Autograph manuscript speech on suffrage.
FAWCETT (Dame Millicent Garrett), 1847-1929, leader of the constitutional. Autograph manuscript of a speech on the suffrage. Small quarto. pp. 23 (rectos only), circa 4,500 words, with a printed insert of a leaflet on "What Women's Suffrage Means in New Zealand" by Lady Stout. N.D. [1910]
A disciple of John Stuart Mill, Millicent Fawcett long advocated a practical approach to the matter of women's rights. She made her debut as a speaker for the cause of women's suffrage at the first public meeting on the subject held in London on 17 July 1869. She became well-known on the platform and as the "ODNB" points out, "Critics were disarmed by her appearance and manner - demure, slight, graceful, reasonable, a youthful but composed figure with a mass of amber hair and a 'clear, silvery and expressive speaking voice."
The present speech was composed at a time when the women's suffrage movement was riven with divisions between constitutionalists and those who favored a more radical approach. Fawcett's own commitment was explicitly to law and order, although she argued that those who broke the law were provoked into so doing by the government.
In her speech Fawcett opens by saying that she is going to tell why women want the vote, arguing that "the legal subjection of woman to man is wrong and that the laws of justice require equal rights before the law, to free citizens of a free country - be they male or female and that taxation without representation is tyranny (underline six words)." She details some of the advances made by women, gaining the municipal vote for example in 1907, all the result of "constitutional agitation", but in the main matter of the parliamentary vote, women met the "dead weight of indifference in the country." The resulting rise of the militants' approach is charted, Fawcett declaring that "some of their methods were certainly not pretty but then war is never pretty (underline four words)."
At the time of her speech, a second reading of the Parliamentary Franchise (Women) Bill had been carried by a large majority of 110 - "yet the bill has gone no further because the Prime Minister refused to 'give it time.'...I ask you if this is your idea of fair play!" (The failure of the Bill led to the suffragettes abandoning their suspension of their campaign of violence; their subsequent march to the House of Commons led to the widespread police arrests and assaults known as Black Friday.) After outlining and demolishing some of the arguments against women's suffrage, Fawcett reads out part of a speech by Lady Stout of New Zealand where women had been enfranchised for 15 years.
She then returns to the theme of the militants' struggle, arguing that people are beginning to realize that "delicately nurtured women do not go to prison and suffer its attendant horrors again and again for the sake of notoriety or submit to rough handling and abuse for love of excitement." She concludes by urging her audience of women, "not to disassociate yourselves from this movement. It is a truism that a cause is hindered if it is not actively helped. Let us...do something that the women of our generation and the generations yet to come may not crave in vain through any fault of ours, for more life and fuller."
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