Women Behaving Badly

Abstract

Of all the political movements of the early twentieth century it was the fight for women’s suffrage that proved the most unnecessarily unpleasant and bitter, revealing, as it did, that the Edwardian sense of a civilized society hid the fact that imprisoning and torturing women with force-feeding was a necessary adjunct to good manners. It was a fight that brought stones and broken windows to Horse Guards and Whitehall, that caused chaos in Mayfair and Piccadilly and took reform to the very chambers of the Houses of Parliament in a revival of the revolutionary fervour of the London women of the seventeenth century.