You Men, Who Have No Right To Force Me Into Gaol: Know I Will Never Surrender

“You men of England, who have no right in this kingdom of France, the king of heaven orders and commands you through me, Joan the Maid, to abandon your strongholds and go back to your own country. If not, I will make a war-cry that will be remembered forever.”

What Joan of Arc said to the English at Orleans, on the 5^th of May, 1429. Two years and 26 days later, likely before her 20^th birthday, the French government and Catholic Church publicly burned her to death for getting uppity. For when you want to tell an oppressor to fuck off in a history-shaking manner.

“I was visited again by the Senior Medical Officer, who asked me how long I had been without food. I said I had eaten a buttered scone and a banana sent in by friends to the police station on Friday at about midnight. He said, ‘Oh, then, this is the fourth day; that is too long, I shall feed you, I must feed you at once,’ but he went out and nothing happened till about six o’clock in the evening, when he returned with, I think, five wardresses and the feeding apparatus. He urged me to take food voluntarily. I told him that was absolutely out of the question, that when our legislators ceased to resist enfranchising women then I should cease to resist taking food in prison. He did not examine my heart nor feel my pulse; he did not ask to do so, nor did I say anything which could possibly induce him to think I would refuse to be examined. I offered no resistance to being placed in position, but lay down voluntarily on the plank bed. Two of the wardresses took hold of my arms, one held my head and one my feet. One wardress helped to pour the food. The doctor leant on my knees as he stooped over my chest to get at my mouth. I shut my mouth and clenched my teeth. I had looked forward to this moment with so much anxiety lest my identity should be discovered beforehand, that I felt positively glad when the time had come. The sense of being overpowered by more force than I could possibly resist was complete, but I resisted nothing execpt with my mouth. The doctor offered me the choice of a wooden or steel gag; he explained elaborately, as he did on most subsequent occasions, that the steel gag would hurt and the wooden one not, and he urged me not to force him to use the steel gag. But I did not speak nor open my mouth, so that after playing about for a moment or two with the wooden one he finally had recourse to the steel. He seemed annoyed at my resistance and he broke into a temper as he plied my teeth with the steel implement. He found that on either side at the back I had false teeth mounted on a bridge which did not take out. The superintending wardress asked if I had any false teeth, if so, they must be taken out; I made no answer and the process went on. He dug his instrument down on the sham tooth, it pressed fearfully on the gum. He said if I resisted so much with my teeth, he would have to feed me through the nose. The pain of it was intense and at the last I must have given way for he got the gag between my teeth, when he proceeded to turn it much more than necessary until my jaws were fastened wide apart, far more than they could go naturally. Then he put down my throat a tube which seemed much too wide and was something like four feet in length. The irritation of the tube was excessive. I choked the moent it touched my throat until it had got down. Then the food was poured in quickly; it made me sick a few seconds after it was down and the action of the sickness made my body and legs double up, but the wardresses instantly pressed back my head and the doctor leant on my knees. The horror of it was more than I can describe. I was sick over the doctor and wardresses, and it seemed a long time before they took the tube out. As the doctor left he gave me a slap on the cheek, not violently, but, as it wer, to express his contemptuous disapproval, and he seemed to take for granted that my distress assumed. At first it seemed such an utterly contemptible thing to have done that I could only laugh in my mind. Then suddenly I saw Jane Wharton lying before me, and it seemed as if I were outside of her. She was the most despised, ignorant and helpless prisoner that I had seen. When she served her time and was out of prison, no one would believe anything she said, and the doctor when he had fed her by force and tortured her body, struck her on the cheek to show how he despised her! That was Jane Wharton, and I had come to help her.

When the doctor had gone out of the cell, I lay quite helpless. The wardresses were kind and knelt round to comfort me, but there was nothing to be done, I could not move, and remained there in what, under different conditions, would have been an intolerable mess. I had been sick over my hair, which, though short, hung on either side of my face, all over the wall near my bed, and my clothes seemed saturated with it, but the wardresses told me they could not get me a change that night was it was too late, the office was shut. I lay quite motionless, it seemed paradise to be without the suffocating tube, without the liquid food going in and out of my body, and without the gag between my teeth. Presently the wardresses all left me, they had orders to go, which were carried out with the usual promptness. Before long I heard the sounds of the forced feeding in the cell next to mine. It was almost more than I could bear, it was Elsie Howey, I was sure. When the ghastly process was over and all quiet, I tapped the wall and called out at the top of my voice, which wasn’t much just then, ‘No surrender,’ and there came the answer past any doubt in Elsie’s voice, ‘No surrender.’” 

Constance Lytton’s account—titled Suffragette Lady Constance Lytton, Disguised as a Lower-Class Woman, Jane Wharton, is Forcibly Fed in Walton Gaol, Liverpool, 18 January 1910—of experiencing just about the full force of patriarchy. Can be found in the Faber Book of Reportage, 1987, edited by John Carey. I have yet to find a more devastatingly comprehensive encapsulation of the feminist struggle for equality: invented positions of hierarchy, insincere and self-serving sympathy, the uncomplicated and simple reasonableness of what women are asking for, overtly phallic and startlingly contemptuous and unprovoked violence, futile and harmful ‘medical’ interventions, the cowardly complicity of those ‘just doing their job,’ unwillingly internalized dehumanization, and the soul-searing and miraculous heroism of true friendship. For when you need to feel the warmth of the unquenchable human spirit.