Millicent Fawcett
Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett GBE (née Garrett; 11 June 1847 – 5 August 1929) was an English political activist and writer. She campaigned for women's suffrage by legal change and in 1897–1919 led Britain's largest women's rights association, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS),[1] explaining, "I cannot say I became a suffragist. I always was one, from the time I was old enough to think at all about the principles of Representative Government."[2] She tried to broaden women's chances of higher education, as a governor of Bedford College, London (now Royal Holloway) and co-founding Newnham College, Cambridge in 1875.[3] In 2018, a century after the Representation of the People Act, she was the first woman honoured by a statue in Parliament Square.[4][5][6]
Dame Millicent Fawcett
5 August 1929 (aged 82)
Suffragist, union leader
Newson Garrett
Louisa Dunnell
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Agnes Garrett (sisters)
Louisa Garrett Anderson (niece)
Later years[edit]
In 1919 Fawcett was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Birmingham.[3] In the 1925 New Year Honours she was appointed Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE).[28]
Millicent Fawcett died in 1929 at her London home in Gower Street, Bloomsbury.[29] She was cremated at the Golders Green Crematorium although the final resting place of her ashes is unknown.
In 1932, a memorial to Fawcett, alongside that of her husband, was unveiled in Westminster Abbey with an inscription: "A wise constant and courageous Englishwoman. She won citizenship for women."[30]
Legacy[edit]
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. Saint Felix School, near Fawcett's birthplace of Aldeburgh, has named one of its boarding houses after her.[31] A blue plaque for Fawcett was erected in 1954 by London County Council at her home of 45 years in Bloomsbury.[32] 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 in honor of her role in the British suffrage movement and her connections to the area.[33]
In February 2018, Fawcett won a BBC Radio 4 poll asking Britons to name the most influential woman of the past 100 years.[34]
The Millicent Fawcett Mile is an annual one-mile running race for women, inaugurated in 2018 at the Müller Anniversary Games in London.[35]
On 11 June 2018, Google celebrated Millicent Fawcett's 171st birthday with a doodle.[36]
Fawcett, Millicent Garrett (1878). . In Baynes, T. S. (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 6 (9th ed.). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 211–219. ***Please note that a wikilink to the article on [Communism] in [EB9] is not available***.This article on Communism was written by Fawcett for the 9th (Scholars) Edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, but truncated and no longer attributed to her in the 11th edition's article
