LETTER: Partial autograph letter, to W.T. Stead, editor of Pall Mall Gazette.
Part Autograph Letter Millicent Fawcett to W.T. Stead, editor, Pall Mall Gazette, etc (DNB), campaigned against child prostitution, etc. Fawcett giving a suffragette credo to a known support of women's rights..
2 Gower Street, London W.C.1., 26 Nov. [no year [1885?]. Four pages surviving, missing al least the signature page, black-bordered (husband died 1884),12mo, good condition. She starts by thanking him ambiguously for his "address" (postal or a speech?), which, if postal, suggests this is the beginning of a long acquaintance and correspondence, going on, "... May I frankly say that I should have liked the bit referring to women better if it had been more definite? I do not think the average elector would understand the passage I have marked to mean that you would go absolutely for fair play as between men and women. We want you not only to represent [underlined] the disinherited and unenfranchised, but to enfranchise them and enable them to enter into their inheritance of liberty and freedom. This woman question has become bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh, and I am convinced that at the bottom of the opposition to it, lies a deep-seated contempt of womanhood, a blasphemous notion that women were created in order to minister to the purely animal part of men's nature. The most strenuous opposition almost invariably comes from men of bad life; and it is most powerful in those classes where morality is the lowest. Now it seems to me that one of the best ways of fighting against this notion in proclaim the contrary, definitley and plainly whenever the opportunity offers. The mere assertion of the higher ideal of womanhood does much to dissipate the lower ideal, & I am sure it encourages the [letter terminates, signature at least missing]." Notes: a. The handwriting and adddress point to Fawcett. b.Fawcett hadn't heard of Stead, she claims, until 1885: "I do not think I ever heard his name till everybody heard it in 1885, when all London - and, indeed, all the world - rang with the shameless and cruel traffic for immoral purposes in little children, exposed for the first time in the Pall Mall Gazette. This traffic could have been, and ought to have been, stopped by law; but the Bill dealing adequately with these horrors, though it had been passed more than once through the House of Lords, had been, session after session, talked out, counted out, and blocked out in the House of Commons. It was counted out no more after Mr. Stead carried out his plan of insisting that all the world should know that these devilish things were of common, everyday occurrence in a so-called Christian country."
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