Force-feeding British suffragettes

This video about United States’ women suffrage history says about itself:

Alice Paul (Hilary Swank) in Iron Jawed Angels is force fed after refusing to eat. The women singing “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” are suffragettes who have been imprisoned for supporting the women’s right to vote.

Song Lyrics:

I was standing by my window
On a cold and cloudy day
When I saw that hearse come rolling
For to carry my mother away

Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, lord, in the sky

For I told that undertaker
Undertaker please drive slow
For that body you are hauling
Lord, I hate to see her go

Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, lord, in the sky

I will follow close behind her
Tried to hold up and be brave
But I could not hide my sorrow
When they laid her in the grave

Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, lord, in the sky

From British daily The Morning Star:

Magazine highlights force-feeding of suffragettes

Tuesday 26 May 2009

A “harrowing” account of hunger-striking suffragettes being force-fed was revisited on Tuesday.

Imprisoned women who were refusing to eat were subjected to “brutal, life-threatening and degrading procedures,” according to BBC History Magazine.

Author Jane Purvis described how many members of the Women’s Social and Political Union were held down and forced to take a concoction of milk, bread and brandy.

Political campaigners were restrained by female warders while two male doctors put a rubber tube, “which was not always new,” either up a nostril or down the throat and into the stomach to administer the mixture.

Ms Purvis reported that sometimes the procedure would go wrong and the tube would accidentally enter the windpipe, causing the food to enter the lungs and endanger the lives of the women.

She wrote: “Although the word ‘rape’ was not used by the prisoners to describe their experiences, the instrumental invasion of the body, accompanied by the overpowering physical force, suffering and humiliation, was akin to it and commonly described as an ‘outrage’.”

The Suffragettes‘ association with hunger-striking began in July 1909 when Marion Wallace Dunlop fasted for 91 hours after being sent to Holloway prison for printing an extract from the Bill of Rights on a wall inside the House of Commons. Following her protest, she was released from captivity.

The government responded by force-feeding prisoners who refused food, arguing that it was “ordinary hospital treatment to preserve women’s lives.”

The article about the “most shameful episode in the history of the British women’s suffrage campaign” can be read in BBC History Magazine, which went on sale on Tuesday, priced £3.60.

The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Edinburgh: here.

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