Millicent Fawcett: The story behind the suffragette statue in Parliament Square

I am standing in the middle of a hot and noisy East End foundry, with two of the nation’s most prominent feminists. One is the Mayor of London, the other died almost 90 years ago.

When she is unveiled on Tuesday, Millicent Fawcett will be the first statue of a woman in Parliament Square. She will also be the last - the public space is, in City Hall speak, at ‘monument saturation’. Where 11 men, including Churchill, Ghandi, Disraeli and Mandela already stand outside our nation’s seat of democracy, one woman just managed to squeak in.

The bronze, designed by Turner-prize winning artist Gillian Wearing, was given the green light following an open letter published in The Telegraph in May 2016, compiled by activist Caroline Criado-Perez (she who put Jane Austen on the new ￡10 note), and a petition signed by almost 85,000 people.

‘Hi Claire, I’m organising an open letter to the new London Mayor asking if they will pledge to have a statue of a suffragette erected in Parliament Square by 2018 to mark the centenary,” she emailed me back then. “Would you be interested in publishing it?”

Yes, I most certainly would. 'I'm totally on board and think this is very important,' went my eager reply.

Almost two years later to the day - in a dream come true - I was invited to the foundry to see the finishing touches being put to the giant bronze, which involved thousands of man, and woman, hours; from sifting through 400 pairs of boots to find the perfect pair to making sure Fawcett’s skirt was closed-in at the base to stop tourists taking ‘upskirt’ pictures with selfie-sticks (yes, really). 

And today, I will be standing alongside Sadiq Khan as he makes good on his first commitment as Mayor and unveils the bronze of Fawcett; 100 years on from the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which gave some women in Britain the right to vote for the first time.

The statue ended up, not as a suffragette as we first discussed, but a suffragist leader - one of those lesser-known, more peaceful freedom fighters who preferred to lobby behind the scenes rather than chain themselves to railings. Fawcett was perhaps the most dedicated of their number and remained at the forefront of the movement for some 50 years.

She also gave her name to women’s rights organisation the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for women’s rights and, to mark the statues unveiling, this week published a Sex and Power Index.

The results make for grim reading. Simply: men still dominate in every area of power in our society. FTSE 100 CEOs? Just six per cent are women. Supreme court justices? 16.7 per cent. Cabinet ministers? 26 per cent.

Oh, and statues of women? 2.7 per cent.

The Fawcett Society is calling for quotas to address this imbalance - but I can’t help but wonder whether Millicent and her fellow campaigners would have agreed.

There is some evidence that they work, of course: when Labour used all-women shortlists in the 1997 general election, a record number of female MPs were elected (remember ‘Blair’s babes?’).

But I worry that this masks a higher truth. As Criado-Perez succinctly put it on Twitter this week: ‘equality on paper is not the same as equality in real life’.

Clearly, we desperately need to ramp up the number of women in positions of power in Britain. Dr Helen Pankhurst, the great-granddaughter of suffragette leader Emmeline, has repeatedly written that she thinks her ancestors would still be fighting today.

But positive discrimination? Quotas above merit? That, to me, is not the road to true equality. It fails to address deep-rooted gender bias and it risks alienating men.

Initiatives such as the 30% Club - which has worked to get more women onto boards - cleverly used targets, rather than quotas: employing a slowly-slowly approach to call out those with poor gender diversity, but then working to change the culture - rather than propelling women into “golden skirt” positions, based on their XX chromosomes, rather than their CVs.

If there was one thing both the suffragettes and suffragists wanted, it was to take everyone with them. They weren’t fighting for special treatment, or dominance over men. They simply wanted to be treated as equals.

And, amid the moral panic, the most level-headed of men understood this. There were more than 100 prominent male suffrage supporters and a number are pictured around the statue’s plinth, which features 59 striking laser-etched images of Fawcett’s fellow freedom fighters.

The effort to honour them all through a single monument has been a labour of love and brought together a group of people for a common purpose. This is not a memorial to one woman but a mass movement - and we should not lose sight of that today.