Women’s Suffrage: A Short History of a Great Movement, Essay Example

Introduction

Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (11 June 1847 – 5 August 1929) was an early English feminist, who was heavily involved in the suffragist movement. She was president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and was a respected figure in British politics: Fawcett was appointed the head of the British Government’s investigative commission of British concentration camps created in South Africa during the Boer war. St. Andrew’s University bestowed her with an honorary doctor of laws degree and she also received dame hood. It is also important to note that Fawcett was viewed as a more moderate activist for women’s rights.

Fawcett’s Women’s Suffrage: A Short History of a Great Movement is a historical account of the women’s suffrage movement, however, with a clear political intent: the book’s main thesis can be viewed as an attempt to justify suffrage and women’s rights, such that a case for female emancipation in the political and social realm is advanced through appeals to various significant historical texts and practices that the author feels highlight the underlying ethical justness of the movement.

Summary

Fawcett’s account can be viewed as a certain heroicization of the women’s movement, almost in the style of a hagiography. She emphasizes the struggle of women to realize political emancipation, understanding the efforts of various activists as heroic attempts to oppose a patriarchal society based on a fundamentally ethically flawed foundation, where society excludes women from political and thus social participation. For Fawcett, therefore, the women’s movement is a necessary ethical corrective to the morally bankrupt society that realizes an inequality between the sexes.

Fawcett, however, presents this ethical narrative within the context of a meticulous historical account of the movement. She attempts to re-trace the key figures and events in the movement, from the actions of Mary Wollstonecraft onwards, in order to provide a real historical setting for her ethical arguments.

In other words, Fawcett’s reliance on empirical historical data combined with an admiration for the figures of the movement – while also recounting the absurdity of the opposition she faced – aims to provide a justification for suffrage.

Critique

As mentioned, Fawcett’s account can be considered to a certain extent hagiographic: she attempts to communicate to the reader the underlying heroism of those involved in the suffrage movement. Hence, she creates a protagonist-antagonist style of narrative, almost like a novel, in which the reader is compelled to side with the women activists because of their bravery, while also showing the villainy of those that opposed them. The organization of the book, however, follows a clear historical trajectory, as Fawcett attempts to detail the efforts of the movement in a logical manner. Her style is thus carefully balanced between a clear admiration for the suffrage movement and the distance of the historian, who stresses facts.

In this regard, it is precisely such an emphasis on data that makes Fawcett’s book compelling. Although it is clear that she is biased in her history, she is conscious of her subjectivity in composing the account. Accordingly, she carefully balances her narrative with historical data and statistics, for example, using tables to present how Liberals, Conservatives, Labour and Nationalists respectively voted for the Women’s Suffrage Bill. It is such a careful retelling of the history that helps make Fawcett’s account undoubtedly more objective in approach, thus strengthening her overall aim in the composition of the book. Fawcett clearly admires the movement of which she is a part; this, however, is supported by clear historical information.

Fawcett’s work thus bears an undeniable importance. It provides a clear, historically objectively argued account of the women’s suffrage movement. In this regard, the value of the text on a historical level is clear, insofar as it offers a thorough account of this movement, as supported with historical evidence: Fawcett’s historiography is rigorous, thus advancing the reader’s knowledge of the subject. At the same time, the book is important exactly because of Fawcett’s subjectivity: her clear admiration for the participants of the movement is not a drawback, but rather stresses the fact that history is not merely composed of artifacts – it is composed of real persons and subjects, passionate in their endeavors. In this regard, the book succeeds as a historical account, but also lucidly depicts what it means to be resolutely committed to a particular ethical position.

Conclusion

Fawcett makes her case for the justness of the women’s suffrage movement with her clear account of historical obstacles that were overcome and a committed passion to the ethical righteousness of the key figures in the emancipation process. Accordingly, Fawcett effectively synthesizes both the objective-historical and the personal-subjective accounts of this movement, in order to provide a detailed and vid account of this history. Fawcett breathes life into her subject matter, but combines this subjectivity with a rigorous historical approach based on a simultaneous commitment to the facts.