Millicent Fawcett was a suffragist, not a suffragette
I WAS interested in the article titled “Women’s rights fighter honoured” (The Herald, April 25) and the accompanying picture.
Millicent Garrett Fawcett was the leader of the Suffragist movement in Britain. This was separate and different from the later Suffragette movement headed by Emily Pankhurst.
I believe a statue of the latter will soon find its way to the same square in London.
Millicent was a feminist, intellectual, political leader, unionist and writer, primarily known as a campaigner for women to have the vote.
She published a number of books, essays, articles and lectures on mostly political matters.
She concentrated much of her energy to improve women’s opportunities for higher education and in 1875 co-founded Newnham College, the first women’s college at Cambridge.
She led a commission of women sent by the British government to South Africa in July 1901 to investigate the conditions in the concentration camps towards the end of the Boer War.
Her report corroborated what campaigner Emily Hobhouse had said about the atrocious conditions.
The late improvements by the government turned out to be too little and too late, but she continued to fight for the civil rights of the Uitlanders.
She was granted an honorary LLD by the University of St Andrew’s in 1899 and was appointed a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) in 1925.
The Fawcett Society, named in her honour, is still active today.
Her younger sister, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, became the first woman doctor in Britain and a hospital named after her remains in London until this day.
Elaine Hopewell, Port Elizabeth