The centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which extended the right to vote in parliamentary elections to a limited number of women, has given Alistair Lexden several opportunities to draw attention to the most important person in the long campaign for women’s suffrage, Dame Millicent Fawcett. He did so once more in a letter published in The Spectator on 17 February in response to a review of two books on the campaign by Professor Jane Ridley of Buckingham University.
Sir: Jane Ridley (‘Women on the warpath’, Books, 10 February) claims that Millicent Fawcett and her suffragists had ‘got nowhere’ by the time the militant suffragettes came on the scene in 1903. In fact Fawcett’s law-abiding movement with a membership of some 50,000 (far more than the quarrelling Pankhursts ever managed) had won round the majority of MPs by 1897. Between that date and final victory 20 years later, there were always more MPs in favour of women’s suffrage than against it, though the gap between them shrank during the years of the suffragette campaign. Its violence has to be high on the list of factors that delayed victory.
Ridley repeats the claim that Emily Davison ‘jumped out in front of the King’s horse at the Derby’. The coroner at her inquest concluded that ‘it was evident that Miss Davison did not make specifically for the King’s horse, but her intention was merely to disturb or upset the race’. She had positioned herself on a bend where she could hear, but not see, the horses approaching.
Ridley feels that Dame Millicent should not be alone in having a statue; Mrs Pankhurst should have one too. She already does. It stands, much admired, just beyond Parliament’s Victoria Tower where it was unveiled by Stanley Baldwin in 1930, two years after he had faced down intense opposition from Churchill and the Tory right to give women the vote on the same terms as men. Mrs Pankhurst died just after the legislation had passed, as the proud Tory candidate for Whitechapel.
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords