Lady Constance Lytton was a woman born into the most privileged class in Great Britain, however she ultimately rejected this background and became an outspoken member of the Women’s Social and Political Union. In 1910, in a speech she delivered at Queen’s Hall, she recounted the treatment she received during her imprisonment and the forced feedings she endured. She also brings up how differently she was treated once her true identity and title was discovered and she was subsequently released. Throughout her speech, she emphasizes the importance of the hunger strike that they participate in and how inhumane and cruel the forced feedings she and others endured were. She vividly describes the forced feeding procedure that she endured, once saying, “I felt as though I were being killed-absolute suffocation is the feeling.” And further how much the experience haunted her, “what was even worse to me than the thing itself was the positive terror with which I anticipated its renewal.” (CP 227)
Though throughout the speech, she never forgets to mention that while she did suffer these forced feedings, there were many more women who suffered it worse or were still suffering at the time she gave the speech. In the beginning of the speech she states, “…yet they must remember this fact, that thirty-five other women have been treated as I have been treated, and of those women I have suffered the least.” (CP 226). She even recounts an event in which she was arrested during a protest under her own name and was released, while a women who had been much less involved was held for longer and force fed. This aspect of the speech emphasizes the vast differences that women of different classes faced while being involved in the suffragette movement, that while both working-class women and women of the aristocracy might be involved in the same hunger strike or protests, they faced very different punishments if caught.
An artists rendering of the forced feeding procedures from Illustrated London News, 27 April 1912
Lady Constance Lytton with other suffragettes, including Sylvia Pankhurst
http://www.imow.org/community/blog/viewEntry?language=es&id=21
No comments:
Post a Comment