Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847-1929) was a British feminist, who led the nonviolent campaign for votes for women.

At the turn of the century, Millicent Garrett Fawcett was Britain's most important leader in the fight for women's suffrage. Although people today often identify the militant Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters with the struggle, Fawcett contributed more than anyone else to British women obtaining the right to vote in parliamentary elections. Valuing rational thought and her own privacy, she rejected the cult of personality that surrounded more dramatic and emotional leaders.

Changing times make Fawcett appear old-fashioned, an unchanging adherent of the ideology of individual rights popular in the mid-19th century who was surprisingly conventional in many of her opinions. She seems frozen in the late 1860s, opposing free schools as undermining a healthy spirit of independence, defending the severe sexual code that prevailed among the middle classes during...