TY - JOUR
AU - Vessey,, David
AB - Abstract This article considers how national newspapers reported, portrayed, and narrated the militant suffragism of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Using three popular newspapers, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, and the Daily Mirror and the specific case study of hunger strikes and the government’s response of forcible feeding, it evaluates the various tropes that characterized press coverage of the suffragettes. It investigates how militancy, an approach that prioritized spectacle, was covered in an emerging medium that sought to recast politics in a new and spectacular fashion, thereby extending understanding of how the style and content of popular newspapers evolved in the first decade of the twentieth century. In doing so, it expands existing research into the dynamics of the nascent popular press and its function as an ‘arena’ for fostering extra-parliamentary political debate. The WSPU attempted to take advantage of this opportunity to promote its own arguments on forcible feeding and female suffrage, using correspondence columns and prisoner testimony to elicit empathy, albeit with only sporadic success in receiving a sympathetic hearing from a hostile press, with enmity a consistent feature of editorial argument. Nevertheless, the article concludes that responses to hunger strikes and forcible feeding in the popular press were multifaceted, and whilst the WSPU was unable to reframe patriarchal narratives of political activism, it persisted with words as well as deeds in seeking to co-opt newspapers into its campaign and garner publicity for its cause. In My Own Story, her autobiographical account of the years before the First World War, Emmeline Pankhurst claimed that the British press, whilst hostile to the methods of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), nevertheless respected the organization’s commitment to the cause of votes for women. ‘The newspaper correspondents’, she wrote in reference to the nascent phase of the WSPU’s campaign and their interventions in by-elections, ‘were not so reluctant to acknowledge our influence. Even when they condemned our policy, they were unsparing in their admiration for our energy, and the courage and ardour of our workers’.1 This assessment of the WSPU’s role is no great surprise: the book was originally published in 1914 as a series of articles in Good Housekeeping magazine with the aim of raising funds from sympathetic readers in the USA, and it was necessary to legitimize militancy—‘Deeds not words’—against the obduracy of Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government.2 Hence, My Own Story had a concurrent propaganda purpose beyond retelling Pankhurst’s extraordinary life: it was an attempt to retain the initiative in the public relations battle that underpinned the WSPU’s activities, and her statement on press coverage should be seen in this light. For historians, this raises two fundamental questions: how effective was the Union’s media strategy, and what role did newspapers play in publicizing (or disparaging) the suffrage cause? My Own Story also represented the first draft of history in reaffirming the WSPU’s contribution to the achievement of female suffrage, a project that was subsequently expanded by the release of memoirs from other members of the Pankhurst family. Freed from the obligation to influence contemporary public opinion against the backdrop of an active campaign, these accounts still made similar claims about the press. Writing in 1931, Sylvia Pankhurst, although somewhat introspective about the application of militant tactics, still perceived a more supportive tenor to press coverage in the years before the war: ‘a great change was revealing itself in the Press; no longer were the women represented as demented harridans; expressions of admiration for their fortitude crept into the descriptive reports, and even the anti-suffrage editorials were not without their tributes of respect’.3 Likewise, Christabel Pankhurst’s Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote, originally published in 1959, detected a notable shift in press attitudes by 1911, conceding that ‘We were a good deal denounced by some newspapers for our renewed militancy’ but also believing that ‘others began to understand and sometimes even to acknowledge the method in our work’.4 As these autobiographies make clear, press coverage was a primary objective of the WSPU in its campaign to win the vote. Without it, militant tactics were denied the oxygen of publicity, the government could evade scrutiny, and the wider public, the majority of whom remained unaffected by the Union’s actions, could retain a measure of disconnected, neutral ambiguity on the suffrage question. Emmeline Pankhurst noted of 1913–4, when militancy increased in ferocity via acts of bombing and arson, ‘Questions were asked daily, in the press, in the House of Commons, everywhere …. People began to place that responsibility where it belonged, at the doors of the Government, rather than at our own’.5 This claim, notwithstanding the dual motivations of propaganda and posterity, would seem to indicate success in the first part of the WSPU’s media strategy: forcing the agenda and demanding press attention, both integral to militancy from its inception. Or, as Lisa Tickner has concisely explained, ‘they did not mind if the publicity was unfavourable so long as there was noise’.6 However, the second part of this strategy—framing the narrative and influencing discourse on gendered political activism and representation; in effect, deploying words as well as deeds—raises greater doubts about the Union’s ability to extract concessions of legitimacy from the press and moderate established depictions of a patriarchal public sphere. Historiographical scholarship on the suffragettes (as the WSPU’s members became known) has belatedly become more diverse in recent decades. Militancy, it is now understood, had variegated meanings specific to the sociocultural context of Edwardian Britain, revealing more about the suffrage movement, its membership, and its interconnectedness beyond the campaign for the vote.7 However, this redefinition of militancy has not entirely shaken historians’ preoccupation with the ultimately unresolvable question of whether it helped or hindered the achievement of the franchise. Revisionist works, in particular, questioned the effectiveness of the WSPU by 1914, portraying an organization that was moribund and financially depleted.8 This has proven anathema to feminist historians of the suffrage movement, with revisionist accounts regarded as ‘rearguard reaction[s]’ against the challenge to ‘masculinist’ historiography.9 June Purvis, for example, has consistently used her work to defend militancy as necessary to dismantle the patriarchal basis of political discourse and compel a government response: ‘Without the deeds of the rebellious suffragettes, government ministers would not have debated, let alone granted, partial enfranchisement in 1918’.10 This argument has much to commend it, not least the idea of shaking Asquith, a man renowned for ‘wait and see’ impassiveness, from the lethargy of the status quo. Indeed, more generally, revisionism all too often tilts at historical windmills in circumscribing the WSPU’s agency before its campaign was halted by the war. Nevertheless, Purvis’s view still rests primarily on the correlation of militancy with a legislative outcome, and historians on both sides of the debate have often overlooked more immediate aims that prefaced the actual achievement of female suffrage. Jon Lawrence is a notable exception, acknowledging that the WSPU’s disruption of political meetings during by-elections had the objective of garnering national recognition rather than achieving ‘legitimacy’ by seeking to disturb the local political environment.11 Crucially, publicity could also be regarded as an end in itself and operate reciprocally as a ‘direct counterpart to militancy’.12 Over time, accomplishing ever more ostentatious demonstrations of political activism became necessary to realize this priority and guarantee exposure, more so than to confound government attempts to inhibit the WSPU. Spectacle was integral in capturing not just public awareness but that of popular daily newspapers, newly established media forms that themselves sought to reframe political discourse in innovative, spectacular ways. In effect, ‘militants became prisoners of their own attention seeking “public press” promotion’, and the escalating actions of the suffragettes make greater sense in this context, not as leverage against the government but as an ineluctable corollary to retaining press curiosity.13 This article focuses on newspaper coverage of the WSPU to analyse the extent to which the Union was able to influence the prevailing narrative. Historians have addressed this subject through studies of the WSPU’s own propaganda efforts in the suffrage press.14 John Mercer’s analysis of Votes for Women reveals a conscious effort to replicate the populist appeal of national dailies, whilst recognizing that press narratives had to be challenged ‘to ensure the benefits of increased publicity were not outweighed by negative interpretations’, thereby ‘confront[ing] apparent press prejudice by marketing an alternative source of suffrage news to a large audience’.15 The WSPU itself claimed that Votes for Women was essential to ‘correct and amplify the reports of the daily press’, but as autobiographical accounts make clear, the Union also sought to co-opt mainstream newspapers into its campaign, and this makes the relative absence of studies on the daily press and the suffragettes quite surprising.16 Sarah Pedersen’s work on Scotland and regional newspaper coverage is a valuable addition to the literature, as is Katherine Kelly’s research on the use of photography in London newspapers, examining the spectacle of marches by various suffrage groups.17 However, this still leaves the national popular press strangely under-represented in the historiography, something that this article seeks to redress. The article focuses on the specific case study of hunger strikes and the government’s response of forcible feeding to assess coverage of the WSPU in the popular press. Of all the tactics employed by the Union, hunger strikes presented arguably the starkest challenge to the patriarchal foundations of separate spheres ideology. As Barbara Green suggests, ‘In rejecting the plenitude, comfort, and nurturance attached to the domestic middle-class female body as well as refusing to display a pleasing image of womanhood, such feminist spectacles remade definitions of femininity and spectacularity altogether’.18 Accordingly, the WSPU’s use of hunger strikes are examined across two phases: initially, from July 1909 when Marion Wallace Dunlop became the first suffragette to refuse food as part of the demand for first division status as political prisoners; and secondly, after the introduction of the 1913 Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act, more commonly known as the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’, which allowed inmates to recover their health on licence before being reinterned. These two phases are considered through analysis of the three newspapers that led the development of the popular press: the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, and the Daily Mirror, founded respectively in 1896, 1900, and 1903. Taken collectively, these papers pioneered the implementation of the ‘new journalism’ in the daily press, embracing sensationalism and amusement, and moving newspapers’ relationship with the public beyond the more solemn ‘educational ideal’ of the second half of the nineteenth century and towards the ‘representative ideal’ that ‘conveyed the opinions, wants, or needs of readers’.19 Breaking with stylistic traditions and adopting the various features of the ‘new journalism’—including coverage of crime, sport, scandal, and human-interest stories—did not mean abandoning politics, and despite their primary role as commercial ventures, popular newspapers were not insubstantial diversions from more meaningful engagement with political affairs. As Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy have written, perceptions of the popular press are often based on ‘the assumption that most people are not very interested in the detail of Westminster politics’, when instead, ‘newspapers were simply adapting their content to an audience whose education was often limited, and many of whom unsurprisingly viewed politics as an elite activity conducted by “them” rather than “us.”’20 The popular press, therefore, changed the dynamics of political discourse; far from being apolitical, it challenged the hegemony of the parliamentary system and established party apparatus ‘and [was] often disrespectful while doing so’.21 The Daily Mail, under the ownership of Alfred Harmsworth (ennobled Lord Northcliffe in 1905), led the field in creating the new daily, commercialized style that characterized the popular press. Sold for just a halfpenny, the Mail was cheaper than existing competitors, and Northcliffe benefited from the long-term consequences of the 1870 Education Act that established school provision on a national basis, boosting literacy rates and allowing the Mail to become ‘the busy man’s daily newspaper’ for a growing lower middle-class readership.22 Despite this self-assigned epithet, the Mail’s audience also included women, and Northcliffe was assiduous in targeting female readers through women’s pages and serialized fiction to capitalize on increased advertising revenue.23 By 1910, the Mail had a daily circulation of around 900,000, vastly outstripping more established rivals outside of the popular press (the Daily Telegraph had the largest market share with a circulation of 230,000).24 Tellingly, the Mail also coined the term suffragette in 1906 to describe the WSPU’s members, demonstrating its efforts to connect the public with political issues on a more relatable, light-hearted, or for detractors, trivial basis. The Daily Mirror, whilst also a Northcliffe creation, developed along different lines to the Mail. Initially, and in the somewhat derisive words of Hugh Cudlipp, the Mirror’s future editorial director, the paper was to be ‘produced by ladies of breeding … for ladies with the desire to ape new fashions, the leisure to hunt and travel, and the means to squander a thousand pounds a year on luxury’.25 However, disastrous circulation figures—from 265,217 for the first issue down to 24,000 in subsequent months—led to an early relaunch of the paper in January 1904.26 The first editor, Mary Howarth, was replaced by Hamilton Fyfe, who described the task of sacking the all-female staff as ‘a horrid experience, like drowning kittens’, but the Mirror survived and thrived, reaching a circulation of 630,000 by 1910 and achieving the world’s largest daily sale by 1914 after its reincarnation as a pictorial paper aimed at middle-class men and women.27 For Fyfe, pictures were essential to the paper’s new breezy ethos: ‘Everything in the Daily Mirror was calculated to be easy of absorption by the most ordinary intelligence’.28 Perhaps for this reason, the Mirror was regarded as ‘low-brow’ by some commentators despite its success beyond 1904.29 The Daily Express was founded by Arthur Pearson in April 1900, and it immediately signified its innovativeness by rejecting industry norms and printing news stories on its front page rather than advertisements. Readers of the new venture were informed about the success of the Queen’s recent visit to Ireland, fatal forest fires in North America, and the latest update on the ongoing Boer War in southern Africa.30 This latter story represented the embodiment of the paper’s editorial position that endured throughout subsequent decades and the change to Lord Beaverbrook’s ownership. Pearson was unabashed in stating, ‘Our policy is patriotic; our policy is the British Empire’.31 This helped in fostering a mass readership across class divides—reaching a daily circulation of 400,000 by 1910—and the Express developed a distinct market position, occupying what has been described as ‘the middle ground between the solid comment of the “heavies” and the shock tactics of the sensational Press’.32 Commercial newspapers were not simply cultural products that the public passively consumed, and historians need to challenge the preconception of a purely transactional relationship where readers benignly gravitated towards the paper that reaffirmed their existing political views. Instead, as Adrian Bingham has rightly argued, popular newspapers were ‘sites of an ongoing discursive contest’, even more so in their coverage of gender in the Edwardian period.33 Viewed on this basis, we should see newspapers as ‘arenas’ where contributors could voice competing arguments, and where readers were active participants in a more accessible form of political discourse than had heretofore been possible.34 This was not necessarily driven by noble motives; ‘if one primary aim of newspapers was to relay the news, another was to generate controversy and “talking points.”’35 Extending a story through editorial coverage or correspondence columns kept readers hooked, maintaining or increasing a paper’s circulation and expanding its revenue. Nevertheless, this approach broadened the scope of political debate and provided a forum for women—whether pro-suffrage or otherwise—to interpose in the predominantly patriarchal public sphere. In short, popular newspapers gave women ‘an important foothold in the male-dominated national press, ensuring both a greater visibility and opportunities to voice their concerns’.36 Analysis of the Mail, the Express, and the Mirror, therefore, allows consideration of how newspapers engaged with the suffragettes and fulfilled their desire for publicity. More broadly, this study also reveals how the popular press developed the style and techniques that became embedded in tabloid journalism in subsequent decades. None of the three papers condoned the WSPU’s militant actions, but with the exception of the Express, they did periodically sympathize with the ordeal of imprisoned women and challenge the application of forcible feeding. This was motivated more by commercial imperatives and the pursuit of ‘talking points’ than the papers’ respective political agendas; indeed, criticism of the suffragettes remained entrenched and identifiable via four distinct tropes. These can be grouped together as: the dismissal of female offenders as mentally frail or hysterical; gendered responses that sought to preserve women’s established status within separate spheres ideology; more pragmatic concerns for the operation of the law; and arguments that rested on constitutionality, lamenting the WSPU’s unlawful methods relative to the peaceful approach of other organizations. Ultimately, the prevalence of these recurrent themes in press narratives suggests the WSPU’s lack of influence in reframing the portrayal of their campaign. Nevertheless, it is clear that the popular press was occasionally conflicted in its response to the suffragettes, showing a willingness to explore a nuanced middle ground between the binaries of affinity or outright hostility, and reflecting the conjunction of an evolving medium and new, often bewildering tactics of political activism. The First Phase of Hunger Strikes from September 1909 The first use of hunger strikes initially prompted a constrained reaction in the popular press. After Marion Wallace Dunlop’s arrest and 1-month sentence in June 1909, newspaper coverage was somewhat circumspect, in large part due to continued debate about David Lloyd George’s controversial People’s Budget, introduced at the end of April. Indeed, whilst Elizabeth Crawford has explicitly linked the Home Office’s decision to begin forcible feeding in September to negative press comment about the premature release of suffragette prisoners, the popular press was more impassive in its response, and the Express largely ignored the story altogether.37 The Mirror observed that the hunger strike was a ‘formidable’ method in propagating the WSPU’s cause, although it is noteworthy that the paper’s report ended with Dunlop’s own words: ‘I don’t advise anybody to follow my example’.38 In typically self-aggrandizing style, the Mail printed a tribute from Hugh B. Chapman, Chaplain of the Royal Chapel of the Savoy, who occasionally appeared on WSPU platforms. Chapman entreated, ‘Let The Daily Mail take up the gauntlet for these heroines, whether mistaken or not, and let it show that its sympathy with genuine devotion, like its circulation, is five times that of any other journal’.39 The introduction of forcible feeding—or ‘hospital treatment’ as it was euphemistically termed by the government—ignited more intensive public debate on hunger strikes. On being forcibly fed, Mary Leigh, the first recipient of the procedure in September 1909 after her arrest in Birmingham for throwing slates from a rooftop, recollected that ‘The drums of my ears seemed to be bursting. I could feel the pain to the end of the breast bone. When at last the tube was withdrawn it felt as if the back of my nose and throat were being torn out with it’.40 In a letter sent from Winson Green Prison to the Mail that established the WSPU’s framing of forcible feeding, Leigh described herself as ‘the one chosen by the Government to wreak their vengeance on’.41 However, the popular press was by no means immediately or wholeheartedly rallied by the suffering of Leigh and other suffragettes, despite the potent and ‘unambiguous’ statement of ‘political symbolism’ that some historians have assigned to the act.42 The Express, the most ardent supporter of a tough stance in dealing with the WSPU, relished Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone’s decision, proclaiming that forcible feeding would mean ‘no more mercy to hooligan suffragists’.43 This kind of belligerent language characterized the Express’ coverage. The paper went on to describe WSPU prisoners as ‘refractory characters’, and in a further report aimed at undermining the shift to militant tactics, it highlighted the case of an unnamed suffragette who had apparently ‘torn the ribbon bearing the words “Votes for women” from her shoulder’, renouncing her membership and instead returning to work in her former nursing institution.44 The Express also directly framed its response to the WSPU in the context of separate spheres ideology. One column written by the novelist Nowell Griffith entitled ‘Straight Talks: Women be Women’, used a sub-section labelled ‘Mad Leap’ to pose a series of rhetorical questions: ‘are you blooded in Statesmanship? No. Acquainted with great responsibility? No. Self-controlled? No. … Can you obey other women as men obey men? No. Can you trust one another or even yourselves? No’.45 This attempt to codify the domestic role of women by endowing patriarchal depictions of the public sphere with the legitimacy of authoritative views was a repeated theme of the Express’ coverage. Suffragettes were also subject to an ‘othering’ process, isolating them from the majority of Britain’s female population by dismissing them as hysterical. Ostensible praise for a peaceful, 10,000-strong march through London organized by the WSPU in June 1910 during a hiatus from militancy was still contextualized as ‘free from any of that hysteria which marked the earlier days of the movement’.46 Belief in the hysterical nature of militant suffragettes was also a common feature of correspondence columns. The Mirror’s ‘Through “the Mirror”’ column regularly included readers’ letters that emphasized this characterization; for example, ‘B.S.’ suggested that hunger-striking suffragettes ‘are neither martyrs nor heroines – simply unfortunate ladies suffering from a very bad attack of hysteria’.47 Like the Express, the Mirror’s readers also emphasized the prevailing domestic role expected of women. ‘One Who Likes Puddings’ from Putney offered the example of a wife at the Bermondsey by-election in October 1909 as best practice for women’s political involvement: ‘making her candidate the fittest in the field’ was how ‘woman really rules the game’, rather than intervening directly with ‘shouts and war-cries’.48 Alongside readers’ letters, the Mirror adopted the further technique of opining through seemingly factual reports on the treatment of WSPU prisoners, an approach that compensated for the paper’s lack of editorial argument on the issue. In December 1909, when Mary Leigh sued the Home Secretary, as well as the governor and medical officer of Winson Green Prison, for her treatment, the Mirror’s coverage of the court proceedings implied that the actions of the prison authorities were reasonable and justifiable: ‘Soon after the “strike” began Dr. Helby kindly, but firmly, took counter measures. He and another doctor, finding all other methods of persuasion fail, fed Mrs. Leigh by the nasal treatment’.49 In this manner, and whilst more matter-of-fact than its counterparts, the Mirror still made clear its support for forcible feeding as a deterrent against militancy. The Mail offered the most substantive engagement with the first phase of hunger strikes before the suspension of militancy in mid-1910. Although a firm supporter of forcible feeding, the paper encouraged a range of perspectives from both sides of the debate. An initial report in September with the revealing title ‘How to Escape from Gaol’ catalogued the names and number of suffragettes (by this point, totalling thirty-four) who had undergone a hunger strike and then been released from prison on grounds of ill health.50 This was followed by a triumphalist piece that welcomed the apparent success of forcible feeding, suggesting that ‘The use of a stomach pump for forcibly administering food has … now induced the women to take their food in the ordinary way’.51 However, just a few days later, the Mail printed a letter co-signed by the WSPU’s leadership that denounced the introduction of forcible feeding. The letter attacked ‘This new brutality on the part of the Government’ and suggested it would ‘fire women throughout the country to a still stronger purpose and more determined action’.52 Whilst seemingly counter-productive in light of the Mail’s hostility, this was part of the WSPU’s wider media strategy; using correspondence columns in nominally anti-suffrage newspapers to make the pro-suffrage case, thus making their argument stand apart as well as revealing the lack of ‘editorial gatekeeping’ in the national press.53 In mid-October, the Mail also printed the personal testimony of Mary Leigh, affording the WSPU a further opportunity to seize control of the narrative; in effect, ‘scripting the oppressor and giving a plot to the oppressed’ by offering a dichotomous representation of forcible feeding.54 Leigh’s words are solemn and unvarnished, allowing the Mail’s readers to imprint their own emotional reactions onto the experience: Great pain is experienced during the process, both mental and physical. One doctor inserted the end [of the tube] up my nostril while I was held down by the wardresses, during which they must have seen my pain, for the other doctor interfered (the matron and two of the wardresses were in tears), and they stopped.55 The Mail’s divergent presentation of forcible feeding reveals how political issues could be subordinated to the paper’s commercial ethos and the generation of ‘talking points’. Indeed, Northcliffe was adamant that his papers should ‘give all opinions’ to provoke debate, and this was reflected in the Mail’s coverage in the last four months of 1909.56 Beyond Leigh’s account, various stories and readers’ letters featured the tropes that were common across the popular press. On 30 September, a correspondent proposed the ‘simple plan’ to replace water with liquid forms of food, all to avoid the ‘absurd hysterics’ should ‘forcible feeding of prisoners influence public opinion in their favour’.57 Following the Express’ example, the Mail additionally promoted authoritative views to service its editorial stance. ‘Surgeon’ suggested that forcible feeding was at worst only ‘disagreeable’, and that ‘In skilled hands the passing of the tube involves neither risk nor pain’.58 In an attempt to trivialize the WSPU’s campaign, the Mail also recorded the treatment of Marion Wallace Dunlop at a meeting in Newport where a raucous crowd ignited sulphur, threw blocks of wood at the speakers, and induced panic with the rumour that rats had been released in the room.59 Providing column space to both pro- and anti-suffrage arguments demonstrates the Mail’s operation as a discursive political ‘arena’. The Mail was willing to publicize the WSPU’s protests against forcible feeding, including Mary’s Leigh’s horrific description of the traumas she endured in prison, since this constituted compelling news and stimulated debate. This also made commercial sense: the paper’s inclusion of features that appealed to women meant that exaggerated support for the government’s punitive response risked alienating sympathetic readers, but anti-suffragists were also placated by critical reports and correspondence. Hence, in considering initial responses to hunger strikes and forcible feeding, it is vital to set this in the broader context of developments in the popular press. From the perspective of the WSPU and its media strategy, press bias was an agglomeration of interlocking imperatives and not solely the by-product of insensate political attitudes. Press Responses to Heightened Militancy, 1911-12 With the failure of the Conciliation Bill in November 1911, the WSPU escalated its campaign of militant action, receiving, in turn, heightened publicity in the popular press. The Express, in particular, moved quickly to a more strident editorial position. In June 1912, the paper hesitated to reject the view that imprisoned suffragettes should be allowed to starve themselves to death, observing, ‘It may be argued that the best plan in these circumstances is to leave them alone, to starve for as long as they may choose’, before conceding that the law, as well as ‘the dictates of reason and humanity’, made this unconscionable.60 In proposing ‘A New Way with Women’, and encouraging Reginald McKenna, who had followed Herbert Gladstone and Winston Churchill as Home Secretary, towards a tougher response, the Express resorted to diametrically opposed binary distinctions of men’s apparent rationality to defend separate spheres ideology and vindicate the patriarchal basis of Edwardian politics. The perceived hysteria of suffragettes was, therefore, an essential trope in the paper’s attempt to marginalize the WSPU and undermine support for votes for women. Its leader column declared that ‘It is quite clear that these women are not entirely sane’, adding, ‘Hysteria has produced in them the monomaniac delusion that a constitutional cause can be won by criminal and stupid breaches of the peace …. A commission in lunacy seems a more fit tribunal for these women than a police court or the Old Bailey’.61 Another recurring theme—concern for the operation of the law—also led the Express to promote George Bernard Shaw’s perspective on forcible feeding. Shaw was a frequent interpolator in the public debate on votes for women, and whilst he was broadly sympathetic and often ridiculed the government’s handling of the issue, he used the imprisonment of Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans in Dublin after their attempt in mid-July 1912 to burn down the Theatre Royal (the site of a recent visit by Asquith) to propose a more uncompromising solution. Shaw wrote: My conclusion, therefore, is that if the prisoners in Mountjoy [Prison] are determined to commit suicide by starvation, they must be allowed to do so, and that the Government could not be held responsible for their deaths if it could convince the public that the prisoners had plenty of food within their reach. For Shaw, this constituted the ‘cold logic of the matter’ now that public safety (and his own livelihood) had come under threat.62 Shaw’s views were also publicized in the Mail, though in contrast to the Express, which seized on the ‘cold logic’ of the situation to support a firmer stance, the Mail’s coverage instead reaffirms its commitment to generating ‘talking points’ and acting as an ‘arena’ for representative political debate. A prima facie reading of the Mail’s portrayal of the WSPU in early 1912 indicates consistency with the rest of the popular press. An article by ‘A Tory’ assailed the ‘absurd disproportion’ of the suffragettes, suggesting that ‘Hysteria and a love of excitement account for the violence of the rank and file’, before ending with the warning that acquiescence in the face of the WSPU’s provocation would create a type of woman that was ‘glib, sly, and self-advertising’.63 In specifically responding to Shaw’s view on events in Dublin, the Mail’s editorial column commended his argument, stating ‘really there is a good deal to be said for his way of putting the case’, as well as endorsing forcible feeding to ensure that criminal sentences were not evaded.64 Nevertheless, throughout this period, the Mail remained willing to promote the views of WSPU members in correspondence columns, allowing suffragettes to present their arguments to a wider readership. In August 1912, a month before Shaw’s intervention, the paper printed a letter from Cicely Hamilton, playwright and co-founder of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League, entitled ‘Why I Became a Suffragette’. Hamilton ostensibly attenuated her appeal with a supplication to separate spheres ideology, conceding, ‘I believe that the male of the human species is, take him all in all, a more advanced, competent, and capable creature than his female relative’, but this was undoubtedly ironic rather than submissive, and she ended her letter by observing, ‘I am often moved to involuntary pity by the spectacle of the well-intentioned male staggering through life under the deadly burden which presses on his back – the burden of incompetent and helpless femininity’.65 The Mail additionally ran advertisements that exposed the inhumanity of forcible feeding. One example, printed on 17 April 1912, as well as in subsequent issues during the same week, was addressed to ‘Citizens of the British Empire!’ and rhetorically asked readers whether ‘we should follow the cruel practices prevailing in Russia, or those common in the Middle Ages?’66 The advertisement appeared in other newspapers such as The Times despite its anti-suffrage position, but not the Express, which subordinated the ‘arena’ function to its own editorial views. Like its rivals, the Mirror also expanded its engagement with the WSPU’s campaign. On 6 March, readers’ letters unanimously criticized the suffragettes. ‘An Englishwoman’ accused militant offenders of ‘disgracing womanhood’, described them as ‘maenads’ to question their soundness of mind and ended with a call for social segregation, demanding ‘Let them be branded and isolated as criminals’.67 A further letter from ‘N.L.J.’ believed that suffragettes had ‘unsexed themselves’ through their conduct, with the underlying implication that the threat to the domestic ideal was cause for graver concern than militant actions themselves.68 Additionally, other correspondents adopted the constitutionality trope, expressing sympathy for female enfranchisement but reviling the WSPU’s methods. ‘C.J.’ declared themselves ‘a keen believer in the granting of votes to women’ but viewed property damage in London as ‘wild and wanton’ and concluded with the refrain that ‘the cause I believed in is now as much wrecked as the glass which the mad women have shattered in our streets’.69 The Mirror also used its cartoonist and social satirist, W. K. Haselden, to deride the militant campaign of the suffragettes, reflecting a further technique in the popular press’ attempt to reframe political engagement for a mass readership. In Figure 1 titled ‘If Everybody Imitated the Suffragettes’, Haselden depicted the WSPU’s methods as an hysterical overreaction, again conveying the implicit judgement that men would never resort to such exaggerated demonstrations of political action by showing them doing just that. The associated caption read, ‘There would be a general window-breaking and pistol-firing on the part of all the cranks who are dissatisfied, for one reason or another, with the existing state of things’, inviting the Mirror’s readers to regard militancy as a dangerous aberration from the norms of civilized public conduct. Indeed, Haselden’s views on female suffrage continued into the 1920s with a long-running series of cartoons featuring the character Joy Flapperton, whose misadventures were used to condemn the social liberation of young women and inhibit progress towards the equalization of the franchise that was eventually achieved in 1928. This was the ‘new journalism’ in microcosm: political agitation reduced to caricature, and it allowed the Mirror to offer overt engagement with the activities of the suffragettes whilst maintaining a degree of editorial detachment, as befitted its status as a pictorial paper. For the WSPU, it meant that press attention was a double-edged sword: increased publicity did not necessarily mean engagement with the substance of its campaign. 'Organized Anarchy': The 'Cat and Mouse Act' and the Climax of Hunger Strikes From 1913 onwards, renewed focus on hunger strikes and forcible feeding with the introduction of the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ meant that pre-existing stylistic trends became refined and increasingly distinct in the approach of popular newspapers. For the Mail, this encompassed the continuation of a sympathetic hearing for suffragettes who endured forcible feeding, including printing in March the experience of Sylvia Pankhurst in analogous fashion to its earlier coverage of Mary Leigh’s ordeal. Sylvia wrote that ‘I could not endure forcible feeding any more. … Everything went dark. I must have cried out, because one of the officers of the hospital came to me to help me to get to bed’.70 Her recollection was cited in a subsequent editorial to reinforce the Mail’s concerns about the prospective ‘Cat and Mouse Act’. Pronouncing that the legislation ‘will not do’, the paper opined that the suffragettes were ‘misguided women’ but denounced the use of forcible feeding, describing the practice as ‘unbearable torment which is degrading to the community that inflicts it’.71 In the Mail’s case, the WSPU found a more obliging press partner in accepting and publicizing its narrative of forcible feeding. The Mail’s tacit accommodation with the WSPU’s portrayal of the prison experience was reflected in other features of the paper. In April, it printed a letter titled ‘Torture That Must be Stopped’ from Beatrice Harraden, founding member of the WSPU and author of the best-selling novel, Ships That Pass in the Night (1893). Harraden used the example of the USA to indict the situation in Britain, suggesting American ‘men, always able out there to see the woman’s point of view, would have more than met them half-way’.72 This was printed alongside a defence of forcible feeding from a correspondent in Hove, but later in the month, Harraden wrote a further article eulogizing the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst, describing her as ‘imperishable, indestructible’, ‘indomitable and unflinching’.73 Hunger strikes transcended the need to generate artificial ‘talking points’ to stimulate interest, and WSPU voices were accepted on equal terms with dissenting opinions, but the Mail’s more balanced approach could still be attenuated by facetious content. Shortly after Harraden’s article, the paper also ran adverts that depicted a refined woman being served by a waiter with the caption, ‘Don’t Hunger Strike, Take Beecham’s Pills’.74 In contrast to the Mail, the Express remained intransigent in its views. In March 1913, it printed a poem—‘The Little Suffragette’—which ridiculed the WSPU’s members. The third stanza referenced the suffragettes’ apparent abnegation of the domestic sphere, and the penultimate stanza, offering the contrast of ‘saner sisters’, further reinforced the recurrent trope of hysteria to delegitimize the campaign of the WSPU: She couldn’t light the kitchen fire, Of cooking had no notion; But with a can of paraffin She caused a great commotion. … Such idiotic actions make Her saner sisters pensive; Her antics would be silly if They were not so offensive.75 The Express’ leader columns also became even more uncompromising, and in February, it explicitly stated that hunger strikers should be left to die of starvation. In a scathing attack on constitutional groups such as the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, thereby conflating the militancy of the WSPU with the peaceful approach of others, the paper suggested that allowing suffragettes to commit suicide would have ‘a wholesome effect’.76 This stance was praised by many of the Express’ readers. One letter welcomed a zero-tolerance approach, suggesting ‘leave food within their reach, and let them be. If any one chose to commit suicide under these circumstances … bury her within the prison precincts, and the world will be none the worse for the loss of a lunatic’.77 Other correspondence expressed more temperate views but shared the common belief that suffragettes were ‘insane’ or ‘mad’.78 Increasingly, the Express also directed its ire at the government with a sustained attack on Reginald McKenna’s record as Home Secretary, arguing that the law needed to be defended at all costs. In an editorial on 1 March, the paper rejected the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ as a viable solution to the crisis and demanded McKenna’s replacement ‘by a man strong enough to risk odium in order to vindicate the law, strong enough to let the hunger striker perish, if necessary’.79 By May, the paper responded to the act’s introduction by likening McKenna to Frankenstein for creating a monster and then losing control of it, claiming ‘He has filled the land with released prisoners and has generally failed to recapture those who are subject to his cat-and-mouse regulations’.80 This criticism continued throughout the remainder of 1913 and into the following year. In July, the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ was labelled ‘a ludicrous fiasco’ as the paper attacked the cycle of protest, arrest, and release, and by October, a leader column suggested that ‘organized anarchy’ had prevailed due to the government’s failure to suppress militancy.81 These attacks culminated in June 1914 when the Express devoted its lead front-page story to the issue, claiming that ‘The Cat and Mouse Act has failed hopelessly’, before proposing ‘Penal servitude with its full rigours, ignoring hunger striking’ as the only solution to bring about an end to ‘the Great Shame’.82 The Express legitimized this more trenchant editorial stance by using the views of prominent public figures to present the impression of empirical argument. In the first instance, this involved selective use of views from the medical profession to defend the practice of forcible feeding. In February 1913, and in common with the Mail, the Express highlighted the remarks of Dr George Robertson, Physician Superintendent of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, who suggested that tube feeding was ‘not painful in the ordinary sense’.83 The Express also championed the American food writer, Horace Fletcher, and his belief that abstinence from food had curative effects even after 30 or 40 days. The link with the suffragettes was made explicit with Fletcher’s statement that ‘All that is necessary to do is to leave the prisoners to enjoy their dietary rest, and make no more ado about it than if they chose to skip a single meal’. Fletcher further claimed that this would have positive effects on the ‘other diseases which make women ugly and disagreeable’.84 Pseudo-scientific opinion even became conjoined with popular eugenic theory to suggest that the actions of the WSPU were not just threatening the domestic ideal but debasing Britain’s womanhood more generally. The Express printed the comments of William T. Sedgwick, Professor of Biology and Public Health at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who described militant suffragettes as ‘half-women’, before stating that their actions would precipitate a revolution that ‘would mean a degeneration and a degradation of human fibre which would turn back the hands of time a thousand years’.85 Just weeks before the outbreak of the First World War, a short front-page report covering the remarks of Hans Friedenthal, Professor at Berlin University, went a stage further, highlighting his belief that female enfranchisement, or ‘brain work’ of any kind, would ‘cause [women] to become bald, while increasing masculinity and contempt for beauty will induce the growth of hair on the face’.86 Fears about the future of the British race and concerns that ‘the new woman’ (a term coined by Irish feminist writer Sarah Grand in 1894 to describe the increasing personal, social and economic autonomy enjoyed by some women) had relinquished her maternal role were used by the Express to defend separate spheres ideology, resuscitating fin-de-siècle discourse by perpetuating patriarchal opinion over objective scientific thought. The depth of the Express’ hostility was not replicated across the popular press. The Mail, in particular, changed its view on the government’s attempt to resolve hunger strikes. Satisfied that forcible feeding would only be applied in isolated cases where release might endanger public safety, the Mail praised McKenna in its editorial column as well as promoting its own role in forcing the concession.87 Thereafter, the paper became an enthusiastic supporter of the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’. In June 1913, the Mail predicted, ‘if the Act is applied with patience and firmness – if, that is to say, all offenders who “hunger strike” are reincarcerated the moment they have recovered health – the law will sooner or later triumph’.88 Ten days later, a leader column made the confident claim that the WSPU had been reduced to ‘a small knot of the leaders’ and stated that the act had brought about ‘a trial of patience from which the law emerges triumphant’.89 By March 1914, when Mary Richardson achieved notoriety with her attack on Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, the Mail remained bullish, still suggesting, ‘There is ample evidence that the “Cat and Mouse” Act is steadily crushing the militant Suffragette movement’.90 This transformation in attitude reveals conformity to the ‘representative ideal’, reflecting a groundswell of broader discomfort towards forcible feeding that was partially ameliorated by support for the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’. Evident satisfaction with ‘crushing’ the WSPU also shows the complexity of the Mail’s coverage, limiting pathos to the individual suffering caused by forcible feeding. The Mirror adopted more novel methods in its reports on the suffragettes but emulated the Express by questioning a range of ‘public men and women’ to provide the semblance of authoritative opinion. This piece also emphasized concerns derived from eugenic thought. A doctor expressed his fears for ‘the decay of the mother-instinct’, which he believed ‘will have a seriously injurious influence on future generations’.91 Other apparent experts, such as ‘a specialist in women’s ailments’, suggested that suffragettes’ ‘brains have become disordered and their minds bewildered by repeated explosions of emotions which the ordinary woman keeps under strict control’.92 Arrest and prosecution through the criminal justice system would, the ‘specialist’ believed, only exacerbate women’s neuroses even further. However, the Mirror largely evaded substantive engagement with the wider debate on forcible feeding; instead, its reports concentrated on the appearance of WSPU members rather than evaluating their words and arguments. The paper’s commentary on Emmeline Pankhurst’s trial for criminal conspiracy in April 1913 after the attack on Lloyd George’s house at Walton Heath was one such example of this trend, demonstrating an almost obsessive attention to detail: Mrs. Pankhurst wore a black velvet dress, with a square cut white lace collar, and a black hat trimmed with yellow braid. A wardress, with blue-trimmed cap, sat behind her, a little to her right, and two police officers also sat in the spacious dock. Immediately before her, in the well of the court … sat a girl shorthand writer in a bright blue hat, taking a verbatim note of the proceedings with an extremely short yellow pencil.93 In large part, this reflected the Mirror’s greater interest in spectacle rather than meaningful political debate, and the paper further began to narrate disturbances at WSPU meetings in breathless fashion, indicating immediacy through staccato, truncated sentences, as with the following example from July 1913: The detective, still clinging to his prisoner, was pushed into the room. Another plain-clothes detective came to his assistance. A woman switched off the electric light. And for three or four minutes there was a desperate struggle on the floor. The electric radiator was smashed. The furniture was upset. Papers were strewn in all directions. A quantity of money was swept from the manager’s desk upon the carpet. Hats, coats and dresses were torn, and there were many wounded on both sides.94 These stylistic techniques presented a more vivid description of the suffragettes’ activities for the Mirror’s readership, but they also attempted to show how suffrage campaigners had strayed beyond accepted norms in social conduct, violently so in this instance, and by extension distanced themselves from the domestic sphere. This discomfort at the blurring of gender boundaries ran across the Mirror’s coverage of the WSPU despite its more matter-of-fact style. The Express went further still in its defence of gender conventions, and the paper’s use of language was crucial to this aim. Most commonly, the Express used the prefix ‘malignant’ to refer to the suffragettes, indicating malevolence and virulence in their actions. Thus, a leader column from May 1913 proclaimed, ‘The malignants have killed woman suffrage for a generation’.95 Additionally, when Emily Wilding Davison was struck by the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby, the Express described her as ‘a well-known malignant suffragette’, having labelled Emmeline Pankhurst as the ‘leader of the malignants’ just a few days earlier.96 Indeed, the term became almost ubiquitous in the Express’ coverage of the WSPU in the years before the First World War. By May 1914, the Express’ intent became even more conspicuous when it refused to use the gender-specific pronoun to describe militant suffragettes, thereby stripping them of their femininity. Instead, ‘It’ was used repeatedly in a report about the heckling of the King during a theatre visit: Soon after the curtain had risen at His Majesty’s Theatre a ‘woman’ rose from a seat in the stalls and shouted. There was a special staff ready, and It was quickly bundled out. Two other interruptions followed, and in the second case the interrupter was found to be chained to Its seat. It shouted twice in the direction of the royal box, ‘You’re a Russian Czar’, before a detective placed his hand on Its mouth. It promptly bit him. Later, however, it mumbled a promise that It would shout no more. It was released, but immediately broke Its promise and shouted again. In a few moments a carpenter arrived, the arm of the tip-up seat was removed, and the interrupter was hustled out.97 This trait of defeminization appeared again a few days later in coverage of the court hearing of suffragette Nellie Hall: Meanwhile Nellie Hall was struggling and yelling like a maniac. … It flung Itself backwards and forwards, with the police clinging to It, and punctuated Its struggles by repeating the cry: ‘I will not be tried!’ With its hat torn from Its head, Its hair dishevelled and Its blouse disarranged, It continued to fling Itself backwards, and once It almost fell over the rear rail of the dock.98 Through this technique, the Express conveyed its belief that the suffragettes had relinquished their womanhood by abjuring their role in the domestic sphere and entering the masculine fray of political activism. This was a view that was no doubt shared across the popular press more broadly, but neither the Mail nor the Mirror came close to the Express’ aggressive censure of the WSPU. Indeed, the paper’s willingness to countenance the deaths of starving suffragettes in prison reflected its staunch defence of the status quo in gender relations and its unease at a political arena that had already been irreversibly transformed. Conclusion All three newspapers examined by this article were opposed to militant suffragism, and their reactions to hunger strikes and forcible feeding were undoubtedly influenced by an overarching distaste for women’s participation in more forceful political activism. Across the period, the popular press habitually framed criticisms of the WSPU using four distinct tropes. Suffragettes were consistently dismissed as hysterical, which had the advantage of undermining their suitability for the vote as well as differentiating them from the mass of female opinion in the wider country. They were also maligned for their rejection of the domestic sphere which, the press believed, was proven by their disorderly intervention into political affairs. Two related tropes, flouting the law and the unconstitutional nature of the WSPU’s tactics, were also particularly evident in press coverage. Such persistent recourse to these characterizations of the suffragettes suggests a lack of success in the second part of the Union’s media strategy and its inability to conclusively reframe mainstream newspaper narratives. Nevertheless, despite this ostensible failing, one newspaper did respond in a more multifaceted way to hunger strikes and forcible feeding. The Mail was an initial supporter of forcible feeding, but by 1914, the paper opposed its continued use to deal with starving suffragettes. In doing so, it proved sympathetic to their plight by printing first-hand accounts, effectively ceding authority for the overarching narrative of the prison ordeal to the WSPU. In doing so, the Mail was no doubt motivated by the diverse range of views amongst its 900,000 readers; however, its broader function as an ‘arena’ for promulgating competing arguments allowed the suffragettes space to interject in the public debate. In contrast, the Express was a consistent opponent of the WSPU and stubbornly adhered to this position throughout the pre-war period. It was the only newspaper of the three that explicitly supported allowing starving suffragettes to die in prison, and it did so with a vehemence that suggests an intractable belief in separate spheres ideology. Finally, the Mirror occupied a more nebulous position than its rivals. It maintained a certain distance in its coverage of the suffragettes as a product of its pictorial status, but the Mirror’s more limited coverage and matter-of-fact style of reporting still serviced an unsympathetic reaction to hunger strikes and the WSPU more generally. These distinctive editorial positions were enabled by innovations in style and approach that evinced the wider evolution of the popular press in the early twentieth century. As a pictorial paper, the Mirror was more concerned with spectacle than substantive political engagement, and in the second phase of militancy, it indulged its readers with graphic descriptions of suffragette violence that owed a greater debt to fiction writing than more conventional newspaper reports. The Express also used language in a novel way, in its case to delegitimize the WSPU rather than to engage its readers. By referring to suffragettes as ‘It’, the Express denied them their female identity and reinforced its belief that these women had repudiated the domestic sphere. This was allied with repeated reference to purported experts to further question the femininity and sanity of the suffragettes. In comparison, the Mail, whilst equally eager to generate ‘talking points’ and satisfy public curiosity with stories that defied accepted conventions, offered the sincerest response to hunger strikes. As a concession to its more aspirant readership, the Mail remained critical of the WSPU without seeking to alienate moderate opinion, and it engaged with a broader range of views than other newspapers. The popular press’ attraction to the WSPU’s campaign stemmed from a felicitous combination of mutual interests. The suffragettes strove to raise public awareness through acts of spectacle; in turn, popular newspapers sought to recast conventional political discourse in a new, spectacular fashion. This symbiotic relationship rested on attempts to identify and mobilize public opinion throughout the long nineteenth century. As James Thompson has written, ‘Members of the public were not … to be passive consumers of ideas, but rather active participants in an engaged debate’, and this included women despite the greater precariousness of their status in Edwardian society.99 Newspapers were ‘integral’ to this process of reframing narratives towards a recognizable body of public opinion, and the popular press upheld this transformation alongside expanding coverage of extra-political affairs.100 The efforts of the suffragettes sit within this conceptual framework. Hunger strikes—acts of solitude and private sacrifice, not public displays of protest and defiance—could still service the WSPU’s media agenda by propounding unfavourable narratives of forcible feeding and ‘restaging spectacular events in discourse’.101 In turn, newspapers covered the self-starvation of suffragettes since it generated ‘talking points’ and garnered interest, re-presenting the seclusion of the prison experience as second-hand public spectacle, even in instances where actual sympathy was lacking. The popular press reacted to hunger strikes and forcible feeding with a mixture of fascination and hostility, but it did so in the knowledge that readers sought lively engagement with political affairs and had their own instinctive prejudices that needed to be catered to. Responses to the WSPU were therefore filtered through a range of competing political, commercial, and journalistic demands. In this respect, and however distasteful the press often found the suffragettes, they were good for business, and newspapers were more than willing to supply the WSPU with the publicity that it craved. If this was not always favourable to the Union—if it could not always successfully influence the narrative through words having captured the public’s imagination through deeds—then this was a secondary consideration. In securing publicity, the essence of the WSPU’s media strategy, the suffragettes achieved their immediate objective, thereby vindicating militancy in the contemporary present as much as the subsequent historical record. Figure 1: Open in new tabDownload slide W.K. Haselden, ‘If Everybody Imitated the Suffragettes’, Daily Mirror, 6 March 1912, 7. Figure 1: Open in new tabDownload slide W.K. Haselden, ‘If Everybody Imitated the Suffragettes’, Daily Mirror, 6 March 1912, 7. The author would like to thank Adrian Bingham for his encouragement and invaluable advice on earlier drafts of this article. Copyright for W. K. Haselden’s Daily Mirror cartoon has been obtained, thanks to a research grant from the University of Sheffield’s Department of History. Footnotes 1 Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story (London, 2015), 82. 2 June Purvis and Maureen Wright, ‘Writing Suffragette History: The Contending Autobiographical Narratives of the Pankhursts’, Women’s History Review, 14 (2005), 409–10. 3 Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (Milton Keynes, 2010), 309. 4 Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (London, 1987), 193. 5 Pankhurst, Own Story, 310–1. 6 Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–14 (Chicago, 1988), 59. 7 See Jon Lawrence, ‘Contesting the Male Polity: The Suffragettes and the Politics of Disruption in Edwardian Britain’, in Amanda Vickery, ed., Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford, California, 2001), 201–26; June Purvis, ‘The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain’, Women’s History Review, 4 (1995), 103–33; Krista Cowman, ‘“The Stone Throwing Has Been Forced Upon Us”: The Function of Militancy within the Liverpool WSPU, 1906–1914’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 145 (1996), 171–92; Laura E. Nym Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930 (Oxford, 2003). 8 See Andrew Rosen, Rise Up, Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union, 1903–1914 (London, 1974); Brian Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1982); Martin Pugh, The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage, 1866–1914 (Oxford, 2000); Christopher Bearman, ‘An Examination of Suffragette Violence’, English Historical Review, 120 (2005), 365–97 . 9 June Purvis, ‘Gendering the Historiography of the Suffragette Movement in Edwardian Britain: Some Reflections’, Women’s History Review, 22 (2013), 585. For examples of feminist historiography, see Sandra Stanley Holton, Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London, 1996); Maroula Joannou and June Purvis, eds, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives (Manchester, 1998); June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton, eds, Votes for Women (London, 2000); June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (London, 2002); Krista Cowman, Women of the Right Spirit: Paid Organisers of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), 1904–18 (Manchester, 2011). 10 June Purvis, ‘The Suffragette and Women’s History’, Women’s History Review, 14 (2005), 358. 11 Lawrence, ‘Contesting’, 210. 12 John Mercer, ‘Media and Militancy: Propaganda in the Women’s Social and Political Union’s Campaign’, Women’s History Review, 14 (2005), 483. 13 Jane Chapman, ‘The Argument of the Broken Pane: Suffragette Consumerism and Newspapers’, Media History, 2 (2015), 242. 14 See Maria Dicenzo, ‘Militant Distribution: Votes for Women and the Public Sphere’, Media History, 6 (2000), 115–28; Chapman, ‘The Argument’, 238-51 . 15 John Mercer, ‘Making the News: Votes for Women and the Mainstream Press’, Media History, 10 (2004), 189, 196. 16 Mercer, ‘Media and Militancy’, 473. 17 Sarah Pedersen, The Scottish Suffragettes and the Press (Basingstoke, 2017); Katherine Kelly, ‘Seeing Through Spectacles: The Women’s Suffrage Movement and London Newspapers, 1906–13’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 11 (2004), 327–53. 18 Barbara Green, Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905–1938 (New York, 1997), 4. 19 Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana, 2004), 9. 20 Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy, Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present (Oxford, 2015), 63. 21 Bingham and Conboy, Tabloid Century, 64. 22 Mick Temple, The British Press (Maidenhead, 2008), 28–9. 23 Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford, 2004), 18–9. 24 David Butler and Gareth Butler, British Political Facts (New York, 2010), 573. Figures for 1910 are taken from T. B. Browne’s Advertiser’s ABC. 25 Hugh Cudlipp, Publish and be Damned! The Astonishing Story of the Daily Mirror (Brighton, 2009), 23. 26 Cudlipp, Publish, 24. 27 Cudlipp, Publish, 25; Butler and Butler, British Political Facts, 573. 28 Chris Horrie, Tabloid Nation: From the Birth of the Mirror to the Death of the Tabloid (London, 2003), 24. 29 Bingham, Gender, 36. 30 Daily Express, 24 April 1900, 1. 31 Robert Allen, Voice of Britain: The Inside Story of the Daily Express (Cambridge, 1983), 16. 32 Butler and Butler, British Political Facts, 573; Allen, Voice of Britain, 17. 33 Bingham, Gender, 11. 34 Bingham, Gender, 16. 35 Bingham, Gender, 52. 36 Bingham, Gender, 28. 37 Elizabeth Crawford, ‘Police, Prisons and Prisoners: The View from the Home Office’, Women’s History Review, 14 (2005), 500. 38 Daily Mirror, 9 July 1909, 4. 39 Daily Mail, 23 July 1909, 8. 40 Pankhurst, Own Story, 144. 41 Daily Mail, 30 September 1909, 5. 42 Lawrence, ‘Contesting’, 222. 43 Daily Express, 24 September 1909, 1. 44 Daily Express, 25 September 1909, 1. 45 Daily Express, 28 December 1909, 1. 46 Daily Express, 20 June 1910, 5. 47 Daily Mirror, 18 October 1909, 9. 48 Daily Mirror, 26 October 1909, 7. 49 Daily Mirror, 10 December 1909, 4. 50 Daily Mail, 9 September 1909, 8. 51 Daily Mail, 24 September 1909, 7. 52 Daily Mail, 29 September 1909, 7. 53 Sarah Pedersen, ‘The Appearance of Women’s Politics in the Correspondence Pages of Aberdeen Newspapers, 1900–14’, Women’s History Review, 11 (2004), 659. 54 Green, Spectacular Confessions, 88. 55 Daily Mail, 12 October 1909, 5. 56 Bingham, Gender, 53. 57 Daily Mail, 30 September 1909, 5. 58 Daily Mail, 5 October 1909, 4. 59 Daily Mail, 26 November 1909, 8. 60 Daily Express, 29 June 1912, 4. 61 Daily Express, 29 June 1912, 4. 62 Daily Express, 17 September 1912, 5. 63 Daily Mail, 15 January 1912, 4. 64 Daily Mail, 18 September 1912, 4. 65 Daily Mail, 6 August 1912, 4. 66 Daily Mail, 17 April 1912, 10. 67 Daily Mirror, 6 March 1912, 7. 68 Daily Mirror, 6 March 1912, 7. 69 Daily Mirror, 6 March 1912, 7. 70 Daily Mail, 26 March 1913, 5. 71 Daily Mail, 27 March 1913, 4. 72 Daily Mail, 2 April 1913, 7. 73 Daily Mail, 10 April 1913, 6. 74 Daily Mail, 18 April 1913, 11. 75 Daily Express, 1 March 1913, 4. 76 Daily Express, 21 February 1913, 4. 77 Daily Express, 25 February 1913, 4. 78 Daily Express, 25 February 1913, 4. 79 Daily Express, 1 March 1913, 4. 80 Daily Express, 22 May 1913, 4. 81 Daily Express, 22 July 1913, 4; Daily Express, 10 October 1913, 4. 82 Daily Express, 4 June 1914, 1. 83 Daily Express, 25 February 1913, 4. 84 Daily Express, 28 April 1913, 4. 85 Daily Express, 30 January 1914, 2. 86 Daily Express, 13 July 1914, 1. 87 Daily Mail, 3 April 1913, 8. 88 Daily Mail, 27 June 1913, 4. 89 Daily Mail, 7 July 1913, 7. 90 Daily Mail, 14 March 1914, 3. 91 Daily Mirror, 22 February 1913, 3. 92 Daily Mirror, 5 March 1913, 5. 93 Daily Mirror, 3 April 1913, 3. 94 Daily Mirror, 22 July 1913, 5. 95 Daily Express, 7 May 1913, 7. 96 Daily Express, 5 June 1913, 1; Daily Express, 31 May 1913, 1. 97 Daily Express, 23 May 1914, 1. 98 Daily Express, 27 May 1914, 5. 99 James Thompson, British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘Public Opinion’, 1867–1914 (Cambridge, 2013), 244-5. 100 Thompson, British Political Culture, 245–6. 101 Green, Spectacular Confessions, 88. © The Author(s) [2020]. 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TI - Words as well as Deeds: The Popular Press and Suffragette Hunger Strikes in Edwardian Britain
JF - Twentieth Century British History
DO - 10.1093/tcbh/hwaa031
DA - 0013-02-09
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/words-as-well-as-deeds-the-popular-press-and-suffragette-hunger-ftzWdzoal0
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EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
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DP - DeepDyve
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