mainly guilty of incitement [to violence]’, she uttered coolly on the 17 March,
‘are the people who are governing this country.’^56 The following day, when a
protest meeting against forcible feeding was held under the auspices of the
National Political League, the imprisoned Sylvia wrote her mother (addressed
as ‘Dearest Mother’) an anguished letter which Zelie Emerson, a fellow prisoner,
smuggled out of Holloway. The narratives spoken and written by those experi-
encing this excruciating torture emphasised that one struggled and resisted
when the tubes were forced into the body, not simply because of the pain, but
also because to remain passive would seem like collusion, or as Mary Richardson
later put it, ‘give one the feeling of sin; the sin of concurrence’.^57 It is this
aspect of resistance that Sylvia emphasises in her heart-rending letter to
Emmeline, a letter in which she insists that she is following the ‘correct’ ideo-
logical line. But the statement may also be read as the cry of a daughter who felt
neglected by her mother:
I am fighting, fighting, fighting. I have four, five and six wardresses
every day as well as the two doctors. I am fed by stomach-tube twice a
day. They prise open my mouth with a steel gag, pressing it in where
there is a gap in my teeth. I resist all the time. ... The night before last
I vomited the last meal and was ill all night, and was sick after both
meals yesterday. ... I am afraid they may be saying we don’t resist. Yet
my shoulders are bruised with struggling ... whilst they hold the tube
into my throat.
I used to feel I should go mad at first, and be pretty near to it, as I
think they feared, but I have got over that, and my digestion is the
thing that is most likely to suffer now.^58Emmeline was distraught and angry at the barbaric practices inflicted on her
daughter; whatever the differences of view between them, Sylvia was still her
child. She persuaded the socialist Daily Heraldto publish Sylvia’s letter and was
greatly relieved when her daughter was released soon after, on Good Friday, 21
March; in addition to the refusal to eat food, Sylvia had added the protests of
thirst and sleep strikes and thus been released early, on medical grounds, serving
only five weeks of her sentence. The following day, a more cheerful Emmeline
wrote from Coignto ‘My dear friend’, her usual address for Elizabeth Robins, ‘I
know you will rejoice with me that Sylvia is released. The news came by tele-
phone late last night & in a few minutes I am leaving by car to see her.’^59
Arriving at the nursing home at Pembridge Gardens, Emmeline was surprised to
find Keir Hardie there, his face ‘haggard and seamed with sorrow, his hair long
and unkempt’.^60 When in prison, Sylvia had written to Hardie but the letter,
smuggled out at the same time as the message to her mother, had not been
delivered to him; believing she was acting in her daughter’s own interest,
Emmeline had kept the letter at Lincoln’s Inn House. Now mother and lover
were united by Sylvia’s bedside, in their concern for her. The physical condition
HONORARY TREASURER OF THE WSPU AND AGITATOR