Florence Fenwick Miller was born in
Stepney, the eldest daughter of John Miller, a merchant sea-captain, and of Eleanor Estabrook Miller, daughter of a railway engineer. Privately educated as a child, she read for a medical degree at the
University of Edinburgh from 1871, in the year following the
Edinburgh Seven, the first females to be admitted to the course. Like the Seven, she was unable to pursue clinical practise and Edinburgh declined to award a degree to her. Edinburgh University had decided against awarding medical degrees to women. In 1873 she took a
midwifery certificate at the
Ladies' Medical College in London. Despite her training, Miller quickly moved away from medical practice towards wider spheres. She quickly established herself as a lecturer on literary and social reform topics, debating in London at the
Sunday Lecture Society, appearing before the
London Dialectical Society (which was engaged in investigating the phenomenon of
Spiritualism; James Edmunds, the founder of the Ladies' Medical College was a committee member); and giving talks throughout the country. She was an early and vocal advocate of
women's suffrage and, later, in 1889, was one of the founders, with
Emmeline Pankhurst, of the
Women's Franchise League. Miller also engaged herself more directly in social reform. She was elected as a Liberal to the Hackney division of the
London School Board in 1876 at the comparatively young age of 22, and held office from 1877–1885.
Frederick Rogers, a fellow board member, describes her: Like her predecessor
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Fenewick Miller served whilst getting married and went further to also go through pregnancy and child birth as an elected member. She spoke widely on women's suffrage, later in her career acting as an international delegate, notably visiting Chicago in 1893 for the
World's Columbian Exposition and the
World's Congress of Representative Women; and again in 1902 as part of the
International Council of Women. Her international links brought her into association with leading American suffragists. notes that Ford contributed little to the family and suggests that, in part, the volume of Miller's output was related to her straitened economic circumstances. Miller continued to use her own name after the marriage (Frederick Rogers noting that she changed it from Miss Fenwick Miller to Mrs. Fenwick Miller The home secretary instituted an inquiry, and the school was ordered to be closed. In June 1882,
Thomas Scrutton, a member of the school board and chairman of its industrial schools sub-committee, brought an action for libel against Taylor. Miller died on 24 April 1935 in
Hove, Sussex. A biography,
Florence Fenwick Miller: Victorian Feminist, Journalist and Educator written by Rosemary T. Van Arsdel, was published by
Ashgate Publishing in 2001. ==Works==