Deeds, not Words* - Part 2
© Marthe Arends
Deeds, not Words* - Part 2
The hunger strikes had an immediate, albeit often tragic, result-prison officials and doctors did not want the responsibility of the women dying, so the government swiftly passed the "Prisoner's Temporary Discharge of Ill Health Act," which allowed prison officials to release the hunger strikers when they became ill. Once they became well again, however, they were re-arrested and sent back to finish their prison terms. Often the women went back on hunger strike, became ill, were released again...and so on in a vicious circle. The Ill Health Act became known as the Cat and Mouse Act by critics, and was intended to make suffragettes serve every single day of their sentence.
Sadly, it worked, as Annie Kenney knew: "Mrs. Brackenbury lent us her house at 2 Camden Hill Square. We called it 'Mouse Castle'. All the mice went there from prison and were nursed back to health and prepared for further danger work...When I recovered I was re-arrested." [Memoirs of a Militant]
Annie was one of the lucky ones--she survived the force-feedings without serious physical damage. Not all hunger strikers were so lucky. Kitty Marion suffered so intensely during the 232 times she was force-fed that she "felt she was going mad and begged the doctor to give her poison. She even considered hanging herself and, in desperation on one occasion, set the bed clothes on fire (Votes for Women, April 24, 1914, p. 460). Her friends did not recognize her when she was released since she was in an emaciated condition, had lost 2 stone 8 pounds in weight and looked like a 70-year-old." [June Purvis, "Deeds not Words: The Daily Life of Militant Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain", Women's Studies International Forum, 18 (1995)]
As horrified as I was to discover the atrocities of prison life, I was appalled when I read of the attacks by police on suffragettes. Certainly it is understandable that the women who committed violent acts of arson and vandalism such as the slashing of the Rokeby Venus at the National Gallery were imprisoned, but what of the others? Suffragettes selling Votes for Women, a suffrage newspaper, had to stand in the gutter lest they be charged by police with obstruction of pavement. Women were arrested for speaking out at meetings, for posting a bill of rights, or even for peaceably staffing the office of a suffrage organization. "Harriet Kerr...made it a condition of her employment that her work was entirely administrative and that she was "not a militant suffragette" (Hessell-Tiltman, 1975). This did not prevent her from being arrested and sent to prison, however, when the police raided the WSPU Offices in April 1913 (Kerr, 1928)." [Deeds Not Words: The Daily Life of Militant Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain]
