19th-century Feminism (Fawcett)

INTRO
Nowadays, feminism is at work to eliminate every patriarchal bit of occidental societies. If much has
yet to be done, men and women are more or less equal by law in those countries. But if women can now
wear pants, abort and own a bank account, it is thanks to the bravest of them who have been fighting for
centuries in order to obtain what’s rightfully theirs. The 19 th century probably is the one that really
engaged the fight, and the most emblematic of the steps leading to equality certainly is earning the right to
vote.
Today, we will be studying one of the greatest figures of the female suffrage movement in England:
Millicent Garrett Fawcett who led the National Union of Women Suffrage Societies (or NUWSS) whose
struggle was based on non-violent methods. We’ll first start with her biography, including an overview of
the whole women’s suffrage struggle. Finally, we will get to study her speech from 1883.

I- Biography – The author

A) Early life
Millicent Garrett Fawcett, from her maiden and married names, was born in 1847 in the coastal city
of Aldeburgh, in the North-East of London. Until the end of her life in 1929, she was active as a writer,
politician, and of course feminist. She intended for women to earn their rights by peaceful and legal ways,
campaigning to earn Members of Parliament’s votes and people’s support. In order to do that, she will be-
come the leader of the largest women’s rights association in Britain at that time: the NUWSS, which we will
study in more details later.
She comes from a quite privileged environment, her father being a businessman who inherited his
company and who encouraged his 10 children to show an interest in reading, thinking and politics, as he
himself became mayor of their city. Her family is hence full of renowned people in their own field, like her
siter Elizabeth Garrett Anderson that was the first woman to ever be mayor, physician and surgeon in Eng-
land and was an active feminist too. In fact, her whole family was into campaigning for women’s access to
high education and to suffrage, as she was quickly introduced to the feminist pioneer Emily Davies, and to
John Stuart Mill’s ideas.
Aged nineteen years old, she supported the Kensington Society that Elizabeth and Emily were mem-
bers of. It was a women’s discussion group for their rights and education founded in 1865, so one of the
first societies for women suffrage, which latter held a crucial role in the suffragettes’ struggle.
Thanks to M.P. John Stuart Mill, she could extend her liberal feminist network and meet Henry Faw-
cett whom she married in 1867. Because of an accident that made him blind, she worked as his secretary in
a marriage said to be based on “perfect intellectual sympathy”, considering Henry was a universal-suffra-
gist Member of the Parliament. Together, they had one daughter who pursued a brilliant path in mathem-
atics. A year later, Millicent was pronouncing her 1rst public speech on the subject of women’s suffrage
and later, she wrote some books on her own and with her husband about their common cause.

B) Suffragettes VS Suffragists
Now, when you here ‘women’s suffrage”, you think of the word “suffragette”. Nowadays, the word
seems to have become a quite generic term for all the women who joined the struggle, but back in early
20th century, it actually was a term to describe a specific movement for women’s suffrage. In fact, Milli -
cent Garrett Fawcett wasn’t considered a Suffragette; she was a Suffragist. The two terms indeed do not
define the difference of gender between people who would campaign for women to be able to vote, but
their preference in the way they campaign.
Let’s first present the NUWSS, as promised. In 1897, Fawcett was of the ones who initiated the pro -
ject which aimed to make the whole suffrage movement stronger, more credible and more efficient, by
gathering 17 societies across the country, hence forming the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societ-
ies. For 20 years, she led the organization which advocated for a democratic and peaceful approach of their
suffrage struggle, avoiding direct confrontations that would result in violence with the police; they would
typically promote their cause through public meetings, petitions, posters, etc, using the different branches
to locally influence the public opinion with their activities, and ultimately aiming for Parliamentary Bills to
be voted, sometimes thanks to lobbying. The members believed that success could be gained by argument
and education.
However, some feminists got tired of these methods that they considered inefficient, given that the
peaceful campaign had failed to earn women suffrage for decades. Thus, they decided to secede from the
NUWSS and create a new branch: the Women Social & Political Union, or WSPU. They will end up calling
themselves the “Suffragettes” (which was first a derogatory nickname used to attack feminists), contrasting
with those who stayed at the NUWSS who would bear the name of the “Suffragists”.
It was the famous Emeline Pankhurst who took the lead of the new movement when it was formed
in 1903, along with her daughter Christabel. Their methods were known to be far less peaceful from those
used by the NUWSS, especially since they were not afraid of confrontation in demonstrations for example,
as they favoured getting themselves heard directly rather than waiting for people to listen. Their militant
approach consisted in pushing politicians to take quick actions and in getting themselves talked about by
taking shocking actions such as their famous hunger strikes, since the authorities could not afford to let
women die out if they wanted to avoid problems with justice and the people. They would use coercion,
vandalism and sabotages, commit symbolic arsons, etc, so that people would talk about their cause.
Millicent Garrett Fawcett, from her NUWSS leading position, condemned these methods though ad-
mired the bravery they required, even if it brought good publicity to the cause. The WSPU and its events in-
deed drew attention on the whole movement which resulted in many new members joining both the
groups, either becoming militants alongside Emeline Pankhurst, or supporting the constitutional path with
Fawcett, depending on their own personal convictions. In 1913, 500 societies had joined the NUWSS, mak -
ing it large of over 100.000 members in 1914. At the same time, the WSPU were only a few thousand
members. Something interesting to note is that most of the NUWSS members were part of the middle or
upper class while the WSPU gathered a bigger percentage of working-class women.
We hence understand that there were tensions within the whole movement for women’s rights.
Whether it was from men or the WSPU members, the NUWSS and Millicent Fawcett had to face hostility
ever since they started their struggle, which was very early for the leader. The pacific movement even
sometimes took the blame for damage caused by Pankhurst’s militants, because feminist supports were
lumped altogether by anti-suffragists, or because they were much more numerous even though the milit-
ants are those who would draw the most attention. Furthermore, Fawcett actually supported the WSPU;
she indeed supported every person who campaigned for women’s rights: she would just stop supporting
them when they would become too militant.

C) Anecdotes
About her also campaigning for women to get access to an actual education and to education of the
highest rank, she became a governor of Bedford College in London which was founded in 1849 as the first
higher education college for women. She also worked to co-found Newham College of Cambridge in 1871.
While some democratic attempts were made in the previous decades, a major one took place in
1911 that would have extended the right to vote to a million women – under wealth and property-owning
conditions – if it didn’t lack support from the Parliament members. If these ‘Conciliation bills’ failed to be
approved, this is partly because of some of the most fervent partisans of the Suffragists and Suffragettes
among the M.Ps, because giving the right to vote to some women only, depending on their wealth, seemed
ridiculous for them.
Also in 1925, King George the 5 th made her a Dame Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the
British Empire, a chivalry order rewarding prominent achievements in various fields.
Before approaching her 1883 speech, I thought it would be interesting to go through some more of
her history in the suffrage struggle. In 1908, the Liberal leader Herbert Henry Asquith was elected prime
minister. That was supposed to be positive for suffrage campaigners since he previously promised to give
women the right to vote, which he didn’t once in power. Fawcett felt betrayed and decided to support one
of the main rivals of the Liberal party: the Labour party. It caused division within the NUWSS since she ever
stayed politically neutral in her leadership of the movement until then, campaigning across all political
parties regardless of their guidelines.
Another well-known episode of the NUWSS history is what we call the Great Pilgrimage. Between
June and July 1913, the movement managed to gather 50 to 70,000 campaigners across all England and
Wales, who would step by step join the non-violent march until they all reach London. On July 26 th, they
could finally assemble at Hyde Park where dozens of speakers addressed the crowd to spread their ideas.

II- Historical context

A) The suffrage campaign during WW1
So we talked about the NUWSS and WSPU’s activities, which they kept carrying out as long as they
existed, but then came World War 1 which was also a very odd period for women suffrage campaigners. As
we know, because men had to leave their jobs to go fight, women had to replace them and participate in
the war effort, or work in jobs brought into existence by wartime needs. We esteem that there were 2 mil-
lion of them replacing men between 1914 and 1918, which increased the employment of women from 24
to 37%. Typically, they would work as constructors, in engineering, work on the land, do heavy work such
as unloading coal, stocking furnaces, building ships, etc; 700,000 joined the munition industry and 200,000
were even employed in government departments!
Right after Britain declared war to Germany in August 1914, the NUWSS declared they would stop
their political activities considering the country had bigger problems to deal with until the end of the war,
meaning suspending marches, yet they kept campaigning for women’s rights as much as they could beside
participating in the war effort. Millicent Garrett Fawcett then made a speech, and said: “Women, your
country needs you […] Let us show ourselves worthy of citizenship, whether our claim to it be recognised or
not.” The NUWSS leadership indeed believed that this would benefit the whole movement, they hoped it
would help women earn respect from men, MPs and the government, even gratitude, which could lead to
earning the right to vote.
Fawcett chose not to help with the recruiting strategy led by the government, like the WSPU did. In
fact, it is important to say that the NUWSS kept current its peaceful principle during the war: they suppor-
ted women’s participation in the war, but not the war itself. Instead, they for instance participated in initi-
atives such as the Scottish Women’s Hospitals which provided medical head and found hospital units in
several allied countries.
About the WSPU, let’s talk quickly about their side of history. They too supported the participation
of women in the war effort and. In fact, they got involved themselves and ended their militant activities, in
return for the government to have released their members that were imprisoned before the war. This
“patriotic feminism” resulted in them helping with recruiting women into war work, young men into the
army, and later the establishment of conscription. However, this created tensions within the movement
since the idea was accepted by Emeline and Christabel Pankhurst, as leading figures of the union, while
some other members didn’t agree to call off militancy or were simply opposed to the war. Emeline’s argu -
ment sums up in one sentence that her daughter reported: “What would be the good of a vote without a
country to vote in?”.
 Since the WSPU’s activities consisted in shocking actions to make people talk about them, having to
stop that during the war caused them to fade from public attention. Emeline and Christabel Pankhurst fi-
nally dissolved the movement in 1917 and eventually formed the Women’s Party. As for the NUWSS, Milli-
cent Garrett Fawcett decided to retire from its leadership after 22 years of commitment, giving her seat to
Eleanor Rathbone (who also had a long history of feminist politics behind her) under new guidelines such
as the campaign for equal pay or equal standards for sex morals, for example. The movement also re-
named itself as the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship.
Why such a change? The year before, in 1918, was voted the ‘Representation of the People Act’
which gave women over 30 years old the right to vote under the condition of being property owners,
which represented less than 40% of women in the United Kingdom, that is to say 6 to 7 million women
over 40 million citizens. The implication of women during the war certainly served their cause by improving
men’s regard on their capacity to fulfil the same tasks as men, yet these criteria for their right to vote ex -
cluded women that worked the most to participate in the war effort, like nurses or industrial workers. At
the same time, all men over 21 were granted this right, the property qualifications being abolished for
them (while they were 58% of the male adult population before 1918). It is not until 1928 that the condi-
tions for women were lowered to be on equal terms with men through the ‘Equal Franchise Act’.

B) Context of her speech

Now that we got an overview of the women suffrage struggle led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett, let’s
get back to 1883 when she delivered one of her speeches to the National Society for Women’s Suffrage. It
was the first national union for women’s suffrage to be created in the UK, in 1867, and one of the societies
that would join the NUWSS when it was formed in 1897, 14 years after her speech.
So, we know that women could not vote back then, but what about their other rights? As we may
imagine, for men not to allow women to be equal with them on such an important issue, this certainly is
because their perception of them was altered on many levels, in terms of what they believed to be their
natural roles and intellectual abilities for instance. Due to their reproductive system, women were de-
scribed as unstable and emotional which would make them incapable of making rational decisions, natur-
ally intended to be delicate, innocent, and weak. They really were reduced to being homemakers, care-
givers, nurturers, that’s it. Of course, rich women who could afford education and who were respected for
their status or knowledge were better off.
Speaking of education; during Queen Victoria’s reign, better known as the Victorian era (that ex-
tends from 1837 to 1901), women began to ask for a better education considering the poor quality one
they were granted until then. The only chance they were given to receive education was if their family
could afford a governess or was willing to let them read, like Millicent Garret Fawcett could experience in
her family. About reading (and writing), the global literacy rate in the U.K significantly increased from the
end of the 18th century: by 1840, 40% of women were literate while men were already close to 70%. As you
can see on this graph for literacy in England, that difference between genders narrowed until it reached an
approximate equality by the end of the 19th century.
Such a difference is partly due to the fact that society used to believe that reading was dangerous
for women, as lots of literary works were considered inappropriate for them. Certain texts could corrupt
their innocent mind thus reduce their value as women, or distract them from their vocation to domestic
duties; books gave them a link to the world while they were destined to stay at home; or other nonsense
arguments about the effects that specific scientific fields could have on women’s thoughts.
Even if a women never married, she was expected to remain uneducated and ideally work in the
childcare field, working for a rich family for instance. They got a better outlook in 1848 when Queen’s Col-
lege opened in London, aiming to train governesses with an education that would open a little more doors
in the professional world. Some other establishments were founded after that, providing women more op-
portunities, like private schools or universities, even dedicated colleges in Oxford, Cambridge or the Uni-
versity of London (the first in 1878). The situation evolved alongside the suffrage campaign, with the idea
that the use of the right to vote have to lean on the wisdom brought by education.
In the second half of the 19th century, all-girls boarding schools started opening, granting them a
better education, for the families that could and wanted to afford it. Boarding schools were expensive insti-
tutes that quite only noble-born boys could attend in order to become politicians or military commanders
for example, while girls were given a less academic education at home or specialized schools, focused on
domestic chores. Most of the time, it took wealthy women who wished for the elevation of their sisters for
these schools to exist. It’s not until 1880 that the Education Act made the public school system (which was
established 10 years ago) compulsory between age 5 and 10, for both boys and girls. However, not all par -
ents could afford to lose the income brought by their children who would have a job, so it granted educa -
tion for all girls by law, but not in facts.
The logic behind not letting women be educated actually makes sense in terms of economy, since
investing in a woman was far riskier than in a man would could easily get any job; however, the lack of edu-
cation, the absence of women in the intellectual fields or positions of responsibility, and society's percep-
tion of them place this logic in a vicious circle, pushing them ever lower than the men of their time.

Now that we know more about their social conditions, let’s get back to their legal rights, which are
inevitably linked to everything we just learned. In the eyes of the law, once a woman married she basically
ceased to exist. On her wedding day, she became one person with her husband and thereafter everything
she did was under his direction. When divorces were allowed in the Victorian Era, only men if not only
wealthy men were allowed and eligible to request for the dissolution of their marriage. Women's rights
were extremely limited in this era, losing ownership of their wages, all of their physical property, and the
money they generated once married. This obvious inferiority in status is observed precisely in women’s
rights about marriage and divorce, something Fawcett actually mentions in her 1883 speech.

III- Arguments and rhetoric (Analysis of her speech from 1883)

Now, let’s finally dig into the actual speech. It sums up simple and logical arguments as for why
denying women the right to vote is ridiculous and based on nothing rational.
She denounces “laws that are unjust to women” and the fact that eve, if this injustice is very well-
known, nothing much was ever done to change that. One of the greatest absurdities she mentions is the
example of divorce suits that’s once again subject to unfair conditions for women, especially regarding the
fact that nothing legally guarantees that they may obtain the guardianship of their children after splitting
up.
We could then hear her address those who would consider the rights women have already obtained
to be enough, as if they had no legitimacy to ask for an actual equality by law, and that they will, in time,
be contented anyway, without going as far as demanding the right to vote. These anti-suffragists seem to
believe women should content themselves with that great act of kindness, that huge sacrifice, concession
from the men in power.
She also states that if these hardships were the struggle of the higher classes – the ones
represented in politics – the situation would no doubt have been settled already. One could say that rich
women suffer Victorian patriarchy too; yet their situation stays more desirable than what the working and
middle classes’ women may undergo, especially because of the lack of education that is generally speaking
even less accessible for them.
 Now. A great part of her speech is given to the ‘Married Women Property Act’ that was voted 1
year before and was the one to finally allow “married women to own and control property of their own
right”. Before that law was in effect the ‘Coverture doctrine’, stating that married women legally only
existed through their husband; they didn’t have a legal existence of their own, their rights and obligations
were merged with their husband’s administrative existence. As the women’s rights movement grew bigger
during the 19th century, this law especially was more and more criticized. Hence, Fawcett qualifies it as
having “redressed a great and crying evil”, also stating that it would be only logical for politics to keep
walking this way, that there is no valid reason for them to stop there.
She then reminds the audience that if the Act could be adopted, it is because of the wider fight
carried out for women’s representation in Parliament.
For that matter, at some point we can read : “the efforts actively carried out for sixteen years” : I
searched what date it was a reference to, so I did the math : 1883 minus 16 sends us back to 1867. What I
found is that it’s around this date that were founded the first societies for women suffrage : in 1865 we’ve
got the Kensington Society, a women’s discussion group for their rights and education which latter held a
crucial role in the suffragettes’ struggle ; and in 1867 were born the Manchester Society for Women
Suffrage and the National Society for Women’s Suffrage which was one of the societies that joined the
NUWSS when it was formed in 1897.
Anyway, through the text and especially the phrase “by constant and untiring efforts”, we
understand that this finally achieved progress has awaken a stronger sense of justice in women’s hearts,
strengthened their thirst for equality and justice, it’s like it finally freed the rage they’ve been holding in
themselves for so long.
Afterwards, she proposes to imagine that the great achievement that’s the passing of the Property
Act was only due to the male representatives of the Parliament. It allows her to raise the important
question of the legitimacy that men granted themselves to decide over women’s lives. She says: “What
right has any set of human beings to say to another, I concede to you that piece of justice, and I withhold
this, not because you ask for either, or can make me give you either, but because I choose to act so? ”.
Women being half of humanity, the idea of one half dominating the whole other by restraining their
liberties looks ridiculous. Going further with this idea, she ends by demanding for women the right of free
citizenship, under the same requirements as men.
To sum up, she wants for women to finally have the right to exist and dispose of their own life,
because they can’t accept to be second-class citizens anymore.

CCL / Ouverture
Millicent Garrett Fawcett died in 1929, allowing her to witness the achievement of a lifetime when
women were granted a perfectly equal-with-men right to vote in 1928. She started fighting at only 20 years
old and devoted her whole life to women’s rights. Her pacifist methods probably wouldn’t have worked
that efficiently if the Suffragettes with the WSPU didn’t catalyse the recognition of the NUWSS.
She definitely marked the history of The U.K and of womankind with her courage, devotion and
brilliant mind, so much that in 2018, for centenary of women’s suffrage, she became the first woman
honoured by a statue in Parliament Square.

The WSPU and Emeline Pankhurst tend to earn more recognition for what they accomplished for
the women’s suffrage struggle, to the point that suffragettes were dedicated a movie entitled with this
nickname. Millicent Fawcett is somewhat forgotten even though she tirelessly campaigned for her whole
life at the head of the Suffragists, which is quite logical considering the NUWSS actions were not meant to
be as memorable as the militants were.
 The NUWSS is still relevant today because it is where the women’s movement began. If it hadn’t
been for the women in this organization, women today may not have the same voting rights or rights in
general that they do today.
I will finish by saying that 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."