"Let them starve" (Evening Standard June 9th 1914)

Wormwood Scrubs 

Holloway 

Strangeways 

The prisons above represent some of the penal institutions into which Suffragettes were prepared to risk being incarcerated during their fight for a "fully enfranchised voice" (March Women March Lucinda Hawksley 2013. 247). Some sixty years later, the voice of Marian MacAlpin in Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman (1976) echoes similar pangs of desire for, autonomy and control over her personal destiny.

Food refusal  is employed by members of the Suffragette movement as a protest against their imprisonment, drawing media and political attention to their cause. The impending institution from which Atwood's character Marian MacAlpin desires to liberate herself, is marriage to Peter; her sacrifice of nourishment, manifests her feelings of powerlessness over everything except her mortal frame: "'God,' she thought to herself, 'I hope it's not permanent; I'll starve to death!'" (The Edible Woman 186).                 

Dorset Hall

At a different coalface of Women's Suffrage in leafy SW19, Rose Lamartine Yates of Dorset Hall, hosted fundraising afternoon teas on the lawn. WSPU (Women's Social and Political Union) branded Tea, Jam and Chocolate would be on sale at the Teas, Public Meetings and in the WSPU Shops, to philanthropically help finance the Suffrage movement, and disturb the illusion that suffrage was a privilege of the bourgeoisie, with time on their hands and money to spare. 

Hawkesley argues further that  when "women of the Garrett and Fawcett families took up the issue of female suffrage, the movement would begin to be associated with upper-class, often aristocratic women, yet in the early 19th century this was not the case. The earliest exponents of gender equality came not from the drawing rooms of Mayfair but from the factory floors of those towns most affected by the Industrial Revolution" (March Women March 17). 

Marion Wallace-Dunlop initiated the 'hunger-strike' in 1909, when she abstained from food for 91 hours.

              

Marion Wallace-Dunlop            Lady Constance Lytton      Lilian Lenton   

Under the pseudonym, Jane Warton, Lady Constance Lytton wanted an authentic experience of prison treatment; she was "suspicious that she was being treated differently from her working-class peers" (155). Historian Jane Purvis provides this insight: "Warton was held down by wardresses as the doctor inserted a four-foot-long tube down her throat. A few seconds after the tube was down she vomited all over her hair, her clothes and the wall" (qtd in March Women March 156). 

The philanthropic intention behind the hunger-strike lies in how the act of self-sacrifice symbolically embraces the universal suffrage of women. The doctor who attempts to force feed Jane Warton "yelled furiously that if she vomited on him again he would 'feed [her] twice'" (157); thus food becomes punishment. Lady Constance died two years later.

The near death of Lilian Lenton lead to the Cat and Mouse Act in 1913, amid fears over negative publicity concerning the treatment of imprisoned Suffragettes. Before the Act was hastened through Parliament, however, a more degrading tactic was adopted by prison authorities to subvert the intentions of hunger-strikers: "many women were force-fed rectally, turning the already terrifying practice into rape" (157).     

Subconscious reaction to male oppression became a form of conscious protest, and a paradoxical weapon of philanthropy. Marian MacAlpin's food refusal mimics the notion of self-sacrifice as a means to escape oppression, ritualised by her Suffragette forebears. Irony judders when Duncan muses: "I'd prefer to be fed through a main artery. If only I knew the right people. I'm sure it could be arranged..." (237).     

Bibliography

Attwood, M.  The Edible Woman.  Great Britain: Virago Press, 1976.

Hawksley, L.  March Women March.  London: Andre Deutsch Limited, 2013.