DEATH ANNOUNCED OF DAME MILLICENT FAWCETT

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18830, 6 August 1929, Page 5

DEATH ANNOUNCED OF DAME MILLICENT FAWCETT

(United Press Assn.—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright. LONDON, August 4. The death is announced of Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett, at the age of eighty-two years.—Australian Press Association.

Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett is widely known as a biographical and political writer, and as a worker for women’s suffrage and for other political changes. She was bom at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, on June 11, 1847, the daughter of Mr Newson Garrett. In 1567 she married Henry Fawcett, the economist, who became Postmaster* General. A remarkable feature of Fawcett’s work was that for many years it was carried on under the handicap of blindness. His wife gave much assistance in his writing, and herself wrote at that time such works as “Political Economy For Beginners’* and “Tales in Political Economy/' She was created G.B.E. in 1925. All her life Mrs Fawcett had, in a single-minded way, striven to secure for women .the best education possible. The first meeting called together with the object of founding Newnham College was held in Mrs Fawcett’s draw-ing-room at Cambridge, in IS7O. She was the leader of the reasonable section of the women suffrage movement. She preferred to help by influence, by tone, and by personality rather than by violence. To her husband, the blind Postmaster-General, she was from the first not only his hands and eves, but she was also his hope and his light. A great day in Mrs Fawcett's life was in June, 1890, w r hen her only child, Philippa, became Senior Wrangler, and thereby was at once invested with an unrivalled halo of distinction.