Dame Millicent Fawcett

Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett, GBE (1847–1929) was a politician, writer and feminist, who campaigned for women’s suffrage through legal change and was not a militant. From 1897 to 1919, she led the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), which was Britain’s largest women’s rights association. The statue portrays Fawcett holding a banner reading ‘COURAGE/CALLS TO/ COURAGE/EVERYWHERE’. It was commissioned as part of the year centenary celebrations of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which gave some women over the age of thirty, who met certain property requirements, the right to vote.

This is the first statue of a woman to be erected in Parliament Square.

Location: Parliament Square, London SW1.