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Forcible Feeding

Posted on September 13, 1912 by Emily Davison Posted in Letters

September 13, 1912, To the Editor of The Manchester Guardian, “Forcible Feeding”

Of all the subjects which Emily Davison engaged in the summer and early fall of

1912, none was closer to her heart than the horror of forcible feeding, compounded

by instances of public apathy or ignorance of the pain and danger the procedure

visited on imprisoned suffragettes. On September 5th she had written a letter to The

Manchester Guardian which appeared on September 13th. It is a brief plea for pity on

the suffering of her two friends Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans in Mountjoy Prison:

Sir, — As one who has many times undergone the torture of forcible feeding,

I pray that you will allow me to appeal to the people of England against that

which is now proceeding in Mountjoy Prison. If our nation could only realize the

degradation, the unspeakable misery, which it involves to the helpless prisoner, it

could not allow such re-enactments of mediaeval barbarity to be carried on in our

midst. Can it permit women of noble character to be tortured for consciences’

sake? Yours, &c.,

Emily Wilding Davison

Longhorsley, Northumberland

September 5, 1912

Shortly after this letter was published The Newcastle Daily Journal ran a story about

George Bernard Shaw’s letter to Mary Eleanor Gawthorpe, a WSPU organizer who

had organized “a public petition against the forcible feeding of Mary Leigh and Gladys

Evans in Mountjoy Prison in Dublin”. See September 18, 1912, “Forcible Feeding: Mr Bernard Shaw and the Suffragettes”:

The Manchester Guardian
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