Literature for the People
Part One: Millicent Garrett Fawcett
I am thrilled that I can now share the cover of this book, coming out next year. Top left you can see poor consumptive Daniel Macmillan, while the more robust, affluent Alexander is bottom right. Between them these brothers created the publishing powerhouse which launched numerous literary careers, and promoted many others. Several of their particular stars are featured on the cover, and I have already written about Charles Kingsley and TH Huxley:
And about Tom Hughes:
So this week it’s the turn of one of the two women on the cover: Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Millicent is well-known as a leading exponent of women’s rights in the British Suffrage Movement: she is commemorated with a statue on Parliament Square, emblazoned with her famous exhortation ‘Courage calls to courage everywhere’, which referenced the death of Emily Wilding Davison at the 1913 Derby (Emily threw herself in front of the King’s horse as a protest).
Millicent was born in 1847, one of the youngest of a family of ten children, and her father was a wealthy businessman and Gladstonian Liberal, Newson Garrett. Her elder sister Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was the first woman to qualify in England as a physician and surgeon. Educated at a boarding school in Blackheath, as a teenager Millicent was taken to hear FD Maurice preach, and rapidly became part of the wider circle of his Christian Socialist supporters. By 1866 she had also become familiar with the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill and his wife Harriet Taylor, and became a campaigner for the right of women to have the vote on the same terms as men. The following year she married one of Alexander Macmillan’s great friends, the Radical Liberal MP and campaigner Henry Fawcett. Henry had been a brilliant Cambridge undergraduate when Macmillan met him, and persisted in his studies of political economy (what we now call economics) despite being blinded in a shooting accident. When he married he was a Professor in Cambridge as well as a Member of Parliament for Brighton, so the twenty-year old Millicent found herself running two households, as well as helping her husband with his work. Nevertheless she found time to study and write for the suffrage cause.
In her memoirs, Millicent described Alexander Macmillan as one of her most valued friends. It was he who had encouraged her to start writing, and he published her first article in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1868: ‘The Education of Women of the Middle and Upper Classes’. Her argument was that women should be able to take University degrees and that more professions should be made open to them. She was paid seven pounds for the article, which she donated towards John Stuart Mill’s election expenses that year. This article marked the start of her life as a public campaigner, and the fact that it was written and published in the same year that she gave birth to her only child, Philippa, suggests that she would never let domestic duties deflect her from her mission in life.
The following year, 1869, she began a career of speaking in public, and in 1870 Macmillan published her book Political Economy for Beginners, which ran through seven editions over the next twenty years. ‘Political Economy’ she wrote ‘ is the science which investigates the nature of wealth, and the laws which govern its Production, Exchange and Distribution.’ It was aimed at encouraging the teaching of economics to schoolchildren, and the chapters ended with questions and puzzles. Each edition was carefully revised to account for new theories as they had arisen, and facts and figures were taken from another Macmillan publication, The Statesman’s Year Book. The chapter descriptions suggest that this was no book for dummies:
In 1872, husband and wife co-authored Essays and Lectures on Social and Political Subjects, which included Millicent’s lecture ‘Why Women Require the Suffrage’. This is so beautifully written that it is hard to choose just one quotation from it, but here is a flavour:
You will observe that women have to contend against all the objections which were raised against an extension of the suffrage to working men, and others beside, which greatly add to the complication of the subject. For instance, women are told they are too ignorant, too impulsive, too imperfectly educated to use the suffrage with discretion; it is hinted that they will be more open to bribery than other electors; it is also said they are too numerous, and if they had the suffrage they would have everything their own way. Besides all these arguments, which we heard so often applied to working men, women are told in the same breath that they do have everything their own way now, and that they cannot improve their position in any respect; that they are angels, too good and gentle and pure to be burdened with the coarse, rough work of politics. Their exclusion from the political arena is not to be considered as a disability, but as a privilege. A privilege—yes, such a privilege that the only other people who are permitted to share it are minors, lunatics, felons, and idiots.
Over the next ten years, Millicent continued to campaign for women’s rights, and was one of the founders of Newnham College for women in Cambridge. Henry died in 1884, and for a while she withdrew from public life, but then came back stronger and more vocal than ever, taking over the leadership of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. By 1905 this had more than 50,000 members across the country, making it much the largest organisation of its kind, although it had less publicity than the law-breaking WSPU led by the Pankhursts. Throughout a long career Millicent led campaigns on many issues that concerned women and children, such as the property rights of married women, the highly-discriminatory Contagious Diseases Act, the white ‘slave trade’, to curb child abuse by raising the age of consent, to criminalise incest and to end cruelty to children within the family.
Her life and contribution was recognised before her death in 1929: in 1925 she was made a Dame of the British Empire. But it may be that her proudest moment came through the success in 1890 of her very clever daughter. A Newnham College student recorded in her diary: ‘
The great event of the year was Philippa Garrett Fawcett's achievement in the Mathematical Tripos. For the first time a woman has been placed above the Senior Wrangler. The excitement in the Senate House when the lists were read was unparalleled. The deafening cheers of the throng of undergraduates redoubled as Miss Fawcett left the Senate House by the side of the Principal. On her arrival at the College she was enthusiastically greeted by a crowd of fellow-students, and carried in triumph into Clough Hall. Flowers, letters, and telegrams poured in upon her throughout the day. The College was profusely decorated with flags. In the evening the whole College dined in Clough Hall. After dinner toasts were proposed: the healths drunk were those of the Principal, Miss Fawcett, her Coach (Mr Hobson) and Senior and Junior Optimes. At 9.30 p.m. the College gardens were illuminated, and a bonfire was lighted on the hockey-ground, round which Miss Fawcett was three times carried amid shouts of triumph and strains of "For she's a jolly good fellow.
Millicent never forgot the publisher who had first given her a pulpit from which to preach. Her fondness for Alexander Macmillan shines through her memoir: ‘On one occasion, after a great talk on all things in heaven and earth, Mr Macmillan, who had the Scot’s turn for metaphysics and philosophy as well as the Scot’s eye for the main chance, exclaimed, “I often ask myself, Why am I here?” whereupon my husband at once rejoined “Why, to publish Barnard Smith’s arithmetic, of course.” This friendly chaff Mr Macmillan took in very good part. He was a real friend to both of us.’
Next time I will write about another woman who first found herself in print through the enthusiasm and encouragement of Alexander Macmillan: the poet Christina Rossetti.
Excellent piece, Sarah! Very nice to discover you here.
Great post, am looking forward to reading the next one now.