Issue 20 - Winter 2003

Votes for Women

This article, ‘Forcible Feeding’, was published in The New Statesman in April 1913; The Wise Virgins was written at the height of the agitation for women’s suffrage.

We have had enough of forcible feeding. The willingness of the forcible feeders to give as much pain and to do as much mischief as may be necessary to save them from having to give in may be natural; but it is in no way the less discreditable for that. The plain fact to be faced is that a number of women, from Lady Constance Lytton to Miss Sylvia Pankhurst, have undergone in prison a course of severe physical punishment to which they have not been sentenced and to which they could not be sentenced under the law for any offence whatever.

At first the House of Commons listened to the Home Secretary’s accounts of such proceedings with bursts of laughter, and for the moment Mr McKenna had a merry time of it. But he reckoned without the Bishop of Lincoln, who suddenly showed the country that it is still possible for a bishop to be a Christian and a gentleman. Mr McKenna did not deny the torture: on the contrary, he pleaded that it had been so effectual that only eight of his prisoners had dared to go through with it. And he sat down convinced that this was what his chorus of laughers would have called a corker for the bishop.

May we ask Mr McKenna, since he considers it proper to employ forcible feeding, not merely as a life-saving measure but as a deterrent, to explain exactly why he did not increase the peine forte et dure to the point at which even the heroic eight could not endure it? Having gone so far, why did he not go all the way? When and why did he flinch?

At the end of it all the Government has had to admit that the women are determined to die rather than live voteless. And even Mr McKenna has discovered that it is now the correct thing to opine that forcible feeding is objectionable, and that nobody believes it to be the painless and even luxurious mode of nutrition he has hitherto defended. As for the public, it is asking very naturally why in the name of common sense this ridiculous Prisoners’ (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Bill is not a Women’s Suffrage Bill. Everybody knows – except those who never know anything beforehand – that the women are going to get the vote. That is what makes all this useless mischief so exasperating.