Leading suffragist Millicent Fawcett will be the first woman honoured with a statue in Parliament Square after a campaign which highlighted that all of the 11 statues currently located there are of men.
A planning application for a sculpture of Fawcett, one of the founders of Newnham College, the women’s college at the heart of the University of Cambridge, was approved by Westminster City Council on Tuesday, September 19 2017.
The decision follows a campaign by feminist activist Caroline Criado-Perez, which included a petition backed by more than 74,000 people and an open letter to London Mayor Sadiq Khan, signed by a group of women, including many Newnhamites and other high profile women including Emma Watson and JK Rowling.
A detailed model of the monument, by Turner prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing, shows Fawcett holding a sign that reads “Courage calls to courage everywhere”, taken from a speech she gave after the death of suffragette Emily Wilding Davison at the 1913 Epsom Derby.
The statue will be unveiled next year to mark the centenary of the Representation of the Peoples Act 1918, which granted some women over 30 the vote for the first time.
Millicent Garrett Fawcett, pictured, was a daughter of the determinedly feminist Newson Garrett, corn and coal merchant of Aldeburgh, and his wife, Louisa. Her sister was Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Britain’s first female physician, and Rhoda Garrett, the designer, was her cousin.
In April 1867 Millicent married Henry Fawcett, the blind Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and Radical Liberal MP for Brighton. Their only daughter, Philippa, was born a year later.
The Fawcetts’ Cambridge drawing room was a key meeting place for the supporters of women’s education in Cambridge and Millicent herself gave help and shrewd advice both in the early planning and in the growth of Newnham. She urged on philosopher Henry Sidgwick, another of the organisers of early lectures for women, and he risked his own credit in renting a house in which young women attending the lectures could reside. He persuaded Anne Jemima Clough, who had previously run her own school in the Lake District, to take charge of this house.
Demand continued to increase and after moving houses twice, the supporters of the enterprise formed a limited company to raise funds, lease land and put a purpose-built building on it. Newnham Hall opened its doors in 1875, the first building on the site where Newnham still remains.
Fawcett was also active in the campaign for women’s suffrage, an involvement which expanded and dominated her life after her husband’s untimely death from pneumonia in 1886. She played a major role in the formation of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) in 1897 and did her best to prevent rifts in the suffrage campaign threatened by the militancy of the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union. At the outbreak of war in 1914-15 Millicent saw off efforts to take the NUWSS into the international pacifist movement.
She focused on lobbying the Government until the passing of the Representation of the People Act 1918, which gave a limited vote to women over 30 and those with property. Not satisfied, Millicent continued to lobby until the Equal Franchise Act 1928, which gave women the vote on the same terms as men – 62 years after she first started her campaign.
In 1937 Newnham named its newest building Fawcett; and in 1953 the London and National Society for Women’s Service, which worked to improve employment opportunities for women, was re-named the Fawcett Society.
Her daughter Phillippa also deserves a mention, as in 1890, during her time as a student at Newnham, she scored the highest mark of all the candidates for the Mathematical Tripos. She was placed ‘above the Senior Wrangler’ (that is, above the top first) because women were not then eligible for the Cambridge BA degree and therefore could not be classed as Wranglers.
The monument of Millicent Fawcett will be paid for from a £5m fund to celebrate the centenary of women’s suffrage.
With thanks to Dr Gill Sutherland for her biographical information on many of Newnham’s leading figures
Artist Gillian Wearing with a design of the statue.
Photo credit: CAROLINE TEO/GLA/PA