Tessa Blackstone | Millicent Garrett Fawcett: The Fight for Votes for Women
Thu 24 Apr 2025 | 6:00pm - 7:00pm
Labour member of the House of Lords and former minister for education, Tessa Blackstone joins us to share how she came to write her definitive new biography of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the undaunted campaigner who dedicated her life to securing the right to vote for women. She led the suffragists, who were distinct from the more well-known suffragettes because they campaigned within the law and disapproved of violence. But Tessa struggled to find a recent biography of this impressive woman and so began her detailed research into uncovering Millicent’s life story.
Come and hear what Tessa has uncovered about this extraordinary activist, campaigner and co-founder of Newnham College, who changed Britain’s political landscape forever.
In conversation with Helen McCarthy
Venue: Newnham College
Duration: 1 hour
In partnership with
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Author Biography
Tessa Blackstone is a Labour member of the House of Lords and a former minister, first in education and then in the arts. She was an academic social scientist at the London School of Economics, headed Birkbeck College and was the vice-chancellor of the University of Greenwich. She has been the chair of many organisations, including the boards of Great Ormond Street Hospital and the British Library. She lives in London and, for nearly a decade, occupied 2 Gower Street, where Millicent Garrett Fawcett lived for over forty years.
Chair Biography
Helen McCarthy is Professor of Modern and Contemporary British History at the University of Cambridge and author of three books, most recently, Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood (Bloomsbury, 2020), which was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize in 2021.
