Early years, 1847–1867

The Garretts were a close and happy family in which children were encouraged to be physically active, read widely, speak their minds, and share in the political interests of their father, a convert from Conservatism to Gladstonian Liberalism, a combative man, and a keen patriot. Louisa Garrett's conventional, sabbatarian, evangelical piety had less appeal for the children, but Millicent's lifelong commitment to values she associated with the English home and family may reflect the influence of her mother, whom she recalled as a contented and effective manager of the two households, at Alde House in Aldeburgh and at Snape, where her childhood was spent. ‘Millie’ followed her sisters as a pupil, between the ages of eleven and fifteen, at the boarding-school at Blackheath in south London kept by Louisa Browning, step-aunt of the poet Robert Browning, and emerged with a sharpened interest in literature and the arts and a passion for self-education. It was through the involvement of her elder sisters, Louisa (1835–1867), who died young, and Elizabeth [see Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett (1836-1917)], in the Langham Place set that she came into contact with the embryonic women's movement and its allies. ‘Louie’ provided a base for London visits after her marriage in 1857 to James Smith. Millicent was taken to F. D. Maurice's sermons, where she encountered a less dogmatic and more socially engaged Anglicanism that proved a lasting (if never predominant) influence on her. She heard John Stuart Mill speak in 1865; the following year Elizabeth and her friend Emily Davies were among the organizers of a petition asking parliament to enfranchise women householders and Louisa became secretary of the first, short-lived London Society for Women's Suffrage. Elizabeth's struggles to obtain medical qualifications reinforced Millicent's early conviction of the absolute rightness of women's emancipation. Tradition has it that she was marked out as a teenager by Miss Davies for the role of suffrage leader (Strachey, The Cause, 101). 'I cannot say I became a suffragist', she later wrote. 'I always was one, from the time I was old enough to think at all about the principles of Representative Government' (NUWSS typescript, n.d., Manchester Central Library, M50/2/10/20).

Married life

When she was eighteen, at a party given by the radical suffragists Clementia and Peter Taylor, Millicent Garrett met the blind Cambridge professor of political economy and Liberal MP Henry Fawcett (1833–1884), who was fourteen years her senior. They married on 23 April 1867. The marriage was based, in Fawcett's words, on 'perfect intellectual sympathy' (Rubinstein, 24) and strengthened by a shared sense of humour and enjoyment of outdoor pursuits—walking, rowing, riding, and skating. Their only child, Philippa Fawcett was born in 1868. At once a political and an academic wife, Millicent acted as her husband's guide and for some years as his secretary, and ran households in London and Cambridge while also, with his encouragement, developing a writing and speaking career of her own. She wrote articles on women's education, women's suffrage, and other topical issues—eight of them reprinted in a joint publication with Henry Fawcett, Essays and Lectures on Social and Political Subjects (1872)—two novels, and popular works on classical economics. Her short textbook, Political Economy for Beginners (1870), ran into ten editions and was translated into many languages. Like her husband she was a disciple of Mill. The latter's view of Millicent as the less able of the two was not shared by Leslie Stephen, while Charles Dilke made the suggestion—stalled, in fact, by Mill—that she should be elected as the first woman member of the Political Economy Club. For Millicent, however, Mill remained 'a master', not least for his influence in steering English suffragists away from the language of abstract and inalienable rights and 'tall talk' about 'Woman with a capital W' and towards a moderate, utilitarian approach that claimed citizenship for women on grounds of expediency (Fawcett, The women's suffrage movement, 4–7).

The Fawcetts were a radical couple, flirting even with republicanism, supporters of proportional representation and trade unionism, keen advocates of individualistic and free trade principles and the advancement of women. In Cambridge they backed Henry Sidgwick's scheme of lectures for women, launched at a meeting in their drawing-room in 1869, as a venture more likely to pave the way for the admission of women to the university than Emily Davies's bold plans for a women's college modelled on traditional colleges for men. Millicent became a co-founder of Newnham Hall (later College) in 1875 and served on its council, but she also lent support in 1887 to Miss Davies's first controversial bid to open Cambridge degrees to women. A committee member of the London National Society for Woman (later Women's) Suffrage from its foundation in 1867, Millicent made her début as a speaker for the cause at the first public suffrage meeting held in London on 17 July 1869 and in a lecture in March 1870 to a large audience at the town hall in Brighton, her husband's constituency. She became well known as a speaker and lecturer—on political and academic subjects as well as women's issues—in the 1870s, when women rarely ventured onto public platforms. Critics were disarmed by her appearance and manner—demure, slight, graceful, reasonable, a youthful but composed figure with a mass of amber hair and a 'clear, silvery and expressive' speaking voice (Rubinstein, 38–9). Gossip did allege, falsely, that she neglected Philippa for her public work. But although Henry did not always accompany her on speaking engagements, their close partnership was never in doubt. As postmaster-general in Gladstone's second ministry he drew a rebuke from the prime minister for his refusal to vote against William Woodall's women's suffrage amendment to the 1884 Franchise Bill, for which Millicent had campaigned. Significantly, although she usually published under her own name as Millicent Garrett Fawcett, as a public figure she was always styled Mrs Henry Fawcett.

The middle years, 1885–1905

Henry Fawcett's sudden death on 6 November 1884 left Millicent a widow at thirty-seven and deeply grieved, even if her 'passionately reticent' nature made her struggle to conceal it (Strachey, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 103). There is no evidence that she ever considered remarriage. She gave up the houses—18 Brookside in Cambridge and 51 The Lawn, South Lambeth Road, in Vauxhall—where the Fawcetts had lived since 1874. Millicent and Philippa now shared a home at 2 Gower Street in Bloomsbury with a favourite sister, Agnes Garrett (1845–1935), a pioneering businesswoman with a thriving house-decorating firm. Money was not short, thanks to the royalties on Henry's books and Millicent's own earnings from books and journalism. In the months after her bereavement she turned down an invitation to become mistress of Girton and found consolation in projects to commemorate her husband, including the biography which she asked Leslie Stephen to write. The life she rebuilt was emotionally sustained by friends and a sociable extended family, and by a love of music, literature, walking, and travel in which she never lacked congenial companions, as well as by her work for public causes. She was close to Philippa, who shared her mother's skill as a needlewoman and whose distinguished record at Bedford College (of which Mrs Fawcett was a governor) and above all at Newnham, where she was in 1890 classed 'above the Senior Wrangler' in the mathematical tripos, was in itself a contribution to the cause of women.

Between 1885, when she resumed public work, and the early twentieth century when the vote became an overriding preoccupation, Mrs Fawcett's activities ranged widely. Her literary output, detailed in an extensive bibliography in David Rubinstein's authoritative Life (pp. 291–9), now included regular contributions to the Contemporary Review and biographies: popular works—Some Eminent Women of our Times (1889), The Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (1895; 2nd edn, 1901), Five Famous French Women (1905)—and a more scholarly Life of a radical whose views on colonial policy had inspired her husband, Sir William Molesworth (1901). She continued to speak and write for women's suffrage and after the death of Lydia Becker in 1890 emerged as the movement's leader, presiding from 1893 over a committee formed to campaign on behalf of the various local societies which led to the foundation of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) in 1897. She was also a frequent speaker and lecturer at girls' schools and women's colleges and in adult education: it was for her services to education that the University of St Andrews awarded her an honorary LLD in 1899.

Threads of continuity with the Fawcetts' early work appear in other causes Millicent Fawcett espoused, sometimes controversially. Elementary education, they had argued, should be compulsory but parents should pay for it and should not expect to profit from the earnings of young children. This classically Liberal view of family responsibilities lay behind Mrs Fawcett's continued opposition to free education, free school meals, and, later, family allowances, and she was active in the unpopular campaign of 1887–9 for a ban on the employment of children in pantomime and the theatre. On the other hand, the welfare of working-class women was always among her concerns: she had been in 1874 one of the original trustees of the National Union of Working Women and in 1881 joined the council of Emma Paterson's Women's Protective and Provident League. Differences of opinion arose, however, on the issue of protective legislation for adult women workers. Many early women trade unionists had shared the Fawcetts' view that such discrimination should be resisted. In the 1890s Mrs Fawcett had less support when she questioned the case for intervention even in the case of conditions that produced necrosis (‘phossy jaw’) in women workers employed by the match manufacturers Bryant and May. This free market approach was consistent with her own main contribution to economic theory, an analysis of the inequality of women's wages: it was, she argued, an inevitable consequence of the ‘crowding’ of women into a narrow range of occupations as a result of legislative and male trade union discrimination (Mr. Sidney Webb's article on women's wages, Economic Journal, March 1892, 173–6). Her belief that labour market conditions made it counter-productive for women to demand equal pay for equal work was abandoned only when the range of employments open to them was widened during the First World War.

New departures that weakened Millicent Fawcett's associations with radicalism after Henry's death were her involvement in the purity movement, prompted by the exposure of child prostitution by W. T. Stead in 1885 and his subsequent imprisonment, and her permanent breach with the Liberal Party over Irish home rule. In both cases it was the context that had changed, not her own values, and she was among many women who ‘came out’ as purity campaigners at this time just as she was in a majority among university Liberals in supporting the union. She had sympathized with the campaign of Josephine Butler against the Contagious Diseases Acts (repealed in 1886) but—perhaps under pressure from Mill and her husband, perhaps too because her sister Elizabeth supported the acts—stood aside from it. As a founder member in 1885 of the National Vigilance Association and a supporter of the Travellers' Aid Society, founded by a suffragist friend Lady Frances Balfour to protect girls from entrapment into prostitution, she now became a prominent worker for moral reform. Over the years Mrs Fawcett backed campaigns, which had mixed success, to curb child abuse by raising the age of consent and criminalizing incest and cruelty to children within the family, to end the practice of excluding women from courtrooms when sexual offences were under consideration, to stamp out the ‘white slave trade’, and to prevent child marriage and the introduction of regulated prostitution in India. In much of this work the focus was on sexual exploitation of children and on the double standard of morality which, she believed, could never be eradicated until women were represented in public life. But she went further than Josephine Butler in advocating state intervention against ‘vice’. Historians have found it particularly hard to sympathize with her censoriousness towards individuals. Private immorality should, she believed, be incompatible with public influence, for men as it already was for women. The way to combat the double standard was by forcing men to 'level up' (Caine, 232). Sexual transgressors who fell foul of this code included Elizabeth Wostenholme-Elmy, pregnant before marriage; Charles Dilke, who had once been a friend; and the Unionist MP Harry Cust, an unrepentant seducer whose career Mrs Fawcett tried to destroy in 1894 even at the cost of alienating influential suffragist allies. As always she was single-minded in pursuit of principle—and her principles, though pre-Freudian, were not merely conventional. An early novel, Janet Doncaster (1875), shows a combination of puritanism and romantic idealization of loving marriage. Edwardian feminist advocates of free love were later to appal her: a copy of the Freewoman sent to her was judged 'objectionable and mischievous' and torn up into small pieces (Strachey, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 236). Yet she was ahead of her time in advocating divorce by consent in her evidence to the Gorell commission in 1910.

For some years after the home rule split party politics absorbed more of Mrs Fawcett's attention than women's suffrage. Among the founders of the Women's Liberal Unionist Association (WLUA) in 1888, she spoke frequently on Unionist platforms in England and Ireland. She led the faction that split the National Society for Women's Suffrage in 1888 by refusing to allow branches of the Women's Liberal Federation to affiliate. Convinced that her late husband would have remained an opponent of home rule and attracted by the positive view of empire he had shared with some radical contemporaries such as Dilke and Molesworth, she came to represent a tendency within British feminism that associated women's freedom with the ‘civilized’ Western ideals propagated by imperialism and claimed for women a share in imperial responsibilities. The South African War created an opportunity. A patriotic critic of Liberal ‘pro-Boer’ opponents of the war, she was nominated to lead the commission of women sent out in 1901 to South Africa to investigate Emily Hobhouse's indictment of atrocious conditions in concentration camps where the families of Boer soldiers were interned. Never before had women been charged with such a responsible mission in wartime. Their report, published in 1902, was unsympathetic to the 'insanitary habits' of the Boers but by no means uncritical of the British authorities.

In retrospect Mrs Fawcett saw the war, fought ostensibly for the civil rights of Uitlanders, as the cause of a revival of interest in women's suffrage. It was the prelude to her own withdrawal from party politics. She resigned from the WLUA in 1904 in protest against the Unionists' drift towards protectionism—like most contemporary economists she remained a free trader—and for the rest of her career had no party affiliations other than tactical alliances to further the suffrage cause. In the same year she became a vice-president of the newly founded International Women's Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), abandoning her earlier reluctance to be drawn into the international women's movement.

The suffrage campaign, 1905–1914

Between the Liberal election victory of 1906 and the outbreak of war in 1914 mass support for women's suffrage mobilized, initially at least—as Mrs Fawcett recognized—because of the militant campaign launched by the Pankhursts in the winter of 1905. The NUWSS, reorganized under her presidency in 1907, and much the largest of the suffrage societies with more than 50,000 members by 1913, was committed to constitutional methods—although that did not preclude spectacular demonstrations and marches in which she took the lead, sometimes dressed in her doctoral robes, always youthful in appearance and setting an uncomfortably brisk pace. Her connections with higher education helped to recruit the university educated women who were prominent in the leadership of the movement and to give it credibility among educated men: in 1908 she became the first woman to address the Oxford Union (although that body did not vote in favour of women's suffrage until 1913). But she also believed in 'a grand freemasonry between different classes of women' (Rubinstein, 188). Working-class speakers were employed by the NUWSS and its ‘law-abiding’ strategy found more favour among working women than did suffragette militancy.

'Personally it was to myself the most difficult time of my forty years of suffrage work', Mrs Fawcett wrote of the years of Edwardian militancy (Women's Suffrage: a Short History of a Great Movement, 1912, 62). Yet the need to sustain morale in the face of ridicule and divisions called forth some qualities that came easily and established her reputation as a great leader. She was at heart optimistic, believing that women would surely win the vote as a consequence of long-term social changes, and her long experience of political life had taught her how to turn events to best advantage. Her own commitment to law and order was implicit—the storming of parliament by the militants in 1909 in particular she described privately as an 'immoral and dastardly thing to have done' (Hume, 51). Yet both reason and emotions made her seek rather to distance the NUWSS from lawbreakers than to declare war on the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). Suffragettes made headlines and showed the courage to face imprisonment: members of her family—Elizabeth and Louisa Garrett Anderson—were among their supporters. In December 1906 Mrs Fawcett drew censure by hosting a banquet at the Savoy in honour of the first ten suffragette prisoners. Even after the permanent breach between moderates and militants in 1912, when acts of symbolic violence gave way to arson and bomb outrages which seemed unequivocally damaging to the cause, she continued to maintain that the government was responsible for provoking women to break the law and that the retribution inflicted on them—lengthy prison sentences and the torture of forced feeding—was excessive in relation both to the nature of their crimes and to the tariff of punishments applied to male criminals.

Not all historians have endorsed Mrs Fawcett's judgement on tactical questions (Harrison, Women's suffrage at Westminster). On what terms should women demand the vote—as part of a democratic universal adult suffrage measure or within the existing web of property and status qualifications? And how best to put pressure on the political parties? NUWSS policy until 1912 was to demand the franchise 'on the same terms as it is or may be granted to men' and to support pro-suffrage candidates in elections regardless of party. Mrs Fawcett's approach was pragmatic: she looked for the course most likely to secure votes for women. Adult suffrage was unacceptable to Conservative suffragists and, though more congenial in principle to Liberals and the labour movement, aroused alarm because it would have made women a majority in the electorate. A bill to enfranchise only women heads of household, proposed by an all-party ‘conciliation committee’ of MPs in 1910, she welcomed, however, as a first step towards the movement's objective and because it seemed to have a chance of passing. But in 1912, when the Liberal government finally repudiated the Conciliation Bill and revealed plans instead for a manhood suffrage measure, tactics changed. Mrs Fawcett now endorsed adult suffrage and threw NUWSS support behind the only party that was pledged to vote for it—the Labour Party—armed with an election fighting fund that would be used for Labour candidates and against Liberals. Whether she would have done better, as Eleanor Rathbone believed, to continue to work with sympathetic Liberals remains an open question. The prime minister, Asquith, was moving reluctantly away from his firm anti-suffrage stance but it seems unlikely that conciliatory tactics would have persuaded him to give priority to women's suffrage in the crowded parliamentary timetable of 1912–14.

Wartime, 1914–1918

The First World War halted suffrage activism and Mrs Fawcett's efforts to redirect the NUWSS into war work held it together, though with a reduced membership, and won credit with politicians. It was widely accepted that the franchise must be extended to all servicemen—in effect to adult males. An all-party speaker's conference was persuaded to recommend also in 1917 a limited measure of enfranchisement for women over thirty. Mrs Fawcett, now on good terms with Lloyd George, played her part in both urging suffragists to accept this compromise—illogical, but the best that could be achieved—and lobbying to ensure its passage through parliament in 1918. She recognized the effect of the war in changing men's minds, writing that 'instead of our work crumbling in our hands, it has been taken out of our hands by the tremendous movement for democracy' (Rubinstein, 242). She had done more than any other individual to create the climate of opinion in which women could benefit from this sea change.

For the suffrage movement the war brought a painful split between pacifists and patriots which divided Millicent Fawcett from some close colleagues and has recently overshadowed her memory. There was no real possibility of compromise between feminists like Kathleen Courtney and Catherine Marshall who wanted to campaign for a negotiated peace through the IWSA and those who wholeheartedly supported the war. The anti-war group—in a majority on the NUWSS executive in 1915—resigned after a clash with their leader. Wounding language was used on both sides. Mrs Fawcett did not normally turn disagreements among friends into quarrels but this one she experienced as a personal betrayal. It became the only episode in her life that she wished to forget. She has been regarded as lacking in generosity towards those who identified feminism with the cause of peace, omitting their names (as did her first biographer, Ray Strachey) from published accounts of the suffrage movement (Rubinstein, 218–25). In her eyes, the war was fought to defend free institutions against Prussian militarism. Twenty-nine of her Garrett and Fawcett relatives were to die in it. A sympathetic biographer has termed 'shocking' her refusal to intercede against the allied blockade at the end of the war which produced famine in Germany (ibid., 253). Her brand of fierce patriotism was even at the time seen by some as unattractive and dated. But she was not extreme in her generation—she became in 1918 a vice-president of the League of Nations Union.

Last years, 1919–1929

Mrs Fawcett gave old age as her reason for resigning as president of the NUWSS in 1919 but the last decade of her life was packed with activity, much of it associated with that organization, now rechristened the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC). She participated in its campaigns to open the legal profession and the civil service to women, for equal access for women to divorce and for equal suffrage (finally achieved in 1928). As always she was an indefatigably hard worker. She led a deputation of women to the Paris peace conference in the hope of placing women's suffrage on its agenda and continued until 1926 to attend IWSA conferences. Other old causes were revived—the education of women and girls in India, the battle to open Cambridge University degrees to women—and the war years had converted her to some new ones, including equal pay. She liked the short skirts of the ‘flapper’ generation. She did not embrace the ‘new feminism’ of Eleanor Rathbone, however, and when NUSEC was persuaded to support family allowances in 1925 she resigned, though continuing to write for its paper, the Woman's Leader. Public interest in the suffrage movement was limited after the war and her second book on the subject, The Women's Victory (1920), did not sell. But she bore witness to the importance of the vote in accelerating progress towards equality before the law for women and also in ensuring them the respect paid to citizens. 'Democracy is a good teacher of manners', she wrote (What the Vote has Done, NUSEC 1926 edn, 1). Other post-war publications were her somewhat reticent autobiography, What I Remember (1924), impressions of two holiday visits to Palestine (1921, 1922; repr. 1926), and a reverential account (with Ethel Turner), Josephine Butler: her Work and Principles and their Meaning for the Twentieth Century (1927). Honours bestowed on her included an honorary doctorate from the University of Birmingham in 1919 and in 1925 the DGCBE. She died after a short illness at her home, 2 Gower Street, Bloomsbury, London, on 5 August 1929 and was cremated at Golders Green.

Dame Millicent (‘Foss’ to some close friends) was remembered as 'a most lovable person' (Stocks, 71). A memorial inscription added to the monument to Henry Fawcett in Westminster Abbey in 1932 asserts that she 'won citizenship for women'. Later generations have not found it easy to evaluate her. In contrast to the Pankhursts, she shrank from hero-worshippers and did not seek to be a charismatic leader. As a speaker she was persuasive rather than inspirational; she was not a good committee chairman. Victorian values lingered on in her sexual, social, and imperial politics. She took pride in her ‘Englishness’ and—not only in the context of war—had some of the defects that implies. Her statesmanlike qualities were nevertheless crucial in guiding the British women's movement. The range of her contributions to public and intellectual life in an exceptionally long and influential career has only recently been recognized. Once stereotyped as a narrowly bourgeois liberal feminist, she is now appreciated as a woman who also addressed the exploitation of working women and child abuse. She argued—while never adopting the language of ‘sex war’—for votes for women on the grounds that they had distinctive insights to offer and interests to defend. Changing fashions and values in politics and feminism, and her status as an emblem of the women's movement, have complicated the task of her biographers—and will continue to do so until it becomes possible to represent eminent feminists sympathetically as creatures of, as well as rebels against, their times.