Daily News that she should censure such disgraceful developments, replied
calmly:
It is very good of the editor ... to credit me with so much power, but I
want to say that the women in this movement are in it not at my
behest or at my request, but because they feel a burning desire to
promote this cause of votes for women ... and if I were so false to this
movement as to turn coward now and ask them to stop, I believe and I
hope that they would refuse to stop because of my appeal. But I cannot
make any such appeal with a full sense of my responsibility. As one of
the foremost movers in this agitation, I say I have more hope of success
now than I ever had during nearly thirty years of patient agitation.^71Christabel, in a letter to The Times, pointed out that they had been driven by
the government to the use of stones since women were now banned from
attending public political meetings while Emmeline Pethick Lawrence reiter-
ated a similar point in Votes for Women.^72
In Winson Green Gaol, the women went on hunger strike and within a
week, the authorities had responded with artificial feeding; food was poured
down a rubber tube that had been forced either up the nostril (the most
common method) and into the stomach or, after a steel gag had been used to
prise a mouth open, down the throat (the more painful operation) and into the
stomach.^73 Although the word ‘rape’ was not used by the women who were
subjected to forcible feeding, the instrumental invasion of the body, accompa-
nied by overpowering physical force, great suffering and humiliation, was akin
to it.^74 With disbelief, shock and deep anger, Emmeline, Christabel and
Emmeline Pethick Lawrence condemned the government for inflicting upon
the exhausted and starved bodies of women, who had been driven to ‘the last
extremity’ of passive resistance, ‘the horrible outrage of the gag and feeding
tube’.^75 At a protest meeting in the Temperance Hall, Birmingham, Emmeline
emphasised that the leaders of the WSPU ‘took upon themselves full responsi-
bility for the actions of the brave women ... in Winson Gaol’.^76 Thus began
that vicious circle of hunger striking and forcible feeding that was to dominate
WSPU policy over the next five years.
‘A NEW AND MORE HEROIC PLANE’