How many suffragettes were force fed

Apart from one week in November , the WSPU suspended militant action for that year, until 21 November , in order to allow the various Conciliation Bills for Women Suffrage to be presented to parliament. But political stalemate continued since the Liberals remained divided on the issue, as did the Tory opposition. Given the structure of party politics, the bills were doomed. A narrow bill, based on property qualification, would bring propertied women onto the electoral role and benefit the Tories; a wider one that included non-propertied women would bring in working class wage earners for the Liberals.

The vicious cycle of hunger striking and forcible feeding returned. Prison life was especially difficult for mothers with young children, like Myra Sadd Brown. Denied writing materials, she wrote with a blunted pencil on dark brown toilet paper a poignant message to them. A widely circulated WSPU poster of a large ginger cat bearing his bloodied teeth — the limp, injured body of the small suffragette in his mouth — vividly portrayed the brutality of it all.

By the end of December , Emmeline Pankhurst herself, always in the thick of the action, had also added a sleep strike to her refusal to eat and drink water. She was released, in an emaciated condition, after just four days.

While the authorities never dared forcibly feed her, for fear they might have a martyr on their hands, her daughter Sylvia did not fare so well. For Sylvia, the sense of degradation endured when being forcibly fed was worse than the pain of sore and bleeding gums, with bits of loose jagged flesh, or the agony of coughing up the tube three or four times before it was successfully inserted.

Such harrowing personal accounts, published in the suffrage press, helped to strengthen the bond of comradeship and purpose among the WSPU membership. The forcibly fed suffragette knew she was not alone. The operation that had been intended to silence her became a platform from which she could speak about the injustices to her sex.

Under such a repressive state policy, many of the women feared not only for their health but their sanity. Kitty Marion experienced such pain during the times she was forcibly fed that she thought she was going mad and begged the doctor to give her some poison. The situation could not continue. Increasing numbers of doctors, as well as members of the general public, were speaking out against forcible feeding, saying it contravened the rules of medical practice and that those doctors performing the operation were punishing, rather than treating, their patients.

Even The Times, well known for its anti-suffragism, was suggesting a review of policy. By mid-July , a few women, such as Fanny Parker in Perth prison, were writing of how they were fed by the rectum and vagina. The outbreak of war the following month enabled both the WSPU and the authorities to retreat. Emmeline Pankhurst called a temporary suspension of militancy while the government granted an amnesty to all suffrage prisoners.

This militancy was divisive. The suffragettes and their supporters argued that acts of violence kept the cause in the minds of politicians and the public. But more moderate campaigners thought public opinion would turn: the suffragettes were accused of hindering the cause they believed in so strongly.

Still, thousands clamoured to join them. But contrary to some of the glossier representations that abound today, not all of these women were white, affluent sorts who could afford to forgo jobs to campaign. Although many of those able to dedicate time and money were well-off, the actions of non-white and working women were also key. Not least that of the Asian women who organised and marched with the WSPU, but also the trade-union activists in the mill towns of the north and the socialist suffragettes of east London.

These women all worked together, side by side. But their activism soon expanded to more extreme measures and eventually evolved to include rowdy demonstrations, arson and window-smashing campaigns. These actions polarised public opinion. Their demonstrations were often met with violence from male bystanders who would throw stones and rotten eggs. One of the most shocking cases is of suffragette Helen Archdale, who was married to an army officer and imprisoned several times for her campaigning.

It was not uncommon for children to be wrenched from their suffragette mothers because their husbands or other family members disagreed with their actions. And because of the legal framework at the time, once these children were taken away, the devastated women often had no legal claim to their sons and daughters, some of them losing their children forever.

They were accused of conspiracy during the struggle for votes for women. More often than not, suffragettes were fined for their more militant acts, but refused to pay, a show of defiance that landed them in the local prisons. From to the beginning of WWI, almost 1, suffragettes were imprisoned — which sometimes lost them their jobs and, for the higher-class women, certainly cost them status.

She said not only would she never have me in her house again, but several times that she would never speak to me again. But perhaps the harshest brutalities came when these women were behind bars. Many imprisoned suffragettes went on hunger strike to protest against the terrible conditions they were kept in: they contended they should be treated as political prisoners, not as criminals.

Their hunger strikes were as much a part of their campaign as their actions on the streets. Radical pacifist women routinely used hunger strikes as a form of protest. An African American women, Eroseanna Robinson, exemplifies this trend. She was a member of the Peacemakers, a radical pacifist organization that practiced civil disobedience and tax refusal and took to hunger strikes when in jail.

In , when Robinson was arrested for not paying her taxes, she practiced total noncompliance and refused to submit to what she perceived as undemocratic and coercive power. During her year of imprisonment, Robinson refused all nourishment and suffered painful force-feedings.

Pacifists and civil rights activists who engaged in hunger strikes were directly indebted to the suffragists who had preceded them. These activists used their bodies to subvert the prison system. Today, prisoners and those fighting for racial justice are attempting much the same to bring attention and a measure of justice to the suffering world.

Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. Suffragists march from New York to Washington D. AP Photo. Wolcott , University at Buffalo. Author Victoria W. Wolcott Professor of History, University at Buffalo.