Millicent Garrett Fawcett was born in Aldeburgh, England. At 12, she left her family to attend a boarding school in London. There, she met the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who introduced her to women’s rights activists, including Henry Fawcett, a Member of Parliament who was 14 years older than her, and in 1867 the couple got married.
After the wedding, she worked as her husband’s secretary and started her writing career. She published articles and essays discussing women’s issues and her beliefs on equal opportunities for women and specifically women’s education.
At 22, Fawcett attended her first suffrage movement meeting and soon joined the London Suffrage Committee. In the following year, she gave a speech at the first public pro-suffrage meeting, after which she became one of the leading speakers of the movement, giving lectures on the importance of women voting rights, mostly in schools for girls, women’s colleges, and adults education centers.
In 1870, 23 years old Fawcett published the textbook Political Economy for Beginners, which became an immediate success, running through ten editions, translated into several languages, and aspired two novels. Two years later, she and her husband published a collection of essays titled Essays and Lectures on Social and Political Subjects. In 1875, she co-founded a college for women at the University of Cambridge, Newnham Hall, and served as its council.
After her husband died in 1884, Fawcett sold her houses and moved in with her sister at Gower Street, Bloomsbury. She took a year off from public speaking. On her return to the Central Committee for Women’s Suffrage, they asked her to administer the joint meetings of the suffrage societies that merged into the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) in 1897. In 1907, she was appointed president of the NUWSS. Her campaign’s approach to achieving women’s right to vote was moderate and peaceful, in contrast to the militant position of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), led by Emmeline Pankhurst. She gave lectures, wrote articles and pamphlets.
During WW1, Fawcett harnessed the NUWSS activities for the war efforts, supporting the services of hospitals in training camps in Scotland and Russia. The organization continued to campaign for women’s suffrage by emphasizing the contributions of women during wartime. Fawcett’s plan worked, mainly due to the movement’s actions during the war, the Representation of the People Act passed in 1918, giving women limited voting rights.
Shortly after, when she was 72, Fawcett retired from her position as the president of the NUWSS, dedicating her time to writing. She also continued to launch and support other human rights campaigns, such as equal divorce rights, criminalizing incest, raising the age of consent, women’s access to the legal profession, stopping the white slave trade, and regulating prostitution in India. One of her most notable campaigns was against the Contagious Diseases Act, which required prostitutes to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases and imprisoned if positive, while the clients who infected the women were not required to get tested. She argued that the double standards of this and similar laws would continue to exist until women would be part of the decision-making process.
Fawcett died at the age of 82 after dedicating her life to giving women a voice and promoting their rights, paving the way for generations of activist, feminist women.
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