Millicent Garrett Fawcett

Reproduction of the original: Women's Suffrage by Millicent Garrett Fawcett

"The Women's Victory" is a biography by Millicent Garrett Dame Fawcett (1847-1929). She was an English politician, writer, and feminist. She campaigned for women's suffrage by legal change and from 1897–to 1919 led Britain's largest women's rights association, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). In 2018, a century after the Representation of the People Act, she was the first woman honored by a statue in Parliament Square. A movement to fight for women's right to vote in the United Kingdom finally succeeded through laws in 1918 and 1928. It became a national movement in the Victorian era.

Their Fair Share identifies and contextualises many previously unknown critical writings by a selection of well-known turn-of-the-century women. It reveals the networks behind an influential journal like the Athenaeum and presents a more shaded assessment of its position in the field of cultural production, in the period 1870-1920. The Athenaeum (1828-1921) has often been presented as a monolithic institution offering its readers a fairly conservative, male oriented appreciation of a wide variety of contemporary publications. On the basis of archival and biographical material this book presents an entirely new analysis of the reviewing policy of this weekly from 1870, when it came into the hands of the politician Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, up to and including 1919-1920 when John Middleton Murry became its editor. Dilke, and his editor Norman MacColl, are here revealed to have been committed feminists who enlisted some of the most influential women of their time as critics for their journal. The book looks more specifically at the contributions by, a.o., Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Emilia Dilke, Jane Harrison and Augusta Webster.

Fawcett was only 19 years old when she launched a petition for women's suffrage and 22 when she began her political career, much of which was accomplished through her writing. In this book, she narrates her life story in a thoughtful and poignant memoir that shares her life views and the path society led her on that shaped her to be the strong woman she is remembered as.