Prisons & Prisoners

Book excerpt: On 14 January 1910 Lytton disguised herself as a working-class seamstress, assumed the name Jane Warton, and led a suffrage demonstration demanding the vote for women. During the demonstration she hurled a rock wrapped in brown paper at the house of the governor of Walton Gaol. For this act, she was arrested, tried, and sentenced to fourteen days in jail. Like many suffragettes, she refused to eat while in custody and was forcibly fed, which involved forcing the mouth open, running a tube down the throat or through the nose, and pouring liquid into it. The procedure was both painful and dangerous. Lytton's decision to conceal her upper-class identity was a deliberately calculated act. She was devoted to the cause of female suffrage and was appalled at the class-differentiated treatment women (regardless of their offence) received in jail. This is an account of her prison experience and the differences when she was arrested as a middle class women and when she was arrested as Lady Constance Lytton, the daughter of an earl.