A petition has been launched, calling for a statue of a suffragette in Parliament Square. In a letter published in The Daily Telegraph on 16 May, Alistair Lexden argued that there is a much stronger candidate—a woman who rejected the methods used by the suffragettes.
SIR--The proposal to put up the first statue of a woman in Parliament Square (report, May 12) is to be warmly applauded.
However, the person who most deserves this honour is not one of the militant Pankhursts, but Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett-- a founder of Newnham College, Cambridge and leader of the 50,000-strong law-abiding women suffragists.
As a result of determined peaceful agitation by this group, a Women’s Suffrage Bill secured the backing of a majority of MPs in 1897. It was reintroduced several times over the next 20 years with ever increasing backbench support, but the tactics of the roughly 5, 000 suffragettes made it easier for Herbert Asquith and his fellow Liberal ministers to resist the passage of the Bill into law before the First World War. By the time that success was finally achieved in 1918, the suffragettes had fizzled out.
It is time that proper public recognition was given to Dame Millicent, whose unremitting work over nearly 50 years makes her the real heroine of the long campaign.
Lord Lexden
London SW1