As part of their Suffragette Stories project, the University of East Anglia has been digitising items from the Annie Kenney archive. I was struck by this letter to Annie by Constance Lytton, written as it emerged that WSPU prisoners, including Hilda Burkitt, were being forcibly fed.
Whilst Lytton describes it as ‘harrowing’, adding that the Mrs Pankhurst and Lawrence ‘are both ill with it’, she ends with a statement that neatly encapsulates contemporary suffragette rhetoric.
“But as soon as the public realise it and the ‘laughter’ it has caused in the House, it will, as usual, move on the tide immensely. These heroic women will be only too glad, one knows they are only proud to have been pioneers in this receiving of the Government’s new violence.”
As WSPU militancy escalated, the movement developed a rhetoric that allowed the members to justify their actions through asserting themselves as “just warriors”, part of a wider, unstoppable force that would secure the emancipation of women. (1) The ‘tide’ of women’s liberation was a frequent image in suffragette propaganda. Similarly, the women were ‘heroines’ in the tradition of historic militants such as Joan of Arc. In the letter above, Lytton draws on both iconographical elements. The idea of the women in Winson Green taking pride in the medical abuse they suffered is slightly jarring, but it is not surprising. Imprisonment, hunger-strike and forcible feeding would later become emblematic of the Suffragette’s tortured martyrdom for the Cause.
But what of the women inside Winson Green? Outside, Lytton could muse to Kenney, Votes for Women could run on their front page that ‘these women deserve well of womanhood and of the country of their birth; they are setting up a standard of heroism which will be remembered and honoured so long as the annals of human society are preserved’. [Votes for Women, 01/10/09] But how did the women inside Winson Green express themselves? What did they think about it?
In 1914, Hilda Burkitt’s closing speech at her and Florence Tunks’s trial for arson is deeply imbued with the suffragette rhetoric that had evolved from that mentioned above.
“Whatever sentence you impose I shall not serve, because I have made up my mind that I will not take any food or drink while I am in prison. I cannot stand the torture of the feeding for a great length of time, flesh and blood can’t stand it; and if Mr McKenna does not release me I shall die in prison, in which I case I shall then be the victor, because I shall not have served the sentence. You can give me liberty or death.”
[The Suffragette, 05/06/1914]
I had always naively assumed that Hilda’s political statements would have become more ‘extreme’ as the movement progressed. 1909 Burkitt as opposed to 1914’s fully-fledged arsonist and prison veteran seemed quieter, more subdued. I was wrong to assume this.
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‘so, will you reply to my Petition at once, as if I should [succumb crossed out] die through my fasting my death will lie at your door, but I am ready to lay down my life, to bring about the Freedom of my Sex.
Evelyn Hilda Burkitt.
Women’s Social and Political Union.
[HO 45/10418/183577]
What always strikes me about this document is the trace of Hilda’s thought-process as she wrote, crossing-out the more euphemistic, weaker ‘succumb’ for the far clearer ‘die’. Her self-portrayal as a willing martyr for the Cause makes her seem very much one of the ‘heroic’ ‘pioneers’ that Lytton related to Kenney from outside Winson Green. This self-representation would continue throughout her career. She would also draw on her ‘credibility’ as the first suffragette to be forcibly fed to draw people to drawing room and street meetings. She wore her ‘prison badge’, and likely the hunger-strike medal, presented to her by Christabel Pankhurst at Birmingham Town Hall in November 1909, with pride.
These sources show Hilda Burkitt as she wished to present herself to hostile onlookers and the government. She states her political motives clearly, she is committed to the death. However, Hilda also used similar language in communication with her family. In 1914, she wrote to her father from prison to inform him of her arrest. As she was trying to keep her identity secret from the police, the letter is vague, and sent via her brother-in-law Fred. However Hilda also states that she was
‘not taking food or water, what will be the result I do not know. I am quite prepared to give my life if need be, but I suppose McKenna will desire that’.
[HO 144/1205/22030]
Of course, Hilda was obviously aware that the letter would be read, and could have been using this as a further outlet of political self-expression. That said, she obviously did not mind her father reading it after receiving it unexpectedly.
Reuben Burkitt was also present in 1909. As the facts of forcible feeding emerged, he wrote to Keir Hardie. Hardie secured him a Home Office permit to visit Hilda in Winson Green, ending his reply hoping Reuben ‘will find your daughter bearing up bravely’. As he left the prison, Reuben was interviewed by a local journalist and described how Hilda had related the entire process to him, including rough handling by doctors. She had asserted its illegality. Sounding slightly resigned, he is apparently quoted as saying ‘ “She is more reconciled now, although she evidently seems to have given more trouble to the officials than all the other Suffragists.” ‘ Burkitt was, according to the Birmingham Daily Gazette ‘in favour of the Parliamentary franchise being given to women […] but he regrets the militant movement in its present form.’ [Birmingham Daily Gazette, 11/10/09]
Reuben was also present, a week later, after Hilda’s release as she gave an interview to the Birmingham correspondent for the London Daily News. She spoke lying on a couch in her home in Sparkbrook. Her father related that she had just been examined by a doctor and her heart was weak. Hilda described how inside prison, the suffragettes were able to ‘cheer one another up by their “tattoo.” “We call our battle-cry our tattoo, you know – ” “Are we down-hearted? No surrender” Miss Burkitt explained’. She also stated that ‘she still justified violence as the only method of agitation open to the Suffragists’. [London Daily News, 18/10/09]
This web of source material is of course limited; it merely provides snapshots of particular moments and statements. However, throughout, we can see echoes of the same images and rhetorical devices that would shape WSPU self-representation. What is more, we see how the suffragettes used this imagery in their own communications to each other, either by letter as with Lytton and Kenney, or through prison cell walls. In the case of Hilda Burkitt, this was extended to their own family, as her father witnessed, either first-hand or by letter, his daughter’s hunger strikes.
Additional sources
1 – Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp, Transfiguring Sword: The Just War of the Womens Social and Political Union (University of Alabama Press, 1997).
See also: Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women (University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Laugh a Defiance 