British Suffragettes Were Force-Fed Through Tubes — One Woman 292 Times

Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union — the WSPU, the original suffragettes — in Manchester on October 10, 1903. The motto, "Deeds, not words," telegraphed the tactical break with the more deferential suffrage organizations of the previous decades. Through the 1900s and early 1910s the WSPU escalated through public meetings, parliamentary disruption, window-smashing campaigns in central London, and eventually, between 1910 and 1914, a six-month arson and bombing campaign that targeted some 250 buildings — empty churches, country houses owned by anti-suffrage politicians, racecourse grandstands. The campaign deliberately avoided harming people.

The state's response was force-feeding. Suffragettes who were imprisoned often went on hunger strike, after Marion Wallace Dunlop began the tactic in July 1909, demanding political-prisoner status. The government answered by holding women down on prison-cot mattresses, opening their mouths with steel gags, and pumping a slurry of milk and broth through a rubber tube into the stomach. Evaline Hilda Burkitt, the first woman force-fed under the policy, was subjected to it 292 times between 1909 and 1914. The accumulated cruelty became politically untenable; in April 1913 Parliament passed the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act, called the "Cat and Mouse Act," which let the prison system release women on the verge of death, wait for them to recover, and then re-arrest them.

The most-photographed incident came on June 4, 1913, when Emily Davison stepped onto the Epsom Derby track in front of King George V's horse Anmer and was struck. She died four days later. A 2013 forensic re-analysis of contemporary newsreel suggests she had been trying to attach a suffragette flag to the horse's bridle rather than committing suicide; she was carrying a return train ticket and had a planned holiday with her sister booked. British women over 30 received the vote in 1918, with full equal franchise in 1928.