25 Facts About Millicent Fawcett

1.

Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett was an English politician, writer and activist.

2.

Aged twelve in 1858, Millicent Fawcett was sent to London with her sister Elizabeth to attend a private boarding school in Blackheath.

3.

Millicent Fawcett found Louisa Browning who led the school to be a "born teacher" whereas her sister remembered the "stupidity" of the teachers.

4.

Henry had been blinded in a shooting accident in 1858 and Millicent Fawcett acted as his secretary.

5.

In 1868 Millicent Fawcett joined the London Suffrage Committee, and in 1869 spoke at the first public pro-suffrage meeting held in London.

6.

In 1891 Millicent Fawcett wrote the introduction to a new edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

7.

Lyndall Gordon calls this an "influential essay"; Millicent Fawcett reasserted the reputation of the early feminist philosopher and claimed her as an early figure in the struggle for the vote.

8.

Millicent Fawcett was granted an honorary doctorate of law by the University of St Andrews in 1899.

9.

Millicent Fawcett began her political career at the age of 22, at the first women's suffrage meeting.

10.

Millicent Fawcett explains her disaffiliation from the more militant movement in her book What I remember:.

11.

Millicent Fawcett fought for the civil rights of the Uitlanders "as the cause of revival of interest in women's suffrage".

12.

Millicent Fawcett believed such double standards would never be erased until women were represented in the public sphere.

13.

Millicent Fawcett wrote three books, one co-authored with her husband, and many articles, some published posthumously.

14.

Millicent Fawcett regularly spoke at girls' schools, women's colleges and adult education centres.

15.

Millicent Fawcett's NUWSS replaced her political activity with support for hospital services in training camps, Scotland, Russia and Serbia, largely because the organisation was markedly less militant than the WSPU: it contained many more pacifists and support for the war within it was weaker.

16.

Millicent Fawcett held her post until 1919, a year after the first women had received the vote under the Representation of the People Act 1918.

17.

In 1919 Millicent Fawcett was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Birmingham.

18.

Millicent Fawcett died in 1929 at her London home in Gower Street, Bloomsbury.

19.

Millicent Fawcett was cremated at the Golders Green Crematorium although the final resting place of her ashes is unknown.

20.

Millicent Fawcett Hall was constructed in 1929 in Westminster as a place for women's debates and discussions; presently owned by Westminster School, the hall is used by the drama department as a 150-seat studio theatre.

21.

The archives of Millicent Fawcett are held at The Women's Library, London School of Economics, which in 2018 renamed one of its campus buildings Fawcett House, after her role in the British suffrage movement and connections to the area.

22.

In February 2018, Millicent Fawcett was announced as winner of a BBC Radio 4 poll for the most influential woman of the past 100 years.

23.

The Millicent Fawcett Mile is an annual one-mile running race for women, inaugurated in 2018 at the Muller Anniversary Games in London.

24.

In 2018,100 years after the passing of the Representation of the People Act, for which Millicent Fawcett had successfully campaigned and which granted limited franchise, she became the first woman commemorated with a statue in Parliament Square, by the sculptor Gillian Wearing.

25.

Millicent Fawcett's statue holds a banner quoting from a speech she gave in 1920, after Emily Davison's death during the 1913 Epsom Derby: "Courage calls to courage everywhere".