Jane Purvis: Suffragettes in Prison
SummaryIn this seminal article, Jane Purvis argues that - for different reasons - historians in the past have under-estimated the hardships that Suffragettes suffered in prison. She shows how prison conditions were designed to de-humanise them and destroy their morale, and how particularly force-feeding was administered in such a way as to make it as awful as possible. She reveals how, for the Suffragettes, it was a physical and spiritual violation akin to rape.
Historiography Conditions Horror-stories Degradation and Violation
from Jane Purvis, 'The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes', in Women's History Review (1995)
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LinksYou can learn more about force feeding by following these links:
Case Studies
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Historiography of Suffragettes in PrisonFrom
1905 until the outbreak of the First World
War in August 1914 about 1000 women were sent to prison because of their
suffrage activities, most of these being members of the WSPU... While these prison ‘experiences’ have
not been striking and forcible feeding....
Early histories of the suffrage movement present a more sympathetic
picture of prison life than many subsequent accounts.
Metcalfe, for example, writing in 1917, speaks of the “scenes of
horror which had taken place in Holloway and other prisons ... in the
unavailing effort to govern women against their consent”.
However, it is the history written by the constitutional
suffragist, Ray Strachey, a member of the NUWSS and hostile to the WSPU,
that became the influential text. Strachey blames the WSPU women
themselves for the treatment they received...
Unwilling to acknowledge the hunger strike as a political tool, Strachey
comments how the suffragettes, once in prison, ceased to be militant and
created a number women,
deliberately seeking their own torture was eagerly seized upon by male
historians who sought to ridicule the WSPU and its politics.
George Dangerfield’s The
Strange Death of Liberal England, first
published in 1935, discusses the suffragette movement as... a form of “pre-war lesbianism” of “daring
ladies”... Dangerfield too presents the suffragettes as fanatical
women who chose the hardships of prison life in a sado-masochistic way
... “How can one avoid the thought”, he questions,
“that they sought these sufferings with an enraptured, a positively
unhealthy pleasure?” If the victim does not resist,
“forcible feeding is no more than extremely unpleasant. But the
Thus the scene of the drama is set and the props are changed only with
slight variations. Roger Fulford in 1957... mocked their prison
experiences, claiming that solitary confinement in prison was “not
always unwelcome to adults”. Furthermore, although
“forcible feeding is a disgusting topic ... it was not dangerous ...
[It] is of course a familiar form of treatment in
This
dominant narrative was not always challenged in the ‘new’ feminist
women’s history that was written after the advent of the Second Wave
of feminism in
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Conditions in PrisonAlthough
prison conditions might vary, depending on the year in which the
sentence was served and upon local variations and personnel, common
admission procedures stripped the individual of
self-identification. On entry to Holloway in 1908, for
example, the women were immediately called to silence by the wardresses,
locked in reception cells, and then sent to the doctor before they were
ordered to undress. Once they had been searched to make
sure they concealed nothing, their own clothes were stored by the
authorities and details requested about name, address, age, religion and
profession and whether she could read, write and sew. A bath
was then taken. Although each bather was separated from the
next by a partition, low doors enabled wardresses to overlook such a
private bodily function. Once dried, the prisoner was told
to dress herself from clothes lying in piles on the floor.
Second-class prisoners wore green serge dresses, third-class
brown. All had white caps, blue and white check aprons, and
one big blue and white handkerchief a week. Every garment
was branded in several places, black on light things, white on dark,
with a broad arrow. Underclothing was coarse and
ill-fitting; shoes were heavy and clumsy and rarely in pairs while the
black thick and shapeless stockings, with red stripes going round the
legs, had no garters or suspenders to keep them up. On the
way to her cell, the prisoner was given sheets for the bed, a toothbrush
(if she asked for it), a Bible, prayer book and hymn book, a small book
on ‘Fresh Air and Cleanliness’ and a tract entitled ‘The Narrow
Way’. Once in the cell, which might be about 9 feet high
and either about 13 feet by 7 feet or 10 feet by 6 feet (Figure 2), she
was given a yellow badge bearing the number
of her cell and the letter and number of its block in the prison.
From
now until her release, the inmate would be known only by her cell’s
number.
Prison regulations imposed a certain routine on daily life.
At this period in Holloway, for example, a waking up bell rang about
5.30, one and three-quarter hours before a breakfast consisting of a
pint of sweet tea, a small brown loaf and two ounces of butter (which
had to last all day) was handed to the prisoner in her cell.
Before the daily half an hour of chapel the prisoner had to empty her
slops, scrub the floor and three planks that formed
her bedstead, fold up the bedclothes into a roll and stow them away with
the mattress and pillow, and polish with soap and bath-brick the tin
utensils of her cell. ‘Inspection’ each day ensured that the task
was done in the required manner. In chapel and at the daily
hour of exercise in a gravelled yard, talking was not
permitted. Lunch was at or less in the Second Division were not entitled to receive any visits from friends nor to have any correspondence with them.
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Horror-storiesHunger
striking and force feeding were acts committed by, and on, individuals
in their own cells. Whether force fed by a cup, tube through
the nostril (the most common method) or tube down the throat into the
stomach (the most painful), the individual suffragette struggled on her
own and often feared damage to the mind or body. Kitty embroideress, who had already experienced several nervous breakdowns, was not so fortunate. During a period of prolonged hunger striking and forcible feeding three times a day she feared, “I should go mad ... Old distressing symptoms have re-appeared. I have frightful dreams and am struggling with mad people half the night”. Her fears became true when she “lost her reason in prison” and spent the rest of her life in and out of asylums, with Lady Constance Lytton, an upper-middle-class WSPU worker, maintaining her.
The
forcible feeding of the disabled May Billinghurst in Holloway in January
1913 brought a particular wave of revulsion since she was “small,
frail, and ha[d] been a cripple all her life”. Paralysed
as a child and confined to a tricycle for mobility, she told how the
three
Age, too, would be another possible line of difference. The three grandmothers, Mrs Heward, Mrs Boyd and Mrs Aldham, in Holloway in 1912, as well as the 78 year-old Mrs Brackenbury, may have found prison life especially tiring. And older women generally may have been more prone to accidents. A tall suffragette, “by no means young”, tripped and fell in a frosty exercise yard one morning and broke several bones – although this was not discovered until the day before her sentence expired
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Degradation and ViolationFor
many of these women, the worst feature of prison life was the
‘public’ violation of their bodies when being forcibly fed.
Helen
Gordon Liddle hated the lack of privacy when enduring the pain of forced
feeding. Nell Hall spoke of the “frightful indignity” of
it all. For Sylvia Pankhurst, the sense of degradation
endured was worse than the pain of sore and bleeding gums, with bits of
loose jagged flesh, the agony of coughing up the tube three or four
times before it was successfully inserted, the bruising of her shoulders
and the aching of her back. Sometimes, when the struggle was
over, or even in the heat of it, she felt as though she was broken up
into many different selves, of which one, aloof and calm, surveyed all
the misery, and one, ruthless and unswerving, forced the weak, shrinking
body to its ordeal. Although the word ‘rape’ is not used in the
personal accounts of force fed victims, the instrumental invasion of the
body, accompanied by overpowering physical force, great suffering and
humiliation was akin to it, especially so for women fed through the
rectum or vagina. 'Janet Arthur’, later identified
as Fanny Parker, in
Thursday morning, 16th July ... the three wardresses appeared again. One of them said that if I did not resist, she would send the others away and do what she had come to do as gently and as decently as possible. I consented. This was another attempt to feed me by the rectum, and was done in a cruel way, causing me great pain. She returned some time later and said she had ‘something else’ to do. I took it to be another attempt to feed me in the same way, but it proved to be a grosser and more indecent outrage, which could have been done for no other purpose than torture. It was followed by soreness, which lasted for several days.
When
released, a medical examination revealed swelling and rawness in the
genital region. The knowledge that new tubes were not always
available and that used tubes may have been previously inflicted on
diseased persons and the mentally ill or be dirty inside the tube, issues
that had been openly discussed in Votes
for Women,
undoubtedly added to the feelings of abuse, dirtiness and indecency that
the women felt.
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Degradation and Violation |