Book Launch: Millicent Garrett Fawcett Selected Writings

A joint CDCS and genderEd online event.

In conversation with Professor Fiona Mackay (University of Edinburgh School of Political Science), Professor Melissa Terras (Edinburgh College of Art) and Elizabeth Crawford (independent Suffrage Historian) will discuss their new edited collection: Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Selected Writings (UCL Press, 2022).

Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847-1929) has once again been recognised as an important figure in modern feminist culture, her statue in Parliament Square unveiled in 2018 to celebrate 100 years of some women in the UK becoming entitled to the parliamentary vote. The statue bears a placard declaring ‘Courage calls to courage everywhere’, a phrase which has become the most famous aphorism attributed to this leading UK suffragist and campaigner of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But what is the source of the quote, and what is its context?

Join us as we celebrate the launch of a new book which provides access to Fawcett’s essential speeches, pamphlets and newspaper columns, telling the story of her dynamic contribution to public life, in her own words. 35 speeches and articles, and 22 artworks and photographs, cover both the advances and the defeats in the campaign for women’s votes. They also demonstrate the variety of topics and causes Fawcett supported: the provision of education for women; feminist history; a love of literature (and Fawcett’s own attempt at fiction); purity and temperance; the campaign against employment of children; the British Army’s approach to the South African War; the Unionist cause against Home Rule for Ireland; and the role of suffrage organisations during World War I.

In this online book launch for Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Selected Writings, the editors Terras and Crawford will report on how relevant Fawcett’s voice is still, today, while explaining the process in pulling together such an ambitious edited volume. The relationship of the digital to the archival will be shown to be crucial when undertaking this act of feminist interpretation and exposition.

Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Selected Writings will be available for free download in open access from UCL Press from 9th June 2022: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/161045

Speaker Biographies

Melissa Terras is Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage in Edinburgh College of Art, at the University of Edinburgh, UK, leading digital aspects of research as Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture and Society, and Director of research for the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Her research interest is the digitisation of cultural heritage including advanced digitisation techniques, usage of large-scale digitisation, and the mining and analysis of digitised content.

Elizabeth Crawford is an independent researcher and author of a number of books on the women’s suffrage movement – including ‘The Women’s Suffrage Movement: a reference guide’, ‘Campaigning for the Vote: Kate Parry Frye’s Suffrage Diary’, and ‘Art and Suffrage: a biographical dictionary of suffrage artists’. She is also the owner of 'Woman and Her Sphere', a business specialising in selling antiquarian books, pamphlets, postcards and ephemera by and about women.

Fiona Mackay is Professor of Politics in the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Former Dean and Head of the School of Social and Political Science, Mackay was founder of GenderEd, the University’s interdisciplinary hub for gender and sexuality studies. Her research interests include gender and political representation, feminist institutionalism, gender and institutional change, and gender and public policy.

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[Image Description: Graphic mashup using Canva. Image of Millicent Garrett Fawcett from the National Portrait Gallery by Olive Edis, 1910. Used with permission (Academic License) from the NPG.]