The British Women's Suffrage Campaign

National and International Perspectives

June Purvis, June Hannam, June Purvis, June Hannam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000319934
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This book brings together twelve chapters from feminist historians from around the world to offer new perspectives on aspects of the campaign for women's suffrage in Britain.

Although the focus is on Britain, this volume signals how the women's suffrage campaign in Britain embraced both national and global aspects. The historical developments and structures that affected women's lives and suffrage struggles were not limited to national contexts. Early chapters focus on particular individuals both well and lesser known, including Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Emmeline Pankhurst, as well as Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, Lady Isabel Margesson and Isabella Ford. Later chapters highlight the interrelationship between the British movement and suffrage campaigns across the globe with reference to Austria, Japan, New Zealand, Australia and the USA. The chapters deal with issues around strategies, social class, employment, religion, nationalism, empire and race and explore complex issues about women's roles in campaigning for their democratic right to the parliamentary vote.

Offering the reader a broad view of the British women's suffrage movement, this is the ideal volume for students of women's and political history in both its national and international contexts.

1

Millicent Fawcett (1847–1929)

The making of a politician

Elizabeth Crawford

Among its several definitions of ‘a politician’, the Oxford English Dictionary describes such a person as one ‘who is keenly interested in practical politics, or who engages in political strife’. From the age of twenty Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929) devoted herself to practical politics and, as a consequence, her days were dominated by political strife. Born in the mid-19th century, brought up in a small East Anglian town and benefitting from little formal education, for much of her life she directed the constitutional movement to enfranchise women, actively engaging with the political machine, a machine that had evolved over the centuries to run a patriarchal society. How was it that she accrued the knowledge and authority to become a politician?

In the case of Millicent Fawcett the person was political and the political personal. Her initiation into the political sphere began on an April evening in 1865 when, aged 17, she attended a party in Aubrey House, the Kensington home of a radical Liberal MP, Peter Taylor, and his wife Clementia (Mentia). Taylor was a partner in the thriving firm of Courtaulds and the couple were very wealthy and very philanthropic, supporting all the radical causes of the day. The party was one of their fortnightly salons to which were invited radicals of every persuasion, artists and poets as well as politicians. That April evening the atmosphere was particularly electric as many of the guests were involved in a by-election campaign for which a member of the Taylors’ circle, the philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), was one of the candidates. The by-election was for the Westminster constituency and Mill was backed by not only the Taylors and others of their generation but also by a group of energetic young women, one of whom, Elizabeth Garrett (1836–1917), had just qualified as Britain’s first woman doctor. The Mill campaign was considered so exciting that Millicent Garrett, one of Elizabeth’s younger sisters, had come to London for the occasion.

As the great and the good gathered in Aubrey House news of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln had just reached England and, commenting on it, Millicent Garrett exclaimed that she thought this a greater single calamity than ‘the loss of any of the crowned heads of Europe’.¹ Her remark was overheard by another guest, who immediately asked to be introduced to her. That guest was Henry Fawcett (1833–1884), then in his early 30s, already professor of political economy at Cambridge and later that year to be elected Liberal MP for Brighton. Fawcett had achieved all this despite being totally blind. Although it is thought she never knew, within a few days of meeting Millicent, Henry Fawcett proposed marriage to her elder sister, Elizabeth, who told of the proposal in a letter to her parents, explaining that she had turned him down because, as she had qualified as a doctor so recently, she was determined to practise and did not think this would be possible if she were Henry’s wife. Feelings were not mentioned, the Garretts being practical women. Indeed, one acquaintance commented of Millicent some years later that ‘there is no doubt that there is something hard about the Garretts’.² This trait was doubtless inherited from their father, Newson Garrett (1812–1893), a Suffolk man who went to London to seek his fortune. There he married and was set up in a pawn-broking shop at Whitechapel where the first members of his family of six daughters and five sons were born. The pawn-broking business prospered but after the death of a young son Newson resolved to take his children away from unhealthy London and in 1841 returned to Suffolk. He settled in Aldeburgh and, with a small amount of capital, bought a corn and coal business. It was at Aldeburgh that Millicent was born in 1847, the fifth of the Garrett daughters.

Newson Garrett’s business and its position were well chosen and, riding on the crest of Britain’s mid-19th century prosperity, he had the opportunity of developing his enterprise in a number of interlinking directions, becoming an important figure in Aldeburgh. He was very much a ‘can do’ sort of man, another trait inherited by his daughters. As Elizabeth wrote ‘My strength lies in the extra amount of daring which I have as a family endowment. All Garretts have it and I am a typical member of the race and so can’t help it any more than I can help being like them in face and physique. There’s a deal in blood I think’.³

Newson Garrett’s daring did not always make life easy; his finances were notably volatile and his family learned to accommodate themselves to changes in income. For instance, he was keen for his daughters to receive a good education but, despite this intention, a temporary crisis in Newson’s affairs led to Millicent’s formal schooling being cut short before she was sixteen. Millicent’s mother, Louisa Garrett (1813–1903), was very much more conservative than her husband, providing the ballast that kept the family ship on an even keel. Even though, on occasion, she did not approve of the ways in which her daughters were directing their lives, she was always supportive.

Apart from the idiosyncrasy of having a doctor for a daughter, the Garretts’ family life proceeded reasonably conventionally. The eldest daughter, Louisa, had married the son of a local family, owners of a large drapery establishment in London, and a couple of months after the Aubrey House encounter Millicent and her sister Agnes, while staying with Louisa, were taken to one of the few election meetings at which Mill actually appeared. A visiting American has left a lively description of that meeting: ‘Jostling together in most admired disorder and propinquity were representatives of the working classes, of trade, of all the professions, with an obvious sprinkling of eager college students; while there was not lacking what, indeed, is usual at English political meetings, the presence of ladies on the platform and in the front seats’.⁴

Henry Fawcett, who was elected MP for Brighton in 1865, was actively involved in Mill’s campaign and both men supported the idea of granting the parliamentary franchise to women on the same terms as it was given to men. In Considerations of Representative Government, published in 1861, Mill had expressly stated that a difference of sex was ‘as entirely irrelevant to political rights, as difference in height, or in the colour of the hair’.⁵ So, once Mill had been elected, at a time when a Reform bill to extend the franchise was under discussion, the women who had backed him began to consider the possibility of attempting to make some move towards campaigning for their own enfranchisement. The result was that in May 1866 a small informal committee was formed to put together a petition that Mill would present to parliament.

Elizabeth Garrett was one of the committee members and, with her friend Emily Davies, met Henry Fawcett and John Stuart Mill on 7 June 1866 at the House of Commons to hand over the petition containing the names of 1521 women.⁶ In Aldeburgh the petition slips had been handed around by Millicent and Agnes Garrett (who were both too young themselves to sign) and had attracted the signatures of a wide range of women, from the vicar’s wife to a lodging-house keeper.

A year later, on 20 May 1867, John Stuart Mill stood up in the House of Commons to move, unsuccessfully, that clauses of the Reform Bill should be amended to omit the word ‘man’ and substitute ‘person’. Watching him from the Ladies’ Gallery was Mrs Millicent Garrett Fawcett, a bride of less than a month. Marriage to Henry Fawcett was to be the making of her as a politician, providing her with both an education and a professional career as a writer on economics and politics and as a ‘political woman’.

In the earliest extant photograph of Henry and Millicent as a married couple Millicent is sitting on a low chair at Henry’s side, an initial first impression suggesting a teacher/pupil relationship.⁷ Yet Millicent was not without agency, for Henry depended on her as both reader and amanuensis. Although in her autobiography Millicent Fawcett mentions that she acted as Henry’s secretary only until 1871, when he employed in that position Frederick John Dryhurst (1855–1931), I would suggest that Millicent’s work for Henry continued long after he acquired a professional secretary.⁸ Looking, for instance, at collections of letters from Henry Fawcett to Gladstone and to his publisher, Alexander Macmillan, virtually every letter, even those after 1871, is in Millicent’s hand, the letters to Gladstone covering a wide range of parliamentary business, including discussions of bills and parliamentary procedure.⁹

So as she read to Henry and wrote to his dictation Millicent was learning, literally at his knee, something of both elements of his work, plunged into the contemporary debates on political economy and discovering at first hand the workings of parliament. This early photograph was taken sometime in 1868 and, as there is no sign of pregnancy, probably after the birth in April of the Fawcetts’ only daughter, Philippa (1868–1948). That was also the month that Millicent saw her first article in print, ‘The Education of Women of the Middle and Upper Classes’ appearing in Macmillan’s Magazine. For Millicent’s marriage had brought her into contact with not only the worlds of higher education and practical politics but also with that of publishing and there is no doubt that her path into print was eased by the close association that existed between Henry Fawcett and the publishing house of Macmillan’s, founded in Cambridge 20 years earlier. Henry had first published an article in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1860 and the firm published his Manual of Political Economy in 1863, the year in which he was appointed professor of political economy. Running into eight editions and proving a success for both author and publisher, it was, in effect, an abridgement, written as a textbook for undergraduates, of Mill’s Principles of Political Economy. Henry Fawcett had become a close friend of Alexander Macmillan, who, a month before the publication of Millicent’s article, wrote, ‘I was sorry Mrs Fawcett’s paper was not in our last number. It certainly will be in the next. If for no better reason than that Room for the ladies is clearly the cry of the day’.¹⁰Macmillan’s Magazine gave women a medium in which to express ideas on social reform while addressing an audience far wider than that reached by the specifically feminist journals. Millicent published three further articles in Macmillan’s Magazine, two of which were among eight she contributed to a collection of fourteen that, under the title Essays and Lectures on Social and Political Subjects, she and Henry published with Macmillan in 1872. Henry noted in his preface that ‘the labour involved in editing the Volume has fallen entirely on my wife’.¹¹ In March 1872 Henry Fawcett, with Millicent acting as amanuensis, entered into a short correspondence to negotiate royalty terms. Publisher and author may have been friends, but both they and, as she was to prove in later years, Millicent were men of business.¹²

In the same year, while engaged in producing Essays and Lectures, the Fawcetts sat to the artist Ford Madox Brown for a double portrait showing them posed more equally than in the photographs taken four years earlier. Indeed, Millicent, seated on the arm of his chair, is this time raised above Henry. She has one arm, pen in her hand, around his shoulders, while the other, entwined with his, is holding out a letter towards him. He is gesticulating and appears to be speaking, as though discussing with her its contents. Signed by them both as ‘Your Obt. Servants’, it is obviously intended for an official correspondent. The portrait was commissioned not by the Fawcetts but by Sir Charles Dilke (1843–1911), a member, like Henry, of the Radical wing of the Liberal party. The suggestion that a proposed portrait of Henry should also include Millicent seems initially to have come from the artist.¹³ That the commissioner and sitters quickly acquiesced suggests that all concerned wished to highlight the Fawcetts’ effectiveness as a couple. That the document chosen for inclusion in the portrait was a joint effort, rather than one for which Millicent acted as a mere amanuensis, emphasises her autonomy and suggests that the intention was most definitely to depict the Fawcetts as partners working together in the public sphere.¹⁴

Essays and Lectures, the volume of collected essays, was not, in fact, Millicent’s first book. In 1870 Macmillan had published her Political Economy for Beginners, the idea for which had come to her as she helped Henry prepare the third edition of his Manual of Political Economy. As the latter simplified Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, so Millicent’s book simplified Henry’s, aiming to instruct those even lower down the educational ladder, that is, to appeal both to working men and women and to school children. In the preface to the first edition she mentions that she hopes the existence of the book ‘would perhaps be an assistance to those who are desirous of introducing the study of Political Economy into schools. It is mainly with the hope that a short and elementary book might help to make Political Economy a more popular study in boys’ and girls’ schools that the following pages have been written’.¹⁵ Her effort had the approval of Mill himself, who, on hearing of Millicent’s writing project, wrote to the economist John Elliot Cairnes, ‘I have a high opinion of Mrs Fawcett’s capabilities, and am always glad to hear of any fresh exercise of them’.¹⁶ Around the same time Alexander Macmillan wrote to a correspondent, ‘Mrs Fawcett is doin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Millicent Fawcett (1847–1929): the making of a politician
• 2 Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928): the making of a militant
• 3 ‘A particularly interesting kind of “heroine” to have’: marriage, motherhood and votes for women in the archives of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy (1833–1918), feminist, rebel and radical
• 4 Isabella Ford (1855–1924) and women’s suffrage
• 5 Suffragette palace: Sophia Duleep Singh (1876–1948), Hampton Court Palace and votes for women
• 6 ‘Being militant in her own way’: using the individual life of Lady Isabel Margesson (1863–1946) as a prism to explore complex suffrage histories
• 7 The wrong kind of working-class woman? Domestic servants in the British Suffrage Movement
• 8 Class and adult suffrage in Britain during the Great War
• 9 A colonial for the cause: Lady Stout (1858–1931), suffrage and New Zealand as exemplar to the empire, 1909–1914
• 10 Narratives of democracy, the emotions of politics and memories of militant suffragism: Britain, Ireland, the USA and Australia
• 11 Covering the suffragettes: Austrian newspapers reporting on militant women’s rights activism in the United Kingdom
• 12 The influence of the British women’s suffrage movement upon the emergence and development of the Japanese women’s movement
• Index