My own story
sat at a table, ready to take an inventory of my effects. Obeying an
order to undress, I took off my gown, then paused. "Take off
everything," was the next order. "Everything?" I faltered. It seemed
impossible that they expected me to strip. In fact, they did allow me to
take off my last garments in the shelter of a bath-room. I shivered
myself into some frightful underclothing, old and patched and stained,
some coarse, brown woollen stockings with red stripes, and the hideous
prison dress stamped all over with the broad arrow of disgrace. I fished
a pair of shoes out of a big basket of shoes, old and mostly mismates. A
pair of coarse but clean sheets, a towel, a mug of cold cocoa, and a
thick slice of brown bread were given me, and I was conducted to my
cell.
My first sensations when the door was locked upon me were not altogether
disagreeable. I was desperately weary, for I had been working hard,
perhaps a little too hard, for several strenuous months. The excitement
and fatigue of the previous day, and the indignation I had suffered
throughout the trial, had combined to bring me to the point of
exhaustion, and I was glad to throw myself on my hard prison bed and
close my eyes. But soon the relief of being alone, and with nothing to
do, passed from me. Holloway Prison is a very old place, and it has the
disadvantages of old places which have never known enough air and
sunshine. It reeks with the odours of generations of bad ventilation,
and it contrives to be at once the stuffiest and the draughtiest
building I have ever been in. Soon I found myself sickening for fresh
air. My head began to ache. Sleep fled. I lay all night suffering with
cold, gasping for air, aching with fatigue, and painfully wide awake.
The next day I was fairly ill, but I said nothing about it. One does not
expect to be comfortable in prison. As a matter of fact, one's mental
suffering is so much greater than any common physical distress that the
latter is almost forgotten. The English prison system is altogether
mediaeval and outworn. In some of its details the system has improved
since they began to send the Suffragettes to Holloway. I may say that
we, by our public denunciation of the system, have forced these slight
improvements. In 1907 the rules were excessively cruel. The poor
prisoner, when she entered Holloway, dropped, as it were, into a tomb.
No letters and no visitors were allowed for the first month of the
sentence. Think of it--a whole month, more than four weeks, without
sending or receiving a single word. One's nearest and dearest may have
gone through dreadful suffering, may have been ill, may have died,
meantime. One was given plenty of time to imagine all these things, for
the prisoner was kept in solitary confinement in a narrow, dimly-lit
cell, twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. Solitary confinement is
too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what
his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often
beg for the lash instead. Picture what it must be to a woman who has
committed some small offence, for most of the women who go to Holloway
are small offenders, sitting alone, day after day, in the heavy silence
of a cell--thinking of her children at home--thinking, thinking. Some
women go mad. Many suffer from shattered nerves for a long period after
release. It is impossible to believe that any woman ever emerged from
such a horror less criminal than when she entered it.
Two days of solitary confinement, broken each day by an hour of silent
exercise in a bitterly cold courtyard, and I was ordered to the
hospital. There I thought I should be a little more comfortable. The bed
was better, the food a little better, and small comforts, such as warm
water for washing, were allowed. I slept a little the first night. About
midnight I awoke, and sat up in bed, listening. A woman in the cell next
mine was moaning in long, sobbing breaths of mortal pain. She ceased for
a few minutes, then moaned again, horribly. The truth flashed over me,
turning me sick, as I realised that a life was coming into being, there
in that frightful prison. A woman, imprisoned by men's laws, was giving
a child to the world. A child born in a cell! I shall never forget that
night, nor what I suffered with the birth-pangs of that woman, who, I
found later, was simply waiting trial on a charge which was found to be
baseless.
The days passed very slowly, the nights more slowly still. Being in
hospital, I was deprived of chapel, and also of work. Desperate, at last
I begged the wardress for some sewing, and she kindly gave me a skirt of
her own to hem, and later some coarse knitting to do. Prisoners were
allowed a few books, mostly of the "Sunday-school" kind. One day I
asked the chaplain if there were not some French or German books in the
library, and he brought me a treasure, "_Autour de mon Jardin_," by
Jules Janin. For a few days I was quite happy, reading my book and
translating it on the absurd little slate they gave us in lieu of paper
and pencil. That slate was, after all, a great comfort. I did all kinds
of things with it. I kept a calendar, I wrote all the French poetry I
could remember on it, I even recorded old school chorals and old English
exercises. It helped wonderfully to pass the endless hours until my
release. I even forgot the cold, which was the harder to bear because of
the fur coat, which I knew was put away, ticketed with my name. I begged
them for the coat, but they wouldn't let me have it.
At last the time came when they gave me back all my things, and let me
go free. At the door the Governor spoke to me, and asked me if I had any
complaints to make. "Not of you," I replied, "nor of any of the
wardresses. Only of this prison, and all of men's prisons. We shall raze
them to the ground."
Back in my comfortable home, surrounded by loving friends, I would have
rested quietly for a few days, but there was a great meeting that night
at Albert Hall, to mark the close of a week of self-denial to raise
money for the year's campaign. Women had sold papers, flowers, toys,
swept crossings, and sung in the streets for the cause. Many women, well
known in the world of art and letters, did these things. I felt that I
should be doing little if I merely attended the meeting. So I went. My
release was not expected until the following morning, and no one thought
of my appearing at the meeting. My chairman's seat was decorated with a
large placard with the inscription, "Mrs. Pankhurst's Chair." After all
the others were seated, the speakers, and hundreds of ex-prisoners. I
walked quietly onto the stage, took the placard out of the chair and sat
down. A great cry went up from the women as they sprang from their seats
and stretched their hands toward me. It was some time before I could see
them for my tears, or speak to them for the emotion that shook me like a
storm.
The next morning I, with the other released prisoners, drove off to
Peckham, a constituency of London, where the W. S. P. U. members were
fighting a vigorous by-election. In open brakes we paraded the streets,
dressed in our prison clothes, or exact reproductions of them.
Naturally, we attracted a great deal of attention and sympathy, and our
daily meetings on Peckham Rye, as their common is known, drew enormous
crowds. When polling day came our members were stationed at every
polling booth, and many men as they came to the booths told us that they
were, for the first time, voting "for the women," by which they meant
against the Government. That night, amid great excitement, it was made
known that the Liberal majority of 2,339 at the last general election
had been turned into a Conservative majority of 2,494. Letters poured
into the newspapers, declaring that the loss of this important Liberal
seat was due almost entirely to the work of the Suffragettes, and many
prominent Liberals called upon party leaders to start doing something
for women before the next general election. The Liberal leaders, with
the usual perspicacity of politicians, responded not at all. Instead
they beheld with approval the rise to highest power the arch-enemy of
the suffragists, Mr. Asquith.
Mr. Asquith became prime minister about Easter time, 1908, on the
resignation, on account of ill health, of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.
Mr. Asquith was chosen, not because of any remarkable record of
statesmanship, nor yet because of great personal popularity--for he
possessed neither--but simply because no better man seemed available
just then. He was known as a clever, astute, and somewhat unscrupulous
lawyer. He had filled several high offices to the satisfaction of his
party, and under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had been Chancellor of the
Exchequer, a post which is generally regarded as a stepping-stone to the
Premiership. The best thing the Liberal press found to say of the new
Premier was that he was a "strong" man. Generally in politics this term
is used to describe an obstinate man, and this we already knew Mr.
Asquith to be. He was a bluntly outspoken opponent of woman suffrage,
and it was sufficiently plain to us that no methods of education or
persuasion would ever prove successful where he was concerned. Therefore
the necessity of action on our part was greater than ever.
Such an opportunity presented itself at once through changes that took
place in the new Cabinet. According to English law, all new comers into
the Cabinet are obliged to resign their seats in Parliament and offer
themselves to their constituencies for re-election. Besides these
vacancies there were several others, on account of death or elevations
to the peerage. This made necessary a number of by-elections, and the
Women's Social and Political Union once more went into the field against
the Liberal candidates. I shall deal no further with these by-elections
than is necessary to show the effect of our work on the Government, and
its subsequent effect on our movement--which was to force us into more
and more militancy. I shall leave it to the honest judgment of my
readers to place where it ought rightly to be placed the responsibility
for those first broken windows.
We selected as our first candidate for defeat Mr. Winston Churchill, who
was about to appeal to his constituency of North West Manchester to
sanction his appointment as president of the Board of Trade. My daughter
Christabel took charge of this election, and the work of herself and her
forces was so successful that Mr. Churchill lost his seat by 420 votes.
All the newspapers acknowledged that it was the Suffragettes who had
defeated Mr. Churchill, and one Liberal newspaper, the London _Daily
News_, called upon the party to put a stop to an intolerable state of
affairs by granting the women's demand for votes.
Another seat was immediately secured for Mr. Churchill, that of Dundee,
then strongly--in the merely party sense--Liberal, and therefore safe.
Nevertheless, we determined to fight Mr. Churchill there, to defeat him
if possible, and to bring down the Liberal majority in any case. I took
personal charge of the campaign, holding a very large meeting in
Kinnaird Hall on the evening before Mr. Churchill's arrival. Although he
felt absolutely sure of election in this Scottish constituency, Mr.
Churchill dreaded the effect of our presence on the Liberal women. The
second meeting he addressed in Dundee was held for women only, and
instead of asking for support of the various measures actually on the
government's programme, the politician's usual method, he talked about
the certainty of securing, within a short time, the Parliamentary
franchise for women. "No one," he declared, "can be blind to the fact
that at the next general election woman suffrage will be a real,