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Millicent Fawcett

Millicent Fawcett (11 June 1847 – 5 August 1929) was a British suffragette and the leader of the moderate National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) from 1897 to 1919.

Biography[]

Millicent Fawcett

The Fawcett statue in Parliament Square, 2020

Millicent Garrett was born in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, England on 11 June 1847, the eighth of ten children born to a well-to-do family. Her elder sister Elizabeth was Britain's first female doctor, and it was her sister who introduced her to the women's suffrage movement; she was also inspired by the views of John Stuart Mill. In 1867, she married the MP Henry Fawcett and became a liberal political activist; she briefly withdrew from public life following her husband's death in 1884. In 1886, she left the Liberal Party for the Liberal Unionist Party due to her opposition to Irish Home Rule. In 1891, she wrote the introduction to a new edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Following the death of Lydia Becker in 1897, Fawcett became the leader of the moderate National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), which played a major role in the fight for women's suffrage during the early 20th century. By 1905, the NUWSS had 305 constituent societies and 50,000 members, and she supported women's participation in the Second Boer War and opposed the more radical WSPU. In 1914, the NUWSS ceased all campaigning to support Britain during World War I, and she left the suffrage campaign in 1919 following the limited extension of the vote to women. She died in 1929 at the age of 82, and, in 2018, on the 100th anniversary of the granting of women's suffrage, she became the first woman to be commemorated with a statue in Parliament Square in Westminster, London.

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