Millicent Fawcett

End of chapter 9 Recording by Bill Borst Chapter 10 of John Stuart Mill, His Life and Works This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.

John Stuart Mill, His Life and Works His Influence as a Practical Politician By Millicent Garrett Fawcett Everyone must be familiar with the often expressed opinion that, as a practical politician, Mr. Mill's career was essentially a failure.

It has been said a thousand times that the principal result of his brief representation of Westminster was to furnish an additional proof, if one were wanted, that a philosopher is totally incapable of exercising any useful influence in the direction of practical politics.

It is proposed briefly to examine this opinion, though it may indeed with truth be urged that the present time is not calculated to make the examination an impartial one.

John Stuart Mill, His Life and Works.

His Influence as a Practical Politician by Millicent Garrett Fawcett.

Everyone must be familiar with the often expressed opinion that as a practical politician Mr. Mill's career was essentially a failure.

It has been said a thousand times that the principal result of his brief representation of Westminster was to furnish an additional proof, if one were wanted, that a philosopher is totally incapable of exercising any useful influence in the direction of practical politics.

Wanted women to get the vote.

Women had been asking for decades, Millicent Fawcett, you know, suffragists.

And the government was like, nah.

So she was like, oh, you're not going to give us the vote? We're going to take that vote.

Today, we untangle the fight that finally let women vote in Britain.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, a relatively restrained cohort of middle-class women, most prominently led by Millicent Fawcett, had already been lobbying Parliament through petitions, lectures, and peaceful demonstrations for several decades under the banner of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, which was founded in 1872 as a more organized counterpart to earlier suffrage societies.

This constitutional approach sought incremental legal reform within existing political institutions, arguing that women deserved representation not by upheaval, but by gradual extension of the franchise already granted only to property-owning men after the Reform Act 1832, and it had successfully kept the issue alive in parliamentary debates, even if it initially failed to secure any voting rights.

By the mid-1890s, the NUSS had amassed a broad membership base across class and region, with Fawcett employing petitions, lobbying, and public lectures as tools which demonstrated early on that sustained pressure could force politicians to confront the gender gap in representation while keeping political tensions relatively contained.

During this period, the NUSS deliberately avoided direct confrontation with the government, focusing instead on legal petitions that highlighted the contradictions inherent in a system where women could be called upon for military service work in factories or as nurses during wars, yet were barred from participating in the democratic process that determined war policy.

Fawcett's own diaries show she was acutely aware of how the law framed women's exclusion, not simply as a matter of political philosophy, but an institutional necessity which the movement sought to dismantle through education, moral persuasion, and persistent parliamentary engagement.

Shortly after the constitutional movement began to plateau and public sentiment toward incremental change waned, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter, Christabel, answered by founding the Women's Social and Political Union in 1903.

This organization deliberately broke away from any political party affiliation, embraced a more confrontational ethos, and famously declared that deeds, not words, should drive progress.

It seemed like an almost secondary story to those watching the parliamentary battle, yet it was equally disruptive.

Suffragettes like Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett understood that if Parliament had the power to override the Lords, it could also be used to extend that power to all adults, not just men.

Their tactics ranged from polite lobbying to outright civil disobedience.

They smashed windows in Parliament Square, heckled cabinet ministers, and endured hunger strikes, each act aimed at forcing the government to listen.