Lady Constance Lytton

“ I ungratefully wished that if I was to be allowed news of the outside world it might have been an item connected with my more immediate belongings. But the letter gave me a pleasure difficult to describe, bringing, as it did, a ventilating whiff of ordinary human, free existence into prison life. I clung to every particle of it, envelope and all, and generally carried it about in my clothes for fear it should be destroyed while I was out of my cell; no love-letter was ever more watchfully guarded by a girl of sixteen. ”

“ For the inner you of yourself is surely the only means of communication for you with any good influence you may once have enjoyed or hope some day to find, the only window through which you can look upon a happier and more lovable life, the only door through which some day you will be able to escape, unbarring it to your own release from all that is helpless, selfish, and unkind in your present self. ”

“ From the moment I heard that “washing” taunt in the street, I have had eyes for the work of the washers. If there is one single industry highly deserving of recognition throughout the world of human existence and of representation under parliamentary systems, it surely is that of the washers, the renewers week by week, the makers clean.
I determined, if I should find myself the solitary representative of the Deputation and its untrained spokeswoman, I should point to the collars and shirt fronts of the gentlemen who received me and claim the freedom of citizenship for the washers. ”

“ When, for a short while, I shared your lot, I asked myself through all my waking hours if there were any friendly thought which could act beneficently for all prisoners, no matter how various the training of their previous lives, no matter whether distress of circumstance, drunkenness, selfish action, cruelty, or madness had been the cause which brought them into prison.
And there seemed this one thing. It is a single idea, but needs many words to give it shape.
Lay hold of your inward self and keep tight hold. Reverence yourself. Be just, kind and forgiving to yourself. ”

“ What should I be able to do for their release? If by some miracle I obtained it, would it be too late to help them? I thought more especially of Miss Selina Martin. I had seen her in Birmingham a fortnight after her release from the weeks that she had been fed in the prison there. She was in the nursing home, together with Mrs. Leigh, that splendid fighter for the women’s cause and most heroic woman. Their look of illness haunted me still. The idea that Selina Martin was again, perhaps at that very moment, undergoing the same cruel treatment exasperated me. ”

“ She walked across to the policeman, one shoulder hitched slightly above the other, her hair sticking out straight behind and worn in slick bandeaus on either side of her face, her hat trailing in a melancholy way on her head. The large, grey woollen gloves were drawn up over the too short sleeves of her coat; on the collar of it were worn portraits of Mrs. Pankhurst, Mrs. Lawrence and Christabel, in small china brooches; her hat had a bit of tape with “Votes for Women” written on it, interlaced with the cloth plait that went round it, and eye-glasses were fixed on her nose. ”

“ We want to make it known that we shall carry on our protest in our prison cells. We shall put before the Government by means of the hunger-strike four alternatives: To release us in a few days; to inflict violence upon our bodies; to add death to the champions of our cause by leaving us to starve; or, and this is the best and only wise alternative, to give women the vote. ”

“ It is by the side of the most recent victors that women must put in their claim. With this class, the working-class women, though at all times at one with them in point of sympathy from theoretic understanding of their troubles and needs, I was not in direct touch and laid no first-hand experiences that I could share with them. I read the petitions of factory workers, of the sweated home workers, of the professions—teachers, nurses, medical women—with respect and whole-hearted sympathy, but how could I stand for them when I was not equipped to represent them? ”

“ Isolated and detached, she has but little sense of kinship with other women. For her there is no bond of labour, no ties of mutual service; her whole life is spent in the preservation of appearances, and she seems hardly ever to probe down to the bone of realities. Child-having remains her glory, the one bit of full-livedness in an otherwise most arid desert. This is the one basis on which she feels herself united to other women, and the wrongs and sufferings of child-bearers stand out as the exception on which you can sometimes get her to move on behalf of other women. ”

“ Now that the extent of my criminality had been duly notified and received, as it were, official recognition, her pent up indignation let fly and she gave me a regular dressing down. She did not, of course, allude to the nature of my crime; this was left to the imagination of the onlookers, but, as on all other occasions of the kind that I can recall, the sympathy of prisoners turns automatically to a fellow-prisoner, not to the officials. Intercourse by means of speech being forbidden, the language of the eyes becomes perfected. ”

“ Mary Gawthorpe said, with tears in her eyes, as she threw her arms round me: “Oh, and these are women quite unknown—nobody knows or cares about them except their own friends. They go to prison again and again to be treated like this, until it kills them!” That was enough. My mind was made up. The altogether shameless way I had been preferred against the others at Newcastle, except Mrs. Brailsford who shared with me the special treatment, made me determine to try whether they would recognise my need for exceptional favours without my name. ”

“ It was like darkness when these three were in prison. Mrs. Pethick Lawrence and Sylvia Pankhurst, Christabel’s sister, kept the weekly meetings going at the Queen’s Hall in a splendid way. Sylvia is an artist by profession and an artist at heart, but whenever the women’s movement wants her she is there for its bidding. She looked all that is most modest and humble, but speaking seemed to come as a second nature to her as to everyone of the Pankhursts, and at times I could not have believed, but for having heard and seen, the splendid political speech which came from that young girl. ”

“ We believe that if we get the vote we will find some more humane way of dealing with women than that.”
Mrs. Drummond made me feel faith in the woman’s movement, her type was most lovable, full of daring for the enemies of woman, full of patience in working for them, full of the most noble kind of humility in her reverence for them.
Christabel Pankhurst was the sunrise of the woman’s movement, I cannot describe her in any other way. The glow of her great vitality and the joy of her being took hold of the movement and made it gladness. ”

“ The words of the Chaplain came back to my mind—“The women, they’re all as bad as bad can be, there’s absolutely no good in them.” No good in them! and yet amongst them there was this little woman who, at least, loved her child and played with it as only a mother-heart can!
I got down and put the table and chair in their place; I felt amazed, having seen a sight as beautiful as the most beautiful picture in the world.
The wardress who came most often to my cell was kind to me. I said to her, “Oh! if you only knew what a nightmare it is, the feeding. ”

“ Then the prisoner is let out, watched day and night, and taken back to prison, back to hunger and thirst, till she is again at death’s door. This they do twice, three times, four times, five times, till life is all but out. Not yet have the Government admitted that they will stop the “Cat-and-Mouse” torture short of death itself. And the forcible feeding—what is that? The only possible excuse for it is that it prolongs the prisoner’s sentence by so many days, so many weeks, and that is all. ”

“ Though offering no practical assistance the answers led me to realise a strangely unexpected atmosphere of sympathy, and after a few moments hesitation I found myself telling this superintendent the full purport of my mission. To my intense surprise he not only expressed much approval, but burst out with a torrent of abuse against the Government—“Why to goodness couldn’t the Prime Minister receive the women’s deputation same as any other? The brunt of the whole business falls on us, and it’s the beastliest job we’ve ever had.” ”

“ The prison from here looks like a great hive of human creeping things impelled to their joyless labours and unwilling seclusion by some hidden force, the very reverse of natural, and which has in it no element of organic life, cohesion, or self-sufficing reason. ”

“ I then realised that I was amongst Suffragettes. I immediately confessed to them that although I shared their wish for the enfranchisement of women, I did not at all sympathise with the measures they adopted for bringing about that reform. I had, however, always been interested in prisons and recognised from the first that, incidentally, the fact of many educated women being sent to gaol for a question of conscience must do a great deal for prison reform, and I was delighted at this opportunity of hearing first-hand something about the inner life of a prison. ”

“ Littlehampton, the holiday house of the Esperance Girls’ Club, that I met Mrs. Pethick Lawrence and Miss Annie Kenney. I was two or three days in the house with them without discovering that they were Suffragettes or that there was anything unusual about their lives. But I realised at once that I was face to face with women of strong personality, and I felt, though at first vaguely, that they represented something more than themselves, a force greater than their own seemed behind them. ”

“ If the horrors of prison existence are enshrined in an atmosphere of nightmare, the rare happy moments have the glamour of a good dream. This kind act of the night-wardress remains as one of the sunlit flower patches of my time in Holloway. ”

“ It is easy to see that if women are to appeal effectively to a modern parliament for the rights of liberty and representation which so long have been recognised among men, it must be through the working women, the bread-winning woman. Her situation is easily comparable to that of the working- [42] class man who quite recently has had himself to fight in order to win his denied claim to freedom, a fact which he, and others for him, still remember. The aristocracy, the landed proprietor, the middle-class trader, each in turn was driven to claim and fight for these same rights. ”

“ As I thought of them my pity moved from the procession in Holloway to these other women. Success is impossible for a social system that takes no heed to its outcasts, the pathological victims of national existence are the symptoms which can lead us to diagnose its fundamental flaws. Whether or not the women alive to-day in the ruling class can be cured is of comparatively little importance, but clearly the causes which have brought them forth must be altered at the root. The conditions which go to produce a ruling caste are shifting their ground throughout the world. ”

“ It nevertheless was bitterly real at the time, and a few hours within prison walls were sufficient to develop the illusion. As with so many other prisoner sensations, it is akin to child life, engendered from complete helplessness, subjection to others, ignorance and uninformedness as to what is happening outside the cramped horizon of the life to which one is subject. The sense of continuous expectancy and comfort for present distressful monotony in the belief that undreamed of good might happen at any moment is also very similar to the mental outlook of children. ”

“ Yet how often is the woman who bears humanity neglected at such times, so that life goes from her, or she is [12] given no money to support her child. I felt that through Annie Kenney’s whole being throbbed the passion of her soul for other women, to lift from them the heavy burden, to give them life, strength, freedom, joy, and the dignity of human beings, that in all things they might be treated fairly with men. ”

“ The Sabbath day reflected national customs in prison as outside. The morning was characterised by clean clothing and an unusual rigidity of behaviour, but towards the latter half of the afternoon the air of solemnity wore away, some of the officers had an afternoon off, bringing back with them an indefinable sense of the outer world, and the evening hours sometimes produced an atmosphere almost of amiability. Much would depend on whether a lovable wardress, who often did duty in our ward and had shown herself invariably friendly towards us, should be “on” or “off.” ”

“ Pankhurst’s speech on this occasion that I felt taken hold of by the movement. Every sentence of it seemed to be true, dignified, strong, entirely respectful. This passage I more especially remember: “You know that women have tried to do something to come to the aid of their own sex.... I was in the hospital at Holloway, and when I was there I heard from one of the beds near me the moans of a woman who was in the pangs of childbirth. I should like you to realise how women feel at helpless little infants breathing their first breath in the atmosphere of a prison. ”