Fawcett, Millicent Garrett.

Women’s Suffrage: A Short History of a Great Movement. By...[the] President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.

London: T.C. & E. Jack, [1912]. First edition. Date from publisher’s stamp (1/12). With a list of other important suffrage texts, including works by John Stuart Mill, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (p. 90). A very good or better copy of a suffrage memoir by the leader of the constitutional women’s suffrage movement in Britain. Publisher’s olive-green cloth stamped in black. Binding is clean and attractive. Small octavo. 94, [2 ads] pp. Item #16986

Millicent Garrett Fawcett, LL.D. (1847 – 1929), was one of the most important figures in the women’s suffrage movement both in Britain and across the world. She supported a wide variety of causes including equal education, equal pay, ending the exploitation of working women, and creating legislation against child marriage and sex trafficking. Early in her career, Fawcett founded Newnham College, a women’s college at Cambridge, and supported early bids to open Cambridge degrees to women. She was also a supporter of adult education who served as a governor of Bedford College, a teacher training school; in 1899, the University of St. Andrews awarded her an honorary LL.D.

Oxford DNB: Fawcett was a “committee member of the London National Society for Woman (later Women’s) Suffrage from its foundation in 1867…[she] made her debutas a speaker for the cause at the first public suffrage meeting held in London on 17 July 1869 and in a lecture in March 1870 to a large audience at the town hall in Brighton…She became well known as a speaker and lecturer—on political and academic subjects as well as women’s issues—in the 1870s, when women rarely ventured onto public platforms. She continued to speak and write for women’s suffrage and, after the death of Lydia Becker in 1890, emerged as the movement’s leader, presiding from 1893 over a committee…which led to the foundation of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) in 1897… “The NUWSS, reorganized under [Fawcett’s] presidency in 1907, and much the largest of the suffrage societies with more than 50,000 members by 1913, was committed to constitutional methods…Her connections with higher education helped to recruit the university educated women who were prominent in the leadership of the movement and to give it credibility among educated men: in 1908 she became the first woman to address the Oxford Union.”.

Price: $1,250.00