She was fortunate that her father was a wealthy merchant and shipowner, and fortunate that her parents were remarkably free of the dominant ideology of male supremacy which saw the feminine as the second-best.
All of their ten children attended the same boarding school in London for several years, while at home the parents encouraged interest in the political issues of the day, as well as free thought and the free expression of opinion. It is significant that several daughters of this high-powered family achieved eminence. Elizabeth was to become one of the first female doctors in Britain as Elizabeth Garrett Anderson , and her younger sisters followed her struggle against a male-dominated medical elite with interest and passion.
Agnes became one of the first women interior designers in Britain, and also a pioneering businesswoman. Clearly Millicent was fortunate not only in her environment but in her genes. When did Milly first support votes for women?
It is impossible to say, for she seemed to be born a feminist. They were not. She was a speaker at its first public meeting. This took some courage, since for a woman to speak in public was deemed unseemly if not downright immoral. She did not stop lecturing for long over the next 60 years. Success in such a cause is a goal worthy of the noblest ambition; failure in such a cause is a better thing than success in any meaner or paltrier object.
There can be no doubt that, though her tactics were less eye-catching and seemingly less heroic than those of Emmeline Pankhurst, Millicent Fawcett devoted her life to the improvement of the conditions of women. Her arguments in favour of votes for women were really quite simple.
She did not believe that men and women were the same: if they were, votes for women would not be such a political imperative.
The sexes had different abilities, women being more loving and nurturing, and having higher moral standards; but their spheres of activity overlapped and politics were of joint interest.
The claim of women to representation depends to a large extent on those differences. Women bring something to the service of the state different from that which can be brought by men. She argued that since women could hold responsible posts in society, such as sitting on school boards, they should be trusted with the vote. Since women as well as men had to pay taxes, women should have a say in how those taxes were spent. Similarly, since parliament made laws for all to obey, women as well as men should take part in the making of those laws — and female legislators would initiate valuable reforms, such as raising the age of consent, and thereby end the sexual double standard.
In short, like so many other suffragists, Fawcett believed that only if women had the vote would they be treated as equal citizens with men. Yet while wealthy mistresses employed gardeners, workmen and labourers who could vote, women could not, regardless of their wealth or ability. These were simple arguments, and to her mind irrefutable. Yet the education of men in the principles of sexual equality could be no easy or fast process. In April Millicent met Henry Fawcett, a remarkable man, 14 years her senior.
Despite being blinded in an accident, he had become Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge in and, a few years later, Radical Liberal MP for Brighton and an associate of Mill. When news reached them of the assassination of one of their heroes, the American President Abraham Lincoln, Milly remarked that the death was a greater loss than the demise of any crowned head in Europe, a sentiment that caused Henry to fall instantly in love. They married in A year later their only child, Philippa, was born.
It was, according to all the evidence, an ideal marriage. But she did not play second fiddle. She ran their two households, at Cambridge and London, but also wrote herself. She also published a textbook, Political Economy for Beginners, which went into ten editions and several languages, and also two novels. The former, in , allowed married women some control over their own finances. The need for this was brought home viscerally to Millicent in when her purse was stolen at Waterloo Station.
The latter, in , removed the right of police to arrest, detain and medically treat women suspected of being prostitutes, though not of course their male clients — an egregious example of the sexual double standard. He died quite suddenly in November , leaving Millicent a widow of She turned down an offer to become mistress of Girton and instead moved in with her sister Agnes, in Bloomsbury, and was sustained by her extended family, by music and literature, and of course by her work.
She regularly contributed to the journals of the day and also produced several biographies. Above all, she had the cause of women to promote.
Should the suffragists fix their hopes on any particular party? Should women campaign for more democracy in general, since that was bound to include women? Yet the Third Reform Act of , which enfranchised agricultural labourers, did not give the vote to a single woman. She resumed her regular lectures explaining why women should have the vote. But there was no effective forum to channel the movement.
Millicent led the faction opposed to change. A majority of members, who wished to see affiliation, reformed themselves as the Central National Society, while Millicent became honorary secretary and then treasurer of the old Central Committee.
A breakthrough came in Millicent became President of the Special Appeal Committee that was urging suffrage societies to put aside their differences and work together. Millicent Fawcett was in many ways its natural leader, though it was not until in that she became its President. Millicent was a gradualist. There was no logical reason why all women should not vote, she believed, but half a loaf was better than no bread.
And once the citadel had been breached and some women had the vote, the campaign could be focused on extending the numbers enfranchised. She knew that men had received the vote in stages, and that indeed many men still could not vote.
The campaign to educate men was bound to take a long time. Women must not therefore lose heart. All agreed that Fawcett ran the organisation on exemplarily democratic lines. Furthermore it was undoubtedly efficient. Many men were won over by its arguments, and she welcomed their support. She had no wish to attack men, either physically or intellectually. Reform, she knew, was needed for the good of both sexes.
She was certainly making a name for herself, and when a storm of disapproval arose, during the Boer War, over the concentration camps in which the families of Boer soldiers were interned, she was appointed head of an investigating commission. In fact, Millicent Fawcett found much that was wrong with the camps and made far-reaching recommendations for improvements. Her older sister, Catherine, also had suffragette sympathies.
She was involved with the peaceful suffrage campaigners, but she lived in Germany so she was not as heavily involved. Mukherjee: Sophia was an exception in a lot of ways. Because of her aristocratic, royal background, she was very privileged. She was wealthy, so she was able to refuse to pay taxes. Because of her royal background, we know she was treated quite well by the police and other authorities, which was true for most middle-class suffragists at the time.
Her class and her wealth almost trumped her race. Al Jazeera: How did imperialism influence the British suffrage movement, and how did this impact the intersection of class and race? Mukherjee: There were very few women of colour who were involved with the movement, and that is primarily because British suffrage campaigners did not think about including women of colour into conversations and debates around citizenship, and the right to participate in the democratic structures of the nation.
Considering the history of imperialism and colonialism, I think it is really important to be cautious about how we think about Indian women involved in the British suffragette movement. Sophia Duleep Singh was someone who had a voice. But the other Indian women who were involved, they did not have a voice. In June , for example, there was a suffrage coronation procession through London where some Indian women were invited to take part, and encouraged to wear their national dress, saris. These women were objectified by British women who wanted to throw in a bit of colour to the campaign and draw attention to tokenistic attempts of being diverse.
Al Jazeera: How would you describe the portrayal of women of colour associated with the movement, according to evidence? This relates to a lot of work by the historian Antoinette Burton, who looked at British suffrage newspapers and periodicals.
The issue with race was that British women, up until and even beyond, were campaigning for a vote in an imperial parliament that would give them a say over what happened in the Empire. Mukherjee: In other parts of the Empire, women were campaigning for greater economic rights, the right to own property, the right to have a voice within these limited democratic institutions.
In India, there were women doing both, women who took that so-called peaceful, democratic route fighting for the vote, but at the same time, were also caught in the unrest around the nationalist struggle for emancipation from imperial powers. Indian women were campaigning for the vote from onwards, because they fundamentally disagreed that women should be excluded from the limited democratic right to vote, that was given to some Indian men under colonial rule.
Sarojini Naidu's legacy, alongside that of other, Indian women, are a powerful corrective to the idea that the fight for female suffrage was a purely Western phenomenon.
She was arrested a number of times for her role in nationalist activities, and was at the forefront of the suffrage movement in India, petitioning the Indian government, meeting with politicians and demanding that women get the vote.
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