Votes For Women! Read online

  It was, though, the start of Millicent’s lifelong devotion to the cause of winning the vote for women. She was supported and encouraged by the friends she met through her sister and, of course, Elizabeth’s struggles to qualify as a doctor naturally fired her little sister’s enthusiasm for emancipation. It’s said that, even as a teenager, Milly was identified as a possible leader of the suffrage movement and she later said of herself, ‘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.’

  Milly married very young. She was eighteen when she met Henry Fawcett at a party held by a group of keen suffragists, and they married two years later. He was fourteen years her senior, a Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and a Liberal MP. He had been with John Stuart Mill when the 1866 petition was presented to Parliament.

  Millicent Fawcett described their marriage as having ‘perfect intellectual sympathy’. They shared their politics, also had compatible interests in walking, rowing, riding and skating, and shared a sense of humour. A year after their marriage their first and only child, Philippa, was born.

  The marriage was an extremely happy one. Henry was blind and, as Millicent acted as her husband’s eyes, he was able to open political doors for her, introducing her to the men she would need to lobby if her aims were to be achieved. Henry supported her completely. Without such a sympathetic husband she would not have been able to run their houses in Cambridge and London, care for a new baby, write articles, act as his secretary, speak in public for the suffragist cause and be an active member of the Women’s Suffrage Committee.

  Henry Fawcett encouraged his wife to write, in addition to all her other activities. She managed to pen two novels, publish two works on classical economics and write the introduction to a new edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s great work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, although the Victorian version slipped up and replaced ‘Woman’ with ‘Women’! I’ve never quite understood why such an active campaigner for women, on the cover of the new edition, is named as Mrs Henry Fawcett. It was the common way to address a married woman at the time, but one she rarely used. She was always Millicent Garrett Fawcett.

  Being at the forefront of a controversial national campaign was not a recipe for an easy life. I haven’t seen pictures of Milly wearing anything but a traditional Victorian woman’s outfit with a high neck and full skirt. But she was leading a revolution where women walked the streets or rode their bicycles (shock, horror!) in the newfangled ‘Rational Dress’, which allowed some ease of movement and less corseted restriction. Some women were even courageous enough to wear a banner demanding ‘Votes for Women’ across the chest.

  Punch cartoonists had a field day. They began to publish a torrent of abusive cartoons lampooning the suffrage cause; the magazine seemed to represent the view not only of comic artists and politicians but the majority of the British public as well. Millicent made lots of attempts to avert disapproval by her respectable behaviour and her clever, well-informed speeches, and she steadfastly refused to be put off by the widely held view that achieving the aims of the women’s movement would be fraught with difficulties and would take a very long time. She chose to dismiss the strength of the opposition they faced and never wavered in her determination to promote the cause.

  In 1997 Shelagh Diplock, a former director of the Fawcett Society, described Millicent as a formidable, if never a particularly charismatic, speaker:

  Millicent Garrett Fawcett, at the age of twenty-two, set out on the first speaking tour of her sixty-year-long campaign for women’s suffrage. She would list the many reasons given why women should not be given the vote. It was said that women were intellectually inferior. They were physically inferior. They were too pure to be involved in politics. If given the vote, they would neglect their families and homes. Men would no longer open doors for them. Women did not really want the vote and so on. Then, one by one, she would demolish these points using her sharp logical mind and quick wit. This powerful mix of reasoned arguments to promote a cause, combined with humour to keep an audience listening, remains a most effective strategy to this day.

  The Women’s Suffrage Committee soon became the London Society for Women’s Suffrage as other groups around the country, in Edinburgh and Manchester, began to be formed. They had all been heartened by the fact that Millicent’s petition had at least been seen in Parliament: ‘For the first step forward had been taken, the challenge had been thrown down, and the Cause had been advanced into the political lists.’ But their belief that the cause would be popular simply because it was just was misguided.

  Nevertheless, the movement grew. There were numerous strong and resourceful women who were prepared to endure the ridicule they faced in standing up for women’s rights, and there were a number of men who also proved essential to the movement. Always positioned at the front of her armies of supporters was Millicent Garrett Fawcett. She served on the board of most of the suffrage organisations, spoke on platforms, wrote and lobbied.

  There were endless difficulties and debates about where the women’s campaigning energies should be concentrated. As we’ve seen in the previous chapter, medicine and education were the preoccupations of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Emily Davies, but for young Millicent, the vote was the main focus and she was continually aware of the need to avoid the racier side of the campaign and remain the calm, informed lobbyist who had to persuade rather than alienate the powerful men whose minds she wanted to change.

  As a consequence of the need to present a respectable front, Milly was forced to back down from a campaign she would have dearly loved to support. Josephine Butler was a fellow feminist and social reformer who, between 1869 and 1886, worked to have the Contagious Diseases Act repealed. The Act required that any woman suspected of being a prostitute must be examined for venereal infection. If she were found to have the disease she would be locked in hospital until she was cured. If she refused to submit to a genital examination she could be given a prison sentence of up to three months.

  Milly agreed with Butler that it was unjust that prostitutes, or indeed any woman suspected or accused of being one, should be examined regularly for venereal disease when the men who bought their bodies were not subjected to such demands. But Butler’s efforts were widely considered unsuitable for a woman of modest Victorian conduct. Millicent was keen that she should not be associated with the ‘violent opposition’ the Butler campaign aroused and supported her only in private.

  As the century wore on and further attempts were made by sympathetic MPs to bring forward a Bill or resolution to advance the cause of suffrage, the tone of the response in the House was said to be not so much hostile as facetious. The women’s reasoned arguments and demands were simply not taken seriously, even in Parliament.

  In 1884 Henry Fawcett died suddenly, leaving Millicent a widow at the age of only thirty-seven. Her naturally reticent nature prevented any outpouring of emotion, but those close to her commented on how deeply she grieved for him. She never considered marrying again.

  Millicent sold the houses in Cambridge and London and moved with Philippa and one of her sisters, Agnes, into 2 Gower Street in Bloomsbury, where a blue plaque now honours her memory. She was not short of money. Her sister was a successful businesswoman who ran a home improvement company and Millicent made a living from her writing. She made regular contributions to the Contemporary Review and wrote a number of biographies, including Some Eminent Women of Our Times and The Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria.

  She also became the suffrage movement’s official leader, becoming the president in 1897 of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and adopting the suffragist colours of green, white and red (GWR) – the initials stood for ‘Give Women Rights’, and differed from the suffragettes’ green, white and purple, symbolising hope, purity and dignity.

  Not all of her views would play well with modern members of the society named after her, which, in 2016, celebrated its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary – the history of the Fawcett Society began at the time of the 1866 petition to Parliament presented by John Stuart Mill and Henry Fawcett.

  Millicent supported compulsory primary education for young children, but believed parents should be expected to pay for it and be prevented from profiting from the earnings of their young. As a believer in the principle of family responsibility she opposed free school meals and later family allowances, and she was active in an unpopular campaign in the late 1880s for children to be banned from working in pantomime or in the theatre.

  As a passionate believer in the free market, she had been a supporter of the National Union of Working Women and was concerned about the welfare of working-class women, but she did not approve of legislation to protect them. She felt that there should be no discriminatory legislation on the part of women that was not equally available to men.

  She even caused controversy and was widely opposed when she questioned the case for intervention on the part of women whose faces had been horribly mutilated during the course of their work at Bryant and May’s match factory in the East End of London. The condition was known as ‘phossy jaw’, as the necrosis was caused by the phosphorus used to make the matches. The social activist Annie Besant published an exposé in the magazine The Link describing the factory as a prison house and the girls as white slaves.

  Besant encouraged and supported the girls during the Match Girls’ Strike of 1888, which became an extremely significant moment in the history of the trade union movement. Bad employers were shamed in the press, the match girls, aided by Annie Besant, forced Bryant and May to agree to improve their conditions and a union, one of the first to represent women and a then rare example of a union for unsk
illed workers, was formed and would last until 1903. The Link described the strike as putting ‘new heart into all who are struggling for liberty and justice’.

  Millicent was aware of how badly women workers were paid compared to men and her major contribution to economic theory was an analysis of the inequality of women’s wages. She wrote that it was an inevitable consequence of two things: the ‘crowding’ of women into a narrow range of jobs as a result of laws that restricted women’s opportunities for employment, and discrimination against women perpetrated by the male trade union movement. She argued that it was counterproductive for women to demand equal pay for equal work because the labour market made it impossible for them to achieve equal work – an argument that’s common even today when the fight for equal opportunity and equal pay goes on.

  Millicent thought demanding more money might well persuade employers that it was hardly worth employing women at all if they ceased to be the cheaper option. She abandoned that argument when the range of jobs open to women was widened during the First World War, as men went to the front and women took up the jobs they had left behind to keep the country working.

  In some ways, then, she was a rebel against her times, but she was also a woman of her time. She had statesmanlike qualities, which made her an important leader of the British women’s movement, but her Victorian values are clear. She was a passionate believer in the British Empire and a severe opponent of Home Rule for Ireland and independence for India. She also became closely associated with the purity movement, prompted by the exposure of child prostitution by the newspaper editor W. T. Stead, who was a pioneer of investigative journalism. He arranged the purchase of a thirteen-year-old girl, Eliza Armstrong, to highlight the existence of the trade, and wrote a series of devastating articles about child exploitation in the Pall Mall Gazette. He was later imprisoned for three months, having been found guilty of failing to secure the permission of the girl’s father for the purchase. The story inspired George Bernard Shaw to write Pygmalion and call his character Eliza.

  Millicent was one of a number of women who joined the purity movement as a result and she campaigned for years, as a founder member of the National Vigilance Association, to protect girls from being trapped into prostitution, to curb child abuse by raising the age of consent, to make incest a criminal offence, to stamp out the ‘white slave trade’ and to make cruelty to children within the family illegal. She had some success. One of her most vociferous campaigns was to end the practice of excluding women from courtrooms when sexual offences were being considered.

  She did tend to be rather censorious in a way that might not appeal to modern feminists, although she did, at least, insist that equality should dominate her moral arguments. By her moral code, neither men nor women were suitable for public office if they indulged in private immorality. She disapproved publicly of a friend who became pregnant before marriage and she tried to destroy the career of the Unionist MP Harry Cust. He was an unrepentant seducer, which, for Millicent, overrode his strong support for the suffragist cause. When some Edwardian feminists began to advocate ‘free love’ she was appalled and a copy of the Freewoman, which was sent to her, was torn up into small pieces and described as ‘objectionable and mischievous’. So perhaps it’s surprising that, when she gave evidence to the Gorell Commission on divorce in 1910, she argued in favour of divorce by consent.

  As Britain moved into a new century, mass support for women’s suffrage grew and even the passionately non-violent Millicent had to acknowledge that it was the militant campaign launched by the Pankhursts in 1905 that had really brought the movement to the attention of the nation. As the nineteenth century had come to a close, the NUWSS seemed to have made little progress towards the goal of winning votes for women. Letters of congratulation had been dispatched to their sisters in places like Australia and Wyoming, where women had achieved what the British campaigners had failed so spectacularly to win.

  The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was reorganised under Millicent’s presidency in 1907 and was by far the largest of the suffrage societies with more than fifty thousand members by 1913. It remained committed to constitutional reform. Through her close connections with the universities she attracted well-educated women into the leadership of the movement, which helped give credibility to the cause among educated men. She arranged demonstrations and marches in which she took the lead and in 1908 became the first woman to address the Oxford Union, although the Union did not vote in favour of votes for women until 1913.

  Millicent worked hard to attract working-class women into the movement, to join the educated women who had already signed up, saying she believed in ‘a grand freemasonry between different classes of women’. It’s been suggested by the historian Janet Howarth that the law-abiding strategy of the NUWSS was more popular among working women than suffragette militancy.

  As the direct action policy of the Pankhursts’ WSPU stepped up there was growing tension between the suffragists and suffragettes. Millicent described this period as ‘the most difficult time of my forty years of suffrage work’. She openly expressed her disapproval of the suffragettes’ storming of Parliament in 1909, describing it as an ‘immoral and dastardly thing to have done’. She was, though, determined that no war should be declared between the suffragists and the suffragettes. The individual suffragettes who made the headlines and were courageous enough to face imprisonment, hunger strikes and force-feeding won her admiration. In 1906 she had held a banquet at the Savoy in honour of the first ten suffragette prisoners, although she was criticised for it in the press and by those who considered the suffragettes’ violent tactics to be illegal acts that deserved severe punishment.

  The two sides of the movement split in 1912, when the acts of symbolic violence such as breaking windows escalated into arson and bombings. The suffragettes never killed or even injured anyone, but it was clear to Millicent that such acts were damaging to the cause. Still, she argued that the government was responsible for provoking women into breaking the law, while also declaring that the punishments meted out to them, such as long prison sentences and force-feeding, were excessive given the nature of their crimes. The tariff for length of sentence was, she said, more lenient for men, even if their crimes had been more heinous.

  The First World War brought an end to activism in the suffrage cause, but Millicent held the NUWSS together by directing its members into war work and was admired by a wide range of politicians for her efforts. There were, though, some serious fallings-out with fellow suffragists who, conflating feminism with pacifism, objected to her wholehearted, patriotic support for the war effort. She saw the war as a necessary conflict that was defending free institutions against the militarism of Prussia.

  In 1917 it became accepted that the franchise should be granted to all servicemen, which effectively meant universal suffrage for all adult males. Before the war only men over twenty-one who owned property had the right to vote. The 1918 Representation of the People Act extended the right to all men over twenty-one, regardless of wealth or class. An all-party speakers’ conference held in 1917 was persuaded to recommend a limited right to vote for women.

  There’s no doubt the war and women’s work in nursing, running the railways, driving ambulances and working in factories certainly contributed to the change of mind, but it’s clear that pressure from Millicent, particularly in persuading Lloyd George to support her, was instrumental in the fight being won. She also persuaded her members to compromise and accept the limited enfranchisement on offer in 1918. She lobbied politicians to ensure the Bill passed through Parliament in 1918 and women over the age of thirty who owned property won the first step towards universal suffrage, which was finally achieved ten years later in 1928.

  Millicent was now seventy-one and gave old age as her reason for resigning from the presidency of the NUWSS in 1919. It was rechristened the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC) and she remained associated with it for the last decade of her life. She was a vice president of the League of Nations Union, took part in campaigns to open up the legal profession and the civil service to women, fought for women to have equal access to divorce and continued to argue for equal suffrage.