September 18, 1912, The Newcastle Daily Journal article, “Forcible Feeding; Mr.

Bernard Shaw and the Suffragettes”

‘”Cold Logic:’ Eat or Die”

Mr. Bernard Shaw has written a long letter to Miss Gawthorpe on the

forcible feeding of the Suffragettes who are serving a sentence of penal

servitude in Mountjoy Prison for attempting to set fire to the theatre at Dublin.

He roundly blames the Government, says the Pall Mall Gazette, and incidentally

declares that nobody would be punished, but ‘restrained they must certainly

be, just as necessarily as a tiger must be restricted.’ Forcible feeding is

described as an ‘abominable expedient,’ at which game the Government has

been ‘ignominiously beaten.’

‘The moment the women go on to graver crimes,’ Mr. Shaw

proceeds, ‘this illogical compounding of a month’s imprisonment for a week’s

torture is no longer possible. An attempt to give the Mountjoy prisoners an

equivalent in forcible feeding for three and a half years’ penal servitude would

probably end either in killing them or driving them mad. The result of that

might be that other suffragists might be goaded into doing something that

would be punished by sentence of penal servitude for life.

‘In that case what would the Government do? To release a really

dangerous criminal after a fortnight’s stomach-pumping would be ridiculous,

and the released prisoner might quite possibly be lynched. To keep the

prisoner would mean allowing her to starve herself to death.

‘STAND AND DELIVER”

‘In such an extremity it seems to me that the prisoner’s right to commit suicide

would have to be recognized. As long as the Government placed within

the prisoner’s reach a sufficiency of food, I do not see how it could be held

accountable for the prisoner’s death any more than if she committed suicide in

any other manner.

‘If a woman meets me on Waterloo Bridge, and says, “Give me a five-pound

note or I’ll jump into the Thames and drown myself as soon as you have gone

a sufficient distance to prevent you from holding me,” I really do not see how I

could reasonably comply with the request, because if it were established as a

rule of conduct that I was bound to do so or else be held guilty of the woman’s

death, all the women in London might make me stand and deliver in turn until I

was a beggar.

‘And in the same way if the Government is bound to release every prisoner who

threatens to commit suicide by starvation, then all the criminals can compel a

general gaol delivery and practically abolish all legal methods of dealing with

crime. The fact that these methods are so bad that one could hardly regret such

a result does not affect the argument, because any methods, however human,

could be evaded in the same way.

‘My conclusion, therefore, is that if the prisoners in Mountjoy are determined

to commit suicide by starvation they must be allowed to do so, and that the

Government could not be held responsible for their deaths if it could convince the

public that the prisoners had plenty of food within their reach.’

Shaw’s lucid, sardonic argument, like Jonathan Swift’s in A Modest Proposal, seems

inhumane and heartless. Yet his words resonate with the reasoning of Mr. W.A.

Dudley, Davison’s earlier correspondent: both point out that the suffragettes were

indeed putting the government in an impossible situation. Davison, however, seems

not to have recognized that Shaw’s brutal logic did not convey assent, but rather laid

out a line of “reason” that would break the current impasse between suffragettes

and government. Davison’s response is full of all too human passion and concern

for two friends who cannot be conveniently de-personalized by a generic terms such

as “suffragette” and “hunger striker.” In fact Davison’s letter reveals her own sense

of personal responsibility for their plight, because she had tried to put a stop to the

practice of forcible feeding by sacrificing herself in failed suicide attempts at Holloway

Prison. She compares her attempt to the recent suicide of Count Nogi Maresuke, a

Japanese samurai who, with his wife, committed ritual suicide after the death of the

Emperor Mejii, in part because such a death followed the code of samurai warriors, in

part because he felt shame for having lost the regimental banner of the Japanese 14th

Infantry Regiment at the Battle of Kyushu in 1876, and partly because of the large loss

of life incurred during his siege of Port Arthur (August, 1904-Jnuary, 1905) during

the Russo-Japanese War. Davison invokes the shame Nogi felt as a parallel to her

own failure, and to the disgrace she suffered when her failed suicide attempt elicited

“ribald jesting” in the House of Commons. She concludes her letter by returning to a

fundamental principle of the WSPU: that imprisoned suffragettes are not criminals

but “honourable political prisoners.”

Sir, — It is impossible to believe that so illogical and inhuman a production could

possibly have emanated from the pen of Mr. Bernard Shaw as that which you

quote in your paper.

George Bernard Shaw maintains that it would be quite permissible, and

even meritorious, of the Government to allow Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans to

die in Mountjoy Prison. Before I consider the point, let me just remind the British

nation what such a thing would mean. It would mean a lasting indelible disgrace

to our nation to allow two such noble and honourable women to be done to death

for conscience’s sake. True it is that these women are ready to pay the heroic

price to gain freedom for their sex, but is the nation quite sure that it desires such

a holocaust, which can bring nothing but disgrace upon it?

I speak as one who does know, as I have faced death several times in this

cause, and faced it quite recently in the way that they are doing now. When I

attempted to commit suicide in Holloway Prison on June 22 I did it deliberately

and with all my power, because I felt that by nothing but the sacrifice of human

life would the nation be brought to realize the horrible torture our women face! If

I had succeeded I am sure that forcible feeding could not in all conscience have

been resorted to again.

Just as Nogi and his wife made the most tremendous sacrifice of all (that

a man lay down his life for his friend) to try and bring Japan back to her lost

ideals, so did I face death! I attribute the fact that my two comrades are facing

torture now to the fact that I failed, a failure which provoked ribald jesting and a

glossing over of facts in the House of Commons. If I had succeeded, I am sure

that the British nation would have prepared to adopt the only sane moral right

and wise course to be adopted in these cases, and insisted upon our being

treated from henceforth as political prisoners! The only alternatives are not, as

George Bernard Shaw states, forcible feeding or death! Hence death in such a

case would be downright, hideous, unjustifiable murder! The course which future

ages will see clearly with discriminating ayes [sic; changed to “eyes” in letter to

Newcastle Daily Journal] to be the only possible course to save Britain and the

present Government from the dishonour of committing torture or murder is to

acknowledge legally that these women are not low and selfish criminals (who

could never face what these heroic women have faced), but honourable political

prisoners. –Yours, etc.,

EMILY WILDING DAVISON

Longhorsley, Northumberland, Sept. 17([25.])