Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Selected Writings

The first scholarly appraisal of suffragette Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett in more than 30 years. “Courage calls to courage everywhere” is the best-known phrase associated with Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), the leading UK suffragist and women’s rights campaigner of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But what is the source of her quote, and what is its context? This book reproduces Fawcett’s essential speeches, pamphlets, and newspaper columns to tell the story of her dynamic contribution to public life. Thirty-five texts and twenty-two images are contextualized and linked to contemporary news coverage as well as to historical and literary references. These speeches, articles, artworks, and photographs cover both the advances and the defeats in the campaign for women’s votes. They also demonstrate a variety of the topics and causes Fawcett pursued: the provision of education for women, feminist history, a love of literature (and Fawcett’s own attempt at fiction), purity and temperance, the campaign against the employment of children, the British Army’s approach to the South African War, the Unionist cause against Home Rule for Ireland, and the role of suffrage organizations during World War I. This volume offers a rich, intertextual web of literary works, preferred reading material, organizations, contacts, friends, and sometimes enemies, that reveals Fawcett the individual throughout sixty-one years of campaigning.