Source 32:  By-Election poster: 'Torturing Women in Prison', Votes for Women, 29 October 1909, p.68

Description

This illustration appeared in the 'Votes for Women' newspaper on 29 October 1909. During the summer of 1909, imprisoned suffragettes began to use hunger strikes as a form of protest. At first, the prison authorities released women who refused to eat but, by the autumn of 1909, forcible feeding was introduced. The procedure was brutal and sometimes life-threatening. The woman would be forcibly restrained whilst a rubber tube was inserted up the nose or down the throat. The first instance of forcible feeding in Scotland took place in February 1914 when Ethel Moorhead was imprisoned in Calton Jail, Edinburgh. The forcible feeding of suffragettes stopped later in 1914 when Emmeline Pankhurst called an end to militancy at the beginning of World War I.