Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere

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Winterson writes with a marvellous voice, as if chatting with you across the table. Her sense of humour and passion come through in her cadence and repetition of phrases. She uses cool logic and and speaks with equipoise regarding both sexes, which gives her writing authority, observing, ‘and we do need parity, because women are one half of the population’: She was also, finally, a great human rights and civil rights campaigner. She once said of herself: "I cannot say I became a suffragist, I always was one." It is fitting that her statue will capture her in her prime, a woman in her 50s – the age at which women so often say they become invisible to society – gazing proudly and determinedly across at parliament. But the plinth will also include the images of 59 other suffrage campaigners, women and men, suffragists and suffragettes. As Winterson says she "was thinking of calling it Women's Equality: The Horrible History but 'history' implies the past, and suggests that the work is done." Pankhurst’s speech at the end is well worth reading and is also a call to action and revolt and it ends thus: Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Selected writingsinvites the reader to delve into the life and passions of this great suffragist leader. Millicent Fawcett paved the way for women to take their place in public life, that’s why I’m so proud that in 2018, her sculpture was unveiled in London, becoming Parliament Square’s first-ever statue of a woman. The statue depicts Millicent holding a banner bearing the powerful quote, “Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere”. This book explores important aspects of the rich and too-often untold history of women’s rights, including the origins of that inspirational quote.'

When prejudice and bad science are no longer in the way, women always prove themselves as capable as men.”At that point, Fawcett was merely trying to explain why Davison’s death – which she described as a deliberately “sensational” act of self-sacrifice – made headlines around the world, argues Terras. Courage is not a synonym of fearless! One needs to put courage to work in the direction of admitting and overcoming fear. Almost 90 years after her death, Millicent Fawcett is making history again as she becomes the first woman to be commemorated with a statue in Parliament Square. It's also the first statue in the square designed by a woman: Gillian Wearing. Some have expressed surprise that it is Fawcett, a law-abiding suffragist, who is being honoured instead of one of her better known fellow campaigners. But Millicent Fawcett was indeed a leader of the movement and dedicated 62 years of her life to campaigning for the vote for women. From the #MeToo movement she makes what seems like an odd swerve into discussing AI because computer science/Silicon Valley is very male-dominated and she wants to be sure women have a respected role in the future. My reaction to this was the same as to Beard’s book and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists: you can’t (and I don’t) dispute what the author has to say; for the most part the points are compelling and well made. Yet I don’t necessarily feel that I learned anything, or saw something familiar in a new way.

One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Winterson was named as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Writers" in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council. This is a vital collection of the vital speeches of a vital person. You need to read this to understand the history of Millicent Fawcett and if you don’t understand the history of Millicent Fawcett you don’t understand one of the most important developments in modern civilisation.' Terras and Crawford have brought together a powerful and accessible collection of contributions from Millicent Garrett Fawcett, whose speeches and writings gave a political voice to the women of her generation. This book allows us to follow the footsteps of a momentous - albeit often overlooked - suffragist, who blazed the trail we now walk' Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere should be on everyone’s shelf. The struggle for gender equality is as important to keep in the memory as the atrocities of slavery, racial cleansings, and the rise of fascism. In forty or one hundred years Courage will stand as a time capsule of where we were now to compare to where we will be. Right now, it is an important call for humans to work together to end sexism.

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Terras decided to write the book, which will be published on an open access basis by UCL Press on 9 June, because she could not find the speech Fawcett supposedly made in 1913 and realised that no collection of Fawcett’s speeches and writings existed. We started with Alison sharing the history of the college, and referring to the author Virginia Woolf, who gave a lecture at Newnham and Girton in 1928. This lecture would become her celebrated essay ‘A room of one’s own’, published in 1929, in which Woolf argued that young women need the same space to sit and contemplate that young male students have traditionally had. I gave this gem to my partner as a Christmas present. He, being a long-time Winterson fan, was suitably excited and somehow limited his reading as to make this book last two sittings. Wearing won the Turner Prize in 1997 and was awarded an OBE in 2011. She is represented by Maureen Paley, London, Tanya Bonakdar, New York and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.