page_title: Millicent Fawcett
section_title: Commemoration
hierarchical_section_title: Millicent Fawcett / Commemoration
caption_attribution_description: The statue - unveiled at last.
context_page_description: Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett GBE was an English political leader, writer and feminist icon. Known for campaigning for women's suffrage through legislative change, she led Britain's largest women's rights organisation, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies from 1897 until 1919. She would write: "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 also tried to improve women's chances of higher education, serving as a governor of Bedford College, London, and a co-founder of Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1875. In 2018, 100 years after the passing of the Representation of the People Act, Fawcett became the first woman to be commemorated with a statue in Parliament Square.
context_section_description: In 2018, 100 years after the passing of the Representation of the People Act, for which Fawcett had successfully campaigned and which granted limited franchise, she became the first woman to be commemorated with a statue in Parliament Square, by the sculptor Gillian Wearing. This followed a campaign led by Caroline Criado Perez, in which over 84,000 online signatures were garnered.
  Fawcett's statue holds a banner quoting from a speech she gave in 1920, after Emily Davison's death during the 1913 Epsom Derby: "Courage calls to courage everywhere". At the unveiling of the statue Theresa May said: "I would not be standing here today as Prime Minister, no female MPs would have taken their seats in Parliament, none of us would have the rights we now enjoy, were it not for one truly great woman: Dame Millicent Garret [sic] Fawcett."
caption: Statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square
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