초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This article aims to reconstruct the prison experiences of the suffragettes and seeks to have a deeper understanding of hunger strike and force-feeding. Revisionist feminist scholars have attempted to restore women suffrage prisoners, mostly members of the Women’s Social and Political Union, in the historiography of the suffrage movement and attained a fair success in repelling the traditional and often unsympathetic view on these activists. With respect to the prison life of the suffragettes, they stress how the confinement experience united these women: those who were put in jail while seeking the Cause shared common experiences of hardship and, consequently, developed a concrete collective identity across the boundaries of class. Such explanation, however, fails to fully account for the realities as they were. This article argues that the activists’ prison experiences varied, mostly depending on their social backgrounds, and that the difference often divided them, rather than uniting them. The experiences of hunger strike and subsequent forcible feeding, the most tragic and extreme part in the WSPU members’ imprisonment narratives, also proved that class certainly affected the ways in which they were treated in jail. The suffragettes from middle- or higher classes, including the leaders of the WSPU, were keenly aware of their privileged status compared to their comrades from the lower social strata, even when they refused any special favor provided by the prison authority. Militant suffrage activists with working-class backgrounds often expressed their frustration as they realized that they were in a more vulnerable position than their middle-class fellows. It is also misleading to claim that the middle-class suffragettes came to familiarize themselves with a wider range of women’s issues and to formed a common bond among all womankind by encountering other prisoners and wardresses from lower classes. This article maintains that it is as dangerous to idealize or mythify the suffragettes as to denigrate them, urging to take a balanced and more nuanced approach.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Women’s Suffrage Movement, Suffragettes, Imprisonment, Hunger Strike, Force Feeding
