The Press Saturday, August 15, 1931. A Great Englishwoman.

Press, Volume LXVII, Issue 20316, 15 August 1931, Page 14

The Press Saturday, August 15, 1931. A Great Englishwoman.

Millicent Garrett Fawcett chose her biographer well. Mrs Oliver Strachey was more than an intimate friend and devoted fellow-worker; and thai long, , lime-lit life was safe with one who united been vision, fluent expression, and the eclectic discrimination that lifts biography from a literary exercise to a specialised art. More is here —in 3lillicott GavYctt ~Euu'cclt, by Ray Strachey (John Murray)—than frank, limpid, yet dignified diction, and aptly translated wit and wisdom. When it is recognised that the two-and-sixty working years of Mrs Kaw-c-ett's long life covered the period whert modern England was made; when it is known that she touched every movement, economic, academic, industrial, and social, along' that great advance (and seldom but -for good), the value of Mrs 'Str&ehey's work will be .yet move manifest. The first call to biography is to be real. In this book the path of a great and a very real woman is traced from the cradle to the grave. Every touch of family affection, of young romance, of time-defying' enthusiasm is there, giving warmth and light to the full perspective of change and advance in which she bore a, leading part. The good stars met in her horoscope, first of all when she was born midway in a family of ten, the children of Newsome Garrett, a well-to-do merchant of Aldeburgh, in Suffolk. There, in the Saxon stronghold of East Anglia, herself the type of Saxon womanhood, she drew from her bold, laughing, boisterous father public spirit and individuality, from her gentle and pious mother the sense of eternal, un- [ deviating' rightness; from her teacher, ! Robert Browning's aunt, the love of j fundamental study that set her feet I on a rock throughout life. Mrs I Strachey shows us Millicent Garrett riding, playing, and pacing about the peaceful fields of old Ea.st .Anglia, 3'cading and dreaming already of being n. political power to help women —her elder sister, Elizabeth, was then storming' the door of a medical college—ana denouncing Abraham Lincoln's murderer in tones that "put love" once and for ever on Harry Faweett, blind for eight years, but yet both an M.P. and Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge. Professor Fawcetfc's wedding gift to his.bride was the Open Sesame to that world of polemics and politics she desired. Married in .1867, they made two simple homes., one in Cambridge, one in London, and filled them "with the happiness of good friends and great labour. When they left these retreats, it was to go on those titanic walks which, partly for economy, partly for love of the exercise, were their choice of diversion. Two months after the marriage Mill presented the first suffrage petition at Westminster, Mrs Faweett listening behind the stuffy grille. Of the first women's society, which had its frail beginning then, she was the youngest recruit, and was to die its president. Within two years, Newnham, which the Fawcetts served well, became 'the centi-e of women's academic emancipation in England. But there was no end to their collaboration. They achieved in it an equilibrium and interdependence almost unexampled, unless by the Brownings in one way and the Webbs in another. Millicent was eyes, pen-liand, searcher of facts for the blind man. 'Thus it was that he encouraged her to write her first book, a beginner's manual of political economy. A conjoint book of essays introduced her to Macmillans and the public. A novel followed, but her greater books—biographies, travel, and suffrage summaries—were not yet. Suddenly the thunderbolt, fell. Late in 1884 Henry Faweett died. Saying little, she gathered her strength for independent york. At once.she found it in the cause championed by Stead in 1885, and child protection claimed her voice and energy from then on. But now, in her prime, she reaffirmed her Aldeburgh dreams. She put by the offer to. be mistress of Girton; education waa not all. She'was whitehot on women's economic ;dnd industrial wrongs, but she would, not mortgage herself to any one branch ,of feminism. She would pull no strings for the Liberal Party, and though »free of Party trammels as. of creed, she drew nearest at last to Labour. She saw the political powerlessness of women, and how; it diminished their importance in' men's' eyes; and the vote and nothing but the vote was her objective. She ■ nursed the little suffrage societies of the . dying century into the compact National Union which numbered five hundred societies before triumph came. But what a road they had to tread! First there came the Boer War. Millicent Faweett saw only the justice of Britain's cause. When Emily Hobhouse-shocked Europe with her charges, the War Government sent six women experts to report on the' concentration camps, with Mrs Faweett for leader, They came, "saw, burnt miles of red tape, and forced reforms there and then, conquering even Kitchener in the process; for scorning " charm," Mrs Faweett charmed the men of her time with wit arid reason. In the dark years of the deepening suffrage struggle, from 1906 to 1914, while the enthusiasm of many . turned to militant frenzy, she herself exercised only a stronger patience and strengthened with • it lier network of constitutional reform societies. What the end would have been, none can guess; but the Great War came and blew" an* old order to ■'matchwood. Though she loathed war. she used b6i full influence to suspend the suffrage campaign and to unite women in the service of the country; and when the War was over the battle was won. For more than ten years after that, she enjoyed the late sunshine of her life. .. She was . honoured; as Damq Millicent Faweett. She had already long worn the doctor's gown and hood that St. Andrew's University gave her

>a for her public service. Slie saw the first women'M.P.'s at Westminster, she hailed with delight the calling of Miss Bondfield to Cabinet rank, but sought no office herself. With her daughter Philippa and her sister Agnes she spent her many years of widowhood at Ko. 2 Gower street; and there Millicent Garrett Faweett died in August, 3929. This book is the history in brief of a revolution, the women's revolution of England. .Tt is a moving picture. Men. women, aud great events figure here as they touched Mrs Faweett, or as she touched them, curiously controverting some preconceptions of our time. It can be said that at twenty Mrs Faweett found English women in chains; at eighty-two she saw them fi'ee, from hut to Senate; and .the story of lici- life is the story of a cardinal share in the working of this momentous change—a change, indeed, in the destiny of England. i '