About Millicent Fawcett
Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett was an English political activist and writer. She campaigned for women's suffrage by legal change and in 1897–1919 led Britain's largest women's rights association, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), explaining, "I cannot say I became a suffragist. I always was one, from the time I was old enough to think at all about the principles of Representative Government." She tried to broaden women's chances of higher education, as a governor of Bedford College, London and co-founding Newnham College, Cambridge in 1871. In 2018, a century after the Representation of the People Act, she was the first woman honoured by a statue in Parliament Square. In 1868 Fawcett joined the London Suffrage Committee, and in 1869 spoke at the first public pro-suffrage meeting held in London. In 1890 Philippa became the first woman to obtain top score in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos exams. Enid Moberly Bell's biography of social reformer Octavia Hill records that Hill had "set her heart on securing" the Fawcetts' home, The Lawn, in Lambeth "as a park for Lambeth".
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