Millicent Fawcett was a heroine deserving of a statue | Letters

Rachel Holmes (Opinion, 15 April) does Millicent Fawcett less than justice. Of course Millicent was the daughter of her time and place (born in 1847 to a local businessman in a small coastal town in Suffolk). I spent several years writing a book largely about her (In the Steps of Exceptional Women: The Story of the Fawcett Society) and certainly did not always agree with her, particularly over her attitude to the first world war (she declined to join the brave women who went to the Hague in 1917 in an attempt to stop the war).

But on her fight for suffrage it is impossible to feel anything but intense admiration. Starting in 1866 when she was only 19, and thus too young to actually herself sign the petition for the suffrage amendment to John Start Mill’s reform bill, but for which she resolutely collected signatures, she spent the rest of the century building a movement, speaking in public (although she hated doing this) and endlessly lobbying politicians. She was joined in the early 20th century by what Holmes called the “full-blown, red-blooded” suffragettes of the WSPU, and the Pankhursts, but it is marked that in 1914 Emmeline Pankhurst chose to close the WSPU and devote herself to supporting the war effort. Millicent, also supportive of the war, continued to lobby the new prime minister Lloyd George 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.

When Millicent went home from the House of Lords after the passing of the Act she declared: “I have had extraordinary good luck in having seen the struggle from the beginning.” But it wasn’t good luck. She made it happen through persistence and perseverance. There is no one more deserving to stand in Parliament Square, knocking on the doors of parliament as it were, than Millicent Fawcett.
Dr Jane Grant
London

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