MILLICENT FAWCETT
(Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett)
Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett GBE was an English politician, writer and feminist. She campaigned for women's suffrage through legal change and from 1897 to 1919 led Britain's largest women's rights association, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). She explained, "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." Fawcett tried to broaden women's chances of higher education, serving as a governor of Bedford College, London (now Royal Holloway) and co-founding Newnham College, Cambridge in 1875. In 2018, 100 years after the Representation of the People Act, she became the first woman honoured by a statue in Parliament Square.