Today in Herstory: Number of Force-Fed Protesting Suffragists Increases

Today in Herstory: Number of Force-Fed Protesting Suffragists Increases


Art student and imprisoned suffragist Kate Heffelfinger of Shamokin, Pennsylvania. She is currently serving sentences totaling seven months for standing along the White House fence with a banner in support of woman suffrage and critical of President Wilson’s insufficient efforts for the cause.


November 21, 1917: The number of suffragists being subjected to the ordeal of force-feeding has suddenly increased from two to five. Lucy Burns and Dora Lewis, leaders of the hunger strike at Occoquan Workhouse, were transferred out yesterday and sent to join Alice Paul and Rose Winslow in the hospital ward of the Washington, D.C. District Jail, where Paul and Winslow are in their fourteenth day of force-feedings. Kate Heffelfinger has also joined the ranks of those singled out for this form of legalized torture.

According to a statement given out by the National Woman’s Party tonight:
“Fearing their death in Occoquan, Superintendent Whittaker last night moved Mrs. Lawrence Lewis of Philadelphia and Miss Lucy Burns of Brooklyn to the Government jail in Washington. Miss Burns was force-fed at Occoquan before leaving. Her struggles were heard by other prisoners in the next cells, who describe them as terrifying. It required five guards to hold her during the feeding. Mrs. Lewis was fed after her arrival at the jail.”

Kate Heffelfinger, who has been on a hunger strike at the District Jail for over a week, was taken to the hospital ward last night and is now undergoing the ordeal as well. A note she wrote today has been smuggled out and reads:
“Three times a day for fourteen days Alice Paul and Rose Winslow have been going through the torture of forcible feeding. I now know what the torture is – the horrible gripping and gagging of swallowing six inches of stiff rubber tubing. Such a strain on the nervous system is not to be imagined. That over, there is the ordeal of waiting while liquids are poured through, then the withdrawal of the tube.”

In other suffrage news, the New York State Woman Suffrage Party met for the second day of its convention. The first order of business was to clear up a misunderstanding in regard to one proposal that caused a great deal of controversy and generated much publicity yesterday. The “reprisal plank,” as presented to the convention – and the press – appeared to be aimed at taking revenge upon any legislator who had previously opposed suffrage, and was, as Mary Garrett Hay described it, “narrow, vindictive and vengeful.” The resolution as read, said: “At the next primaries and election we should campaign against certain candidates to State and Federal offices who have consistently opposed woman suffrage and whose records show them to have been opposed to the interests of women and children and to humanitarian legislation in general.”

At the board meeting where the resolution was discussed, the words “who have consistently opposed woman suffrage” were struck out before passage, but the W.S.P.’s Secretary had accidentally left them in when she read the proposal to the delegates. Vira Whitehouse, the organization’s president, said: “The resolution, as passed, did not contain any such clause, although as presented it did. The error was with our press department and the Party does not wish to go on record before the public as determined to carry on any such campaign.”

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http://feminist.org/blog/index.php/2014/11/21/today-in-herstory-number-of-force-fed-protesting-suffragists-increases/