Formidable. Frosty. Forthright. Just a few of the words that have been applied to Millicent Garrett Fawcett by her biographers and those who knew her. Even at this distance in time, and although being physically tiny in stature, she looms large among the campaigning feminists of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
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| Mrs Fawcett, 1890 Photograph by W. and D. Downey National Portrait Gallery UK |
Whether she was the best choice to head the Ladies Committee to investigate the concentration camps in South Africa is debatable, especially in the middle of a war in which opinions were sharply divided. Millicent was a dyed-in-the-wool Imperialist with little tolerance of anyone with opposing views. Like many of that era, she believed Britain had a right to rule the world. It would not go well for any of her fellow Committee members who questioned that idea.
In her memoir, "What I Remember", Millicent recalled it was in July 1901 that she received a visit from Edith Lyttleton, the wife of the sportsman/politician Alfred Lyttleton, asking her if she would be prepared to travel at short notice to South Africa to inspect the state of the camps there. Edith had became a founding member of the Empire friendship organisation, the Victoria League.
Millicent commented that Alfred "was admired, beloved and trusted by all parties and all sections of the country as few men have ever been" - rare praise for a politician - and he was most concerned about what was happening to the children in particular in the camps.
Edith informed Millicent that she would be joined by other women who were experts in health and child welfare. Millicent didn't hesitate but, when discussing her duties with the Secretary of War, St John Brodrick, she was vehement that she would not speak to Emily Hobhouse at all.
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| Emily Hobhouse angloboerwar.com |
While it is understandable that Millicent might prefer to see things for herself, she was already biased against Emily. Apparently the knives had been out previously between the two women over another matter when Emily supported some tenants in a building owned by the Fawcett family.
Added to this, although it was Emily’s exposure of what was happening in the camps that initiated the Committee, she had suffered from bad press, with words like "excitability" and "hysterical" attached to her, compared to Millicent's personality with its cool detachment and control.
Emily's behaviour suggested she was more sympathetic to the Boer cause than she should have been, and she had been deported from the Cape for her activities. No wonder Millicent would have nothing to do with her.
Millicent left England on 22 July 1901, accompanied by Lady Alice Knox, wife of General Sir William Knox then on service in South Africa and Miss Lucy Deane, a trained Inspector of Factories and an expert in infant welfare. Also on the voyage were Millicent's daughter Philippa, Lucy Deane's sister and Lady Alice's maid. The three other ladies to make up the Committee were already in South Africa.
While on board ship, the women made plans and also learned from a fellow passenger a few words of the Cape Dutch Taal, although one can't imagine Millicent being that keen on learning what many English people disparagingly considered a pidgin or inferior language to the true Dutch of the Netherlands.
When they arrived at Cape Town, the ladies were accommodated in the grand Mount Nelson Hotel before meeting up with the two female doctors, Ella Scarlett and Jane Waterston and the nurse, Katherine Brereton. Millicent's memoir described the violent, hostile factions that were evident in the city and the many other charitable and relief committees who had differing viewpoints as to what needed to be done in the camps. There were many "cooks" stirring the broth and the ladies were discouraged from calling at Government House in case of trouble.
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| Mount Nelson Hotel Still one of the world's grandest hotels |
Emily Hobhouse had done much of her travel and investigation of the camps on her own, paying her own way, struggling with red tape permission, using primitive modes of transport and often going without food, water or a bath or shelter. She had experienced the deprivations of war at first-hand and wasn't impressed to learn that the Ladies Committee undertook their travels in a special train supplied by the Cape Government. Millicent described this as follows:
(Details of the progress can be followed through Millicent's memoir that is available online, see Chapter XVII. More of it will feature in further posts on this topic.)
More biographical background on Millicent:-
Millicent Garrett Fawcett was born in Suffolk in 1847, one of eleven children of a wealthy industrialist Newson Garrett who encouraged his children in liberalism, to be outgoing and have enquiring minds. Millicent developed a passion for self-education, literature, the arts and there’s no doubt her elder sister, Elizabeth Garret Anderson, who would become Britain’s first female doctor, was a major influence on her.
"Each of us had what was a second-class compartment fitted with sleeping accommodation. There was a large saloon for our meals, with a travelling kitchen attached, and we also had a Portuguese cook named Gomez, and the services of a young Tommy named Collins, lent to us by General Knox, Lady Knox’s husband. We looked all round the arrangements made for our comfort and security with interest, curiosity, and gratitude, for these railway carriages were to be our home for about five months."
(Details of the progress can be followed through Millicent's memoir that is available online, see Chapter XVII. More of it will feature in further posts on this topic.)
More biographical background on Millicent:-
Millicent Garrett Fawcett was born in Suffolk in 1847, one of eleven children of a wealthy industrialist Newson Garrett who encouraged his children in liberalism, to be outgoing and have enquiring minds. Millicent developed a passion for self-education, literature, the arts and there’s no doubt her elder sister, Elizabeth Garret Anderson, who would become Britain’s first female doctor, was a major influence on her.
At eighteen, she met the blind Cambridge professor and Reformist, Henry Fawcett, 14 years her senior, and they married in 1867. Her only child, Philippa, destined to be a prominent mathematician, was born a year later. They were a radical couple for the time and their successful partnership was strengthened by shared interests in outdoor pursuits, women’s education and suffrage.
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| Henry and Millicent by Ford Madox Brown, 1872 National Portrait Gallery UK |
Millicent developed her own writing and speaking career, specialising in politics and economics as well as women’s issues. It was rare for a woman to give a speech in public and, as still happens today, she had her critics than she must be neglecting her child while involved in such work.
When Henry died suddenly in 1884, Millicent was bereft and she and Philippa moved in with another sister Agnes Garrett, who was a pioneering businesswoman in her own right, but she continued on the same path. She became the leading force in women’s suffrage and a frequent lecturer at girls’ schools and women colleges.
She also espoused many other causes including moral rearmament and backed campaigns connected to prostitution and the sexual exploitation of women and children, but her puritanism and inflexible attitude towards private morality were often at odds with her support for public reforms. She was appalled by the idea of free love out of marriage, yet ahead of her time in advocating divorce by consent.
The rest of Millicent’s life as regards her activities during World War I and the advancement of women has been well-documented. She was bestowed with many honorary doctorates, and received a Damehood in 1925. She died in 1929.
Some of her liberal Victorian attitudes may seem at odds with her feminism and modern women will find her a challenge to evaluate. This closing paragraph from her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography seems to summarise her well.
"In contrast to the Pankhursts, she shrank from hero-worshippers and did not seek to be a charismatic leader. As a speaker she was persuasive rather than inspirational; she was not a good committee chairman. Victorian values lingered on in her sexual, social, and imperial politics. She took pride in her ‘Englishness’ and—not only in the context of war—had some of the defects that implies. Her statesmanlike qualities were nevertheless crucial in guiding the British women's movement. The range of her contributions to public and intellectual life in an exceptionally long and influential career has only recently been recognized. Once stereotyped as a narrowly bourgeois liberal feminist, she is now appreciated as a woman who also addressed the exploitation of working women and child abuse. She argued—while never adopting the language of ‘sex war’—for votes for women on the grounds that they had distinctive insights to offer and interests to defend. Changing fashions and values in politics and feminism, and her status as an emblem of the women's movement, have complicated the task of her biographers—and will continue to do so until it becomes possible to represent eminent feminists sympathetically as creatures of, as well as rebels against, their times."
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| Millicent Fawcett, c. 1910 Photograph by Olive Edis National Portrait Gallery UK |
Personal library sources include:
"The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War, A Social History" by Elizabeth Van Heyningen
"Rebel English Woman, The Remarkable Life of Emily Hobhouse" by Elsabe Brits
"The Compassionate Englishwoman" by Robert Eales
"The Boer War" by Thomas Pakenham
"Those Bloody Women, Three Heroines of the Boer War" by Brian Roberts
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