When the suffrage leader takes her place in Parliament Square it will put right a part of our history we have got wrong
On 24 April 2018 a statue was unveiled of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett. I’d first canvassed the idea of such a monument in The Times in 2015, and then helped persuade the Government to site it in Parliament Square and finance it. This column was written after the statue got the go-ahead.
‘So here’s my proposal. In 2018, the centenary of votes for women, why not have a statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square?’
At around the time that I finished my column with those words, in October 2015, the feminist leader Caroline Criado-Perez went on a run through central London.
She’d finished her successful campaign to get Jane Austen on the £10 note and wasn’t looking to start another one. But then, as she ran past Parliament Square, she noticed something. There were eleven statues commemorating significant figures in our political history. And they were all of men. Right there outside Parliament. All men.
She realised, even before she finished her run, that she had to do something. How we tell our national story matters. Who we choose to celebrate matters. In a democracy everyone has to feel that they can make a difference and in making this clear, symbols matter.
So before long we united our efforts and, together with Sam Smethers of the Fawcett Society, set out to make the case for a statue of Britain’s greatest suffrage leader, Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett, in Parliament Square. And so it came to pass. The mayor of London offered his support and this weekend the Prime Minister and the communities secretary announced government backing. Next year, there Mrs Fawcett will be. I believe that this statue will be a political landmark.
Let me tell you why. This year it is the 140th anniversary of the day when someone didn’t steal Millicent Fawcett’s purse. Sure, the thief took it from her at Waterloo station. He was caught and charged. It’s just that Millicent Fawcett’s purse did not belong to Millicent Fawcett.
She may have been a bestselling author, carrying money she earned herself, in a wallet she bought herself, but legally it didn’t belong to her. She was a married woman and her property was all her husband’s. The thief was charged with stealing the property of Henry Fawcett. Millicent commented: ‘I felt as if I had been charged with theft myself.’
What sort of law was it that meant that her purse and even her writing didn’t belong to her? In her husband’s will, he had to bequeath her the copyright of her own book. What sort of law was it? A law passed by men, for men. Millicent Fawcett devoted her life to righting this wrong. She saw the struggle for women’s votes through from its first moments to its final success. She helped John Stuart Mill collect signatures for his famous petition in 1866, when she was, aged 19, still deemed too young to sign it herself. And she was still a leader of the movement in 1928 when, the year before her death, equal votes for women was finally conceded.
Mrs Fawcett saw with great clarity what Martin Luther King also saw: that no political victory was as important as winning the vote. All her other campaigns – against sexual abuse and white slavery, for university degrees for women, for equal pay, against oppressive divorce laws, for property rights – could be advanced if first she won the great campaign for the vote.
Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters are remembered for their campaign of law breaking that caught the imagination, publicised the cause, but ultimately probably delayed votes for women as male politicians used their violence as an excuse for delay.
It was Millicent Fawcett who carried on when the suffragette campaign fizzled out, as it was bound to. She always regarded the Pankhursts as her allies, but their violence as an error. A constitutional campaign of protest would be larger, more durable and more successful. And she was right.
So the Fawcett statue will be a celebration of one of the greatest democratic campaigns ever fought. It will mark the progress made by the supreme cause of women’s equality, and point the way to further progress. It will tell the story of one of the most important social changes in human history, the modern recognition after thousands of years that men and women must have the same rights. It will put right a part of our history we have been getting wrong, and tell the story of the suffrage campaign correctly for the first time. It will tell schoolchildren and students, tourists and citizens the story of a hero they have never heard of before.
A woman who was an economic liberal but who understood that it was a faulty liberalism that failed to assign individual rights to all of its citizens. How could one have a modern market economy if married women could not own their own property? How could one have a modern society if people like her sister Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify as a doctor, were not regarded as proper citizens?
A woman who never gave up and never gave in. It was Millicent Fawcett who persuaded Sir Hubert Parry to provide music for Blake’s poem ‘Jerusalem’ to serve as the women voters’ hymn: ‘I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green and pleasant land.’
If Millicent Fawcett takes her rightful place in our national story, then so do the many thousands of women who won the vote with her, legally, peacefully but with determination and imagination. And every girl and every woman who wants to improve the life of their fellow citizens can see the possibilities more clearly as they make their way in public life.
In Parliament Square we will also be erecting a monument that says to all who visit Britain and all who want to live here that we have decided that equality for women is one of the great British values, and the insistence upon it one of the things that – however imperfect we are at it – makes us British.
The statue will also stand as a reminder of the value of politics and of its nature.
There’s an oddity about the people whose lives we mark in Parliament Square: they clashed with each other. Churchill with Gandhi and Gandhi with Smuts, Peel with Disraeli and Derby with Palmerston. Millicent Fawcett diverged from Disraeli, and battled with Churchill and (for some of the time) Lloyd George. Politics is like that; there’s no one right answer. She saw that and coped with it and showed what politics can do. When people say politics doesn’t matter we can say: here is Millicent Fawcett. She gave her life for the vote.