continued to campaign for the vote during the war, and used the situation to their advantage by pointing out the contribution women had made to the war effort in their campaigns.

Fawcett is considered instrumental in gaining the vote for six million British women over 30-years-old gaining the vote in 1918.