EP 04 - The Secret History of the Suffragettes

The Secret History of the Suffragettes

- Episode 04 -

Hunger strikes and force feeding

DOWNLOAD

LISTEN

The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wednesday 16 March 2022

Hunger strikes and force-feeding LISTEN

Suffragette being force-fed in prison 1912

Mostly poorer women went to prison and were force-fed

In this stand-alone podcast we look at the terrible risks taken by women suffragettes and their brutal force-feeding in prison, and discover that there was a growing divide between the original northern working class activists who were taking the risks and the polite London ladies in silks and satins who funded Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s society lifestyle.

And we ask what the Pankhurst WSPU (Women's Social and Political Union) intended when it changed its motto from ‘we demand the Parliamentary vote for women on the same terms as it is or may be granted to men’ to ‘tax-paying women are entitled to the Parliamentary vote.’ If that was what happened, not a single woman in paid employment would have qualified for a vote. Except perhaps a few self-employed lady doctors.

Here was an organisation that was campaigning only to get votes for rich women, and was happily collecting tens of thousands of pounds from the well-to-do of the home counties. But it maintained its public profile – its appeal to those smart ladies in their drawing rooms – by sending mostly poorer women to prison where – as the WSPU knew perfectly well - they would be brutally treated and force fed.

Episode 4 Hunger strikes and Force-feeding on Apple podcast here

Episode 4 Hunger strikes and Force-feeding on Spotify here

Episode 4 Hunger strikes and Force-feeding on Soundcloud here

With photos & read more - all episodes on our website here

Pank-a-Squith boardgame launched as a fund-raiser in WSPU colours (Asquith being the name of the Prime Minister)

The Suffragettes delivered a niche market for advertisers amongst the well-to-do

Let’s take a look at the Pankhurst WSPU’s own publication, Votes for Women, its main mouthpiece. Let’s choose the issue for Friday 10 November 1910.

The magazine is full of adverts. It’s worth remembering, while we thumb through them, that a teacher’s pay was roughly £2 a week, so £104 a year). Why not spend 10 guineas, we read, (that’s £10.10.0 and equivalent to something over £1200 today) on a set of black and Alaskan fox furs? Why not buy a ‘Daimler’ or a ‘Mercedes’ travelling coat, to match your smart new motor, or a Japanese silk blouse for 37/6 (about £100)?

These smart advertisers: notably Heals, Debenhams and the new Selfridges which opened 15 March 1909, apparently hardly noticed the escalating Suffragette violence – even when it was their own windows that got broken. The odd insurance claim was apparently worth it for the rich women they were able to attract. Much more important to them was selling hats, gowns, coats, shoes – even underwear in suffragette colours.

Historian Jane Chapman has argued that what the Pankhurst WSPU was in practice delivering was a niche market for advertisers among the well-to-do. It was a market that had previously been very difficult to reach.

The WSPU opened their first shop in Charing Cross selling all manner of things from a board game where you had to reach 10 Downing Street, bone china tea sets in WPSU colours of purple, green and white, and ‘Votes for Women Cigarettes.’

They started out as a branch of the Labour Party and ended up benefiting the Tories

Marion Wallace Dunlop, the first Suffragette hunger-striker. It took two men two hours to remove her quote from the Bill of Rights from the wall of St Stephen's Hall, Westminster (Parliament)

Force-feeding of Suffragettes was dangerous and compared with being raped

In 1909 294 WSPU campaigners (Suffragettes) were arrested and 163 of them imprisoned. One of them, Marion Wallace Dunlop, was thrown in gaol in June 1909 for writing a quote from the 1688 Bill of Rights on a wall in Parliament –
‘It is the right of the subject to petition the King, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal.’

Dunlop went on hunger strike. Until 1908 suffrage protesters had been kept in what was called ‘1^st division’ conditions, with their own clothes, books and visitors. But they were now being treated as criminals, put into often dirty prison fatigues and made to work.

Dunlop’s hunger strike was something new. It lasted 91 hours until she was hastily released. Other suffrage campaigners quickly followed – refusing to eat – 36 of them by the end of the year.

In August 1909 the king Edward VII – who was on holiday in Austria – sent a message suggesting that these hunger-striking women should be forcibly fed. Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, quickly complied. The result was a series of brutal scenes in which women – and some men – were forcibly fed by tube several times a day through every possible orifice, and many left permanently scarred. It very quickly became one of the WSPU’s most successful publicity campaigns, as doctors protested that the practice was dangerous and women compared it with being raped. For once, public opinion was on the campaigners’ side.

Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst lived a life of luxury

Emmeline Pankhurst was never force fed, and the WSPU funded Emmeline's swish London hotel-home, and Christabel's flat in Paris

Emmeline Pankhurst was arrested 14 times between 1906 and 1914 and said she had gone on hunger strike 12 times. But she also claimed that the prison authorities had tried to force feed her only once and that that she had fought them off with a water jug.

In the light of accounts by working-class Suffragettes, and Lady Constance Lytton who pretended to be working-class and was treated so badly she never recovered and died prematurely, we would say that the authorities were never going to force feed the likes of well-connected Mrs P. The prison authorities kept their brutality for those who didn’t matter. And, it would appear, the wealthy leaders of the WSPU knew this very well.

When Mrs P’s husband died in 1898 he left her no money and she had no other source of income. Before 1906 she had earned a meagre living as a registrar of births, marriages and deaths in Manchester.

But from 1906, when the WSPU moved to London, Emmeline Pankhurst lived at the Inns of Court Hotel. It was an extremely smart establishment on Lincoln’s Inn Square, described as having ‘the highest decorative pretensions’, starting with ‘perhaps the finest hotel hall in England’ and extending through its masonic hall, grand dining room, ladies drawing room and bedrooms lit with electric light. It was, it boasted, within a shilling’s cab fare from almost all the London theatres. It cannot have come cheap.

View All Episodes