Keywords

Beginning in the middle of 19th century, the political issue of women’s suffrage—the right of women to vote—arose in Western societies and provided the breeding ground for several women’s suffrage organisations established at the turn of the century. In the Edwardian period of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the foundation of the militant women’s suffrage organisation Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst and her eldest daughter, Christabel, soon split the women’s movement into suffragists who opposed violence in favour of a constitutional approach to campaigning and militant suffragettes who embraced aggressive tactics in order to achieve their goal.

When WSPU member Marion Wallace Dunlop went on hunger strike in Holloway Prison in 1909 in order to protest against being denied the status of a political prisoner, she implemented a political weapon for the militant suffrage movement, which challenged the British prison authorities outright. Initially, the hunger strike itself seemed to be the greatest weapon of the militant women’s suffrage movement. Yet, with the introduction of forcible feeding by the English government in the same year, the hunger strike itself increasingly lost its importance and became a means to an end—namely, a means to provoke a violent government response, which should serve as evidence for the violent repression of women in England.

Forcible feeding became such a delicate political issue because of its underlying ethical problems, which could easily be instrumentalised for political purposes. Although artificial feeding was a common practice in mental asylums at the beginning of the 20th century, conducting it on mentally competent patients gave rise to serious ethical concerns which called into question the prison system as well as the integrity of the entire medical profession.Footnote 1 While some historians and scholars concerned with medical ethicsFootnote 2 have already taken up the subject and addressed the question of the responsibility of physicians in conducting forcible feeding, the question of the responsibility of the prison administration in implementing forcible feeding of mentally competent patients into the prison system has not yet been touched. As the Foucauldian approach to the prison has often been chosen, the importance of power has overshadowed the question of responsibility in such administrations.Footnote 3 Although the hunger strike itself has been analysed as an intentional act without responsibility, the same question has not been applied to administrative practices that resulted in the forcible feeding of hunger striking prisoners.Footnote 4 Accordingly, this article aims to fill these gaps by examining how the Irish prison administration applied certain administrative practices in order to avoid taking responsibility when implementing forcible feeding of mentally competent patients into the Irish prison system.

The Suffragettes’ Legacy I: The Implementation of Hunger Striking

When three members of the WSPU—Mary Leigh, Gladys Evans and Jennie Baines (as Lizzie Baker)—went on hunger strike in Mountjoy Prison in Dublin on 14 August 1912, they imported a political weapon into Ireland that proved to have a long-lasting impact on the country.Footnote 5 The hunger strike became Ireland’s most spectacular form of national resistance in the 20th century, and it all started with three English suffragettes responsible for throwing a hatchet at the carriage of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, which injured the Irish Parliamentary Party Leader John Redmond, as well as for a failed arson attack on the Theatre Royal in Dublin.Footnote 6 As the consequence, Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans were sentenced to five years’ penal servitude, while Jennie Baines was sentenced to seven months’ hard labour.Footnote 7 The hunger strike of the WSPU members, begun with the goal of gaining the status of political prisoners, was only the initial spark that lit the fire.Footnote 8 Four members of the Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL)—Jane and Margaret Murphy, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Margaret Palmer—who were also imprisoned at Mountjoy and had been occupied with the idea of going on hunger strike for some time, joined their hunger protest with slight delays. Four other imprisoned IWFL women did not join—two because of their poor health, and the other two because they refused.Footnote 9

Though most Irish historiansFootnote 10 have preferred to seek the roots of hunger striking in Ireland or India, their origin can be clearly traced back to the women’s suffrage movement in England. Some historiansFootnote 11 have recognised the suffragettes’ legacy, yet understood the early Irish hunger strikes to be the result of an appropriation and execution of an idea rather than practices undergoing a complex implementation process. It is possible to write a genealogy of ideas, tracing hunger striking back to Russian prison protests in the 19th century or to ancient forms of fasting in Ireland and India, but it must not be forgotten, that it was the suffragettes who brought hunger striking (and forcible feeding) to Ireland—as a practice not as an idea. What might look like the idea of hunger striking was, in fact, the effect of the practice of hunger striking.

Despite what genealogies of ideas suggest, hunger striking and forcible feeding had not only to be translated into another culture’s terms but also implemented in another culture’s inventory of social practices. The split of the group of IWFL prisoners over the introduction of the hunger strike, for instance, perfectly exemplifies the difference between several women’s suffrage organisations in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. As the cases of Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans illustrate, WSPU members could operate independently of a hierarchical leadership within a volunteer organisation controlled by the incontestable leader Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, who regularly authorised and approved independent militant actions afterwards.Footnote 12 Unlike the other women’s suffrage organisations, the WSPU did not grant its members the right to vote on matters within the organisation, but more freedom in the choice of the degree of militancy. At the same time, it provided its members with a platform for self-presentation: its newspaper Votes for Women, founded in October 1907, regularly dedicated articles to the prison experience of hunger striking suffragettes, particularly if they had been subject to forcible feeding.

By contrast, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, the founding member of the IWFL, attempted to determine and enforce the official line of the organisation even against its members: first, she attacked the Murphy sisters for their willingness to go on hunger strike; later, she and the other IWFL prisoners attacked and put pressure on the two IWFL members who had refused to go on hunger strike. In February 1913, the IWFL even expelled the Murphy sisters.Footnote 13

Genealogies of ideas overlook the fact that social actors often face considerable problems when trying to adopt social practices. Reading hunger striking as a practice that had to undergo a complex implementation process allows us to better grasp the essence of this form of political resistance: social practices must be aligned with the organisational structure of social groups. When political organisations could not implement a form of political resistance into their inventory of social practices as successfully as other such organisations, it was not necessarily because they did not try hard enough or because they did not have the same access to resources, but potentially because it did not fit their situation. The IWFL, for instance, faced the problem that hunger striking was difficult to reconcile with its decision-making process. It is too simplistic to assume that people can simply be pressured into going on hunger strike with a qualified majority, peer pressure or a leader’s decision. Furthermore, the example perfectly highlights the importance of the political means for the social coherence of political organisations: the political means can considerably increase or decrease the social coherence of every social group—depending on the political means as well as on the implementation process.

All historians who see in the lack of suffrage within the WSPU enough evidence for authoritarian structures ignore that the WSPU had—apart from winning women’s suffrage—no official line, thus giving its members a great deal of autonomy, especially with regards to the choice of the political means, while they could always build on the organisation’s backing. This might have been the ideal breeding ground for hunger striking, which required great individual powers of endurance and constant support from outside the prison in order to be effective. At the same time, it explains why Irish nationalist organisations with a similar organisational structure could successfully adopt the hunger strike as one of their most important form of resistance. Although the English suffragettes failed to gain the status of political prisoners, they successfully implemented the hunger strike in the Irish prisoner’s inventory of political resistance.

The Suffragettes’ Legacy II: The Implementation of Forcible Feeding

The hunger strike of the WSPU prisoners was the acid test for Ireland’s prison authorities. On August 19, 1912, the IWFL hunger strikers had completed their sentences and were released along with the English suffragette Jennie Baines, whose health was too frail for her to remain in prison.Footnote 14 One day later, the Irish prison authorities began to forcibly feed the English suffragettes Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans.Footnote 15 In writings on the forcible feeding of the suffragettes, it has been suggested that the Irish authorities had waited for the release of the Irish hunger strikers to avoid “dreading the public furore if Irish women were known to be undergoing forcible feeding”.Footnote 16 Murphy has pointed out that the medical practice in Mountjoy Prison did not comply with “the norm in England and Scotland to begin forcible feeding within two or three days of commencement of a strike.”Footnote 17 Furthermore, he has highlighted the fact that Dr Joseph O’Carroll, from whom the General Prisons Board had sought an outside medical opinion, did not advise forcible feeding on his first visit on 17 August but altered his opinion after his second visit on the 20 August.Footnote 18 With these facts, some Irish historians want to prove that the Irish prison authorities delayed the start of forcible feeding of the English hunger strikers because they did not dare to force-feed Irish women, but “could not justify differential treatment”Footnote 19 of Irish hunger strikers.

Although the timing is significant and these arguments sound convincing, some correlation between events does not imply causation. Accordingly, we should not overinterpret the decision to wait until the release of the Irish prisoners as a political manoeuvre by the Irish authorities. In fact, it was not unusual for the General Prisons Board, which was responsible for managing the Irish prison system, to postpone forcible feeding for as long as possible. When the English suffragette Gladys Evans was re-arrested on 22 October 1912 and refused her food, the decision was made to resort to forcible feeding after her appearing in Court on 29 October.Footnote 20 As she was discharged, forcible feeding did not take place during her second arrest.Footnote 21 In Northern Ireland, the prison authorities later used the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913, according to which prisoners on hunger strike were to be released from prison as soon as they became ill and could be re-imprisoned after their recovery on their original charges, to permanently release hunger striking suffragettes regardless of the crime they had committed.Footnote 22

It is more appropriate to say that the decision to force-feed hunger striking prisoners was hanging like the sword of Damocles over the Irish prison authorities. The medical officers at Mountjoy Prison were well aware that they must conduct forcible feeding. Yet, as the General Prisons Board was reluctant to forcibly feed female prisoners, it postponed the decision on whether a patient should undergo forcible feeding in order to wait for the problem to resolve itself—the prisoner might give in or be released/discharged. Accordingly, the General Prisons Board did not forcible feed the Irish hunger strikers because the problem resolved with their release. As the English suffragettes Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans had to serve a five-year prison sentence and a near-term release was therefore impossible, and it became increasingly unlikely with every day that passed that the English suffragettes would give in, the Irish prison authorities became aware that the decision to forcible feed hunger striking prisoners loomed ahead.

Only when postponing the decision on whether a patient should undergo forcible feeding became too great a burden, did the General Prisons Board face the problem by seeking advice from outside the Board in expectation of being provided with an incentive to finally cut the thread. Although the medical officers of the General Prisons Board could have relied on their own medical expertise, they sought an outside medical opinion from Dr Joseph O’Carroll, a highly respected physician specialising in diseases of the heart and the nervous system at Richmond Hospital Dublin and appointed Professor of Medicine at University College Dublin, before conducting forcible feeding. Basing its decision on an outside medical opinion by such a distinguished expert in his field, the General Prisons Board could avoid taking responsibility for all medical decisions. As Dr Joseph O’Carroll “found [the English suffragettes] slightly weaker”Footnote 23 than at his last visit, he advised that they should be artificially fed, administered by nasal or oesophageal tube.Footnote 24 Under the guise of an emergence case, the prison authorities could reconcile the decision to forcibly feed female prisoners with their consciences and justify themselves.

In contrast to the rather positivistic and order-based approach to forcible feeding in Great Britain, which involved following an unwritten schedule of beginning forcible feeding within two or three days of commencement of a strike, the Irish prison authorities procrastinated forcible feeding as long as possible in order to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. While the English and Scottish administrative approach aimed to make sense through the concept of law and order, which meant implementing forcible feeding into the prison system by mirroring legal frameworks and administrative practices one-to-one, the decision-making process of the General Prisons Board can be best described as the collective construction of the beliefs in being forced into making a decision and in having no alternative other than to introduce forcible feeding.

The Importance of Precedents

As one letter clearly indicates, the General Prisons Board had taken into consideration that the English suffragette Mary Leigh might go on hunger strike in Mountjoy Prison. She was one of the first English suffragettes to undergo forcible feeding in England and known for giving the prison authorities “much trouble by barricading her doors, smashing windows, etc.”Footnote 25 Expecting the worst, the responsible medical officer at Mountjoy made timely preparations for being able to forcibly feed her and contacted Birmingham Prison on 27 July in order to obtain further information on the former prisoner Mary Leigh, which “would guide [him] in [his] treatment of her.”Footnote 26 Along with a detailed report on Leigh’s former experience with forcible feeding, the medical officer at Birmingham had added some personal instructions on how to conduct forcible feeding in prison, which proved helpful for the Irish authorities.Footnote 27 In terms of frequency, procedure and composition of the diet, forcible feeding in Mountjoy was aligned with the personal instructions of the medical officer at Birmingham Prison.Footnote 28 Unlike Gladys Evans, who did not resist and was fed by oesophageal tube passed through the mouth, Mary Leigh was loosely strapped to the feeding chair “in view of her violent resistance in Birmingham prison”Footnote 29 and the “food [was] then administered by nasal tube.”Footnote 30 Forcible feeding continued until the lives of the English suffragettes were at stake.Footnote 31 Leigh had to be released on 20 September because her life was “endangered”Footnote 32 and Evans on 3 October because she was close to a “general breakdown.”Footnote 33

In contrast to the English prison authorities that struggled to find an adequate answer to the first hunger strike in 1909 and had to release several prisoners to avoid female martyrs, the Irish prison authorities could directly build on the experience of English prisons. Long before the English suffragettes went on hunger strike, the prison authorities in Ireland had an answer to their resistance, which they could implement into the Irish prison system. What is interesting to note is that the medical officer at Mountjoy, who adopted the practice of forcible feeding, geared his actions towards the medical practice in English prisons and did not use the limited margin left for him by interpreting official instructions according to his own professional judgement or the requirements of the particular situation. As Grant has shown with the example of an Indian medical officer who referred to the treatment of Irish hunger strikers in seeking formal instructions from the government in Madras in 1921 on how to deal with hunger striking prisoners, medical officers feared prosecution in the event that one of the prisoners died on their watch and tried to protect themselves with “a useful legal precedent.”Footnote 34 The Irish prison authorities built on the experience of English prisons and implemented forcible feeding into the Irish prison system in order to play it safe. Accordingly, the prison system was so synchronized and self-referential because the prison authorities referred to each other and built on each other’s actions in order to use these legal precedents as future securities.

Justifying Medical Intervention

Apart from administrative practices that were applied to avoid responsibility, the medical officers developed certain individual and collective strategies to justify medical intervention and to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. As these strategies were neither inherently logical nor inherently consistent and built, in reality, a multi-layered argumentation structure, which had a certain social function and only made sense in the social context in which it was embedded, the isolated observation of these strategies is quite academic. However, it is worth investigating these strategies in order to examine how medical officers employed certain defence mechanisms in order to overcome their “inner protest” against illegitimate acts, such as employing force against women, causing pain and injuries and infringing the patient’s right of self-determination.

The most distinctive characteristic of the suffragettes’ hunger strike was that their political resistance was primarily embodied in their violent defence of their bodies against the execution of artificial feeding and not in their refusal of food as one might assume.Footnote 35 As the English suffragettes actively defended their bodies against the execution of artificial feeding, it had to be performed on them as forcible feeding. They “barricaded the door of [their] cell[s] by means of [their] bed[s]”Footnote 36, “refused to open [their] mouth[s]”Footnote 37, screamed during the procedure, “violently resisted all the efforts that were made to feed”Footnote 38 them, massively campaigned against artificial feeding in prison or sued the English government afterwards.Footnote 39 Before the medical officer could forcibly feed them, several hospital matrons had been required to “overcome”Footnote 40 their “resistance”Footnote 41 and to place them “in the [feeding] chair, [their] wrists and ankles being loosely strapped thereto”.Footnote 42 Historians have frequently described the forcible feeding of the suffragettes as a bodily experience akin to rape.Footnote 43 As they cannot provide one source of evidence that clearly states that a suffragette ever compared forcible feeding with rape, their presentistic and genuine ahistorical interpretations can be described, at best, as attempts to appropriate and functionalise the historical past for current feminist purposes: rape is a crime and not a metaphor (food—sex) to be utilised to gain the power of interpretation over the suffragette movement. Furthermore, it is a particular antifeminist stance to deny women the ability to interpret their own bodily experiences—especially if it is about the experience of rape. As men were also subject to forcible feeding, but their experiences are taken at face value and never described as a bodily experience akin to rape, it is incomprehensible why only the female experience of forcible feeding needs a further (feminist) interpretation and why only the female body needs a further (feminist) sexualisation.Footnote 44 The WSPU hunger strikers unanimously compared forcible feeding to “torture”Footnote 45 and described in detail the brutality and deliberate cruelty of the prison staff and the pain they had suffered during and after the forcible feeding. For the suffragettes themselves, there was no “grosser and more indecent outrage”Footnote 46 than the use of force against women. Their key arguments against forcible feeding were that it inflicted pain on women and violated the female body.

For the prison authorities, the act of forcible feeding symbolised their heroic victory over the prisoner’s violent resistance. In order to restore the prison discipline and the patriarchal order, the female patient had to be made compliant through the means of violence which was presented as a chivalrous act supposed to heal these “highly strung,”Footnote 47 “nervous,”Footnote 48 “unstable”Footnote 49 and self-destructive women who did not “allow [themselves] to be artificially fed”Footnote 50 and who were “repeatedly but unsuccessfully urged […] to refrain from injuring [their] health by refusing food.”Footnote 51 This strategy of justifying medical intervention can be best described as restoring order—in terms of restoring the prison order as well as in terms of restoring the patriarchal order. By appealing to higher values and extraordinary circumstances, the medical officers could rationalise the use of violence as necessary evil, which was permitted to overcome the violent resistance of difficult prisoners.

The relationship between female hunger striker and male medical officer can be described as a mutually accepted patriarchal gender relation with a considerable impact on the medical treatment of female hunger strikers. Although the suffragettes violently defended their bodies against the execution of forcible feeding, they presented themselves as “weak”Footnote 52 and “helpless”Footnote 53 victims of patriarchal violence. They gendered the practice and experience of forcible feeding in such a way that their written accounts, propaganda posters and political agitation reproduced patriarchal gender roles and primarily targeted men. When the suffragettes built on the concept of the violated female body and precisely described their physical wounds and the “great pain”Footnote 54 they had gone through, they symbolically emasculated the English government. Their “bleed[ing]”Footnote 55 and “swollen”Footnote 56 mouths, their “broken”Footnote 57 beings, the “horrible pain in the[ir] throat[s] and breast[s]”Footnote 58 and “the[ir] cries and deep moans”Footnote 59 not only made the ill-treatment in prison visible, but also reproduced patriarchal gender roles according to which masculinity was inseparably linked to the ability to protect and defend the female body.

By emphasizing the role of the victim and reproducing the patriarchal concept of women as the weak gender, suffragettes could push through their own interests and try to shift the public perception away from their own misdeeds. Some suffragettes had been convicted for serious crimes, such as arson attacks. Yet, when they placed their “health”Footnote 60 in the medical officers’ “hands”Footnote 61 and let them know that they could “have [their] bod[ies], and c[ould] do with it what [they] choose,”Footnote 62 that they were “weak, and [could not] resist”Footnote 63 them and “l[aid] long in expectation of the doctor and his feeding apparatus, but he did not come,”Footnote 64 they symbolically submitted themselves to the medical and male care of the medical officers. These forms of female submission can be explained as the insight that resistance was futile, so that absolute submission was the best strategy to induce the medical officers to act as their guardians, who knew as authorities of medical knowledge best what to do. As the result, the medical officers promised them that “[e]verything possible [was] being done for [them] by all the officials.”Footnote 65 This strategy to justify medical intervention, according to which the male physician acted as the female’s guardian, can be best described as protecting the female body. In addition, the relationship between male physician and female patient appeared to be determined by the male wish to care for women. The medical officers ensured that there was “no appearance of pain caused by the nasal tube,”Footnote 66 that resisting hunger strikers were only “loosely strapped”Footnote 67 to the feeding chair and that “the passage of the tube caused [them] no pain.”Footnote 68When the medical officer urged the female hunger striker not to “undermin[e] her health”Footnote 69 and to “refrain from injuring her health by refusing food,”Footnote 70 genuine male and medical care turned into paternalism.

This strategy to justify medical intervention, according to which the female hunger striker was accused of injuring her health, can be best described as blaming the hunger striker. Especially because the medical officers were too often overinvolved, it was inconceivable for them that their medical treatment might have caused pain or physical injuries. As a result, the female patient was psychopathologised in order to find an explanation that did not call into question the self-image of the male medical officer. The vomiting after the forcible feeding was explained as “the vomiting of Hysteria”Footnote 71 and as “the convulsions associated with Hysteria.”Footnote 72 The very idea that the female hunger striker might refuse his medical and male care was incomprehensible. This strategy can be best seen as the psychopathologisation of the female patient which served to justify medical intervention as well as the use of violence. “[O]vercom[ing]”Footnote 73 their “resistance”Footnote 74 was considered to help women who were—“in view of [their] violent resistance”Footnote 75—obviously “borderline insane cases.”Footnote 76 All ethical questions which arose when conducting forcible feeding on mentally competent patients could be neutralised by simply calling into question the mental competency of female hunger strikers. Accordingly, the prison administration could override the prisoner’s right of self-determination through the psychopathologisation of the female patient who was supposed to be unable to make informed choices.

Another strategy to justify medical intervention was the maintenance of the belief that the medical officers were performing an ordinary operation, which did not cause any pain or injuries. Thereby, the denial of any pain or physical sequelae served to neutralise all qualms. When a senior officer was asked by a junior medical officer if he could see that he had just “caught in a piece of [his patient’s] cheek”Footnote 77 when conducting forcible feeding, “he admitted he could not”Footnote 78 see it. In addition, the medical officers even blamed the female hunger strikers for the physical consequences of their medical treatment by claiming that the vomiting after the forcible feeding was “intentional”Footnote 79 and therefore self-inflicted.Footnote 80 Although the suffragettes aimed to prove the brutal and dangerous nature of forcible feeding by referring to authorities of medical knowledge—the prestigious medical journal The Lancet or physicians and surgeons who were “authorit[ies]”Footnote 81 in their field—, the prison authorities and the British government downplayed the suffragettes’ experience of forcible feeding as exaggerating allegations by hysterical women, whose suffering was self-inflicted and worsened by their resistance. When a suffragette sued Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone et al., it was an unfair battle between men of science and law and a woman who “should not [be] regarded as sane.”Footnote 82 Furthermore, by simply denying the fact that forcible feeding caused pain, physical injuries and/or physical sequelae, the medical officers could justify their actions and avoid taking responsibility for their actions because, due to their denial, there was nothing they could be made responsible for.

The political campaign against forcible feeding in prison took its place alongside political spectacles with which the eligibility to earn the women’s suffrage should be proved. When Gladstone announced, for example, that “predominance of argument alone”Footnote 83 was not enough to get the vote and that women had to prove to be able to establish the “force majeure”Footnote 84 and assemble “in their tens of thousands all over the country,”Footnote 85 the suffragettes accepted the challenge to prove their ability and were later disappointed that the cabinet did not “stand by the statement of their spokesman, Mr. Gladstone.”Footnote 86 The suffragettes ended up in a vicious cycle in which the right to vote was deemed an achievement that could only be awarded by men who set the terms. Accordingly, the British government managed to turn forcible feeding into a political weapon with which they could neutralise the hunger strike, put the suffragettes on the defensive and set the terms of the prison battle, while the suffragettes were forced to find evidence for their pain, for the brutality of the prison staff, for the dangerousness of forcible feeding and for its physical sequelae.

Conclusion

When implementing the forcible feeding of mentally competent patients into the Irish prison system, the prison administration in Ireland mainly used certain administrative practices to avoid taking responsibility. In contrast to the rather positivistic and order-based approach to forcible feeding in Great Britain, the Irish prison authorities procrastinated forcible feeding as long as possible to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. The decision-making process of the General Prisons Board can be best summarized as the collective construction of the belief that they were being forced into making a decision and had no alternative other than to introduce forcible feeding. Furthermore, the prison authorities built on each other’s actions to use these legal precedents as future securities. As long as the medical officers built on legal precedents, they could not be held responsible. Apart from administrative practices that were applied to avoid taking responsibility, the medical officers developed certain strategies to justify medical intervention and to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. Accordingly, administration can be best described as a collective decision-making process in which the burden of responsibility ultimately vanishes into thin air.