Suffragists -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
He cites another successful example in Rharkoff prison in 1878 when six
prisoners resolved to hunger strike to death if necessary to win two
things—to be allowed exercise and to have the sick prisoners taken out
of chains.
There are innumerable instances of hunger strikes, even to death, in
Russian prison history. But more often the demands of the strikers were
won.. Breshkovsky[2] tells of a strike by 17 women against outrage,
which elicited the desired promises from the warden.
[2] For Russia’s Freedom, by Ernest Poole,—An Interview with
Breshkovsky.
As early as 1877 members of the Land and Liberty Society[3] imprisoned
for peaceful and educational propaganda, in the Schlusselburg Fortress
for political prisoners, hunger struck against inhuman prison
conditions and frightful brutalities and won their points.
[3]See The Russian Bastille, Simon O. Pollock.
During the suffrage campaign in England this weapon was used for the
double purpose of forcing the release of imprisoned militant
suffragettes, and of compelling the British government to act.
Among the demonstrations was a revival of the ancient Irish custom by
Sylvia Pankhurst, who in addition to her hunger strikes within prison,
“fasted on” the doorstep of Premier Asquith to compel him to see a
deputation of women on the granting of suffrage to English women. She
won.
Irish prisoners have revived the hunger strike to compel either release
or trial of untried prisoners and have Lyon. As I write, almost a
hundred Irish prisoners detained by England for alleged nationalist
activities, but not brought to trial, hunger struck to freedom. As a
direct result of this specific hunger strike England has promised a
renovation of her practices in dealing with Irish rebels.
And so it was that when we came to the adoption of this accelerating
tactic, we had behind us more precedents for winning our point than for
losing. We were strong in the knowledge that we could “fast on”
President Wilson and his powerful Administration, and compel him to act
or “fast back.”
Among the prisoners who with Alice Paul led the hunger strike was a
very picturesque figure, Rose Winslow (Ruza Wenclawska) of New York,
whose parents had brought her in infancy from Poland to become a
citizen of “free” America. At eleven she was put at a loom in a
Pennsylvania mill, where she wove hosiery for fourteen hours a day
until tuberculosis claimed her at nineteen. A poet by nature she
developed her mind to the full in spite of these disadvantages, and
when she was forced to abandon her loom she became an organizer for the
Consumers’ League, and later a vivid and eloquent power in the suffrage
movement.
Her group preceded Miss Paul’s by about a week in prison.
These vivid sketches of Rose Winslow’s impressions while in the prison
hospital were written on tiny scraps of paper and smuggled out to us,
and to her husband during her imprisonment. I reprint them in their
original form with cuts but no editing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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