A first-hand account of a suffragette hunger striker being force-fed in prison is now on display at the People’s History Museum in Manchester. The document is part of the ‘Represent! Voices 100 Years On’ exhibition, which showcases artefacts from the early women’s rights movement.

The exhibition commemorates the centennial of the first legal recognition of women’s voting rights, albeit limited to some women at the time.

The account is found in a covertly sent letter from Charlotte Marsh to her fellow inmate Selina Martin in November 1909. Both women were incarcerated in Birmingham Prison for protesting during Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s visit to the city.

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The letter was written in pencil on a page torn out of a book.

“The jailer comes twice a day and tries to force me to eat but no – she chases me around the cell!” Marsh wrote. “Sometimes I feel like I’m dying of hunger, do you? Write to me when we get out of here. If you get out first, don’t tell mother they’re trying to tube-feed us. No retreat!”

Suffragette prisoners began hunger strikes in the summer of 1909 to protest the authorities’ refusal to acknowledge their status as political prisoners.

By September of that year, the government had decided not to release hunger-striking suffragettes, opting instead to force-feed them. Prison officials would restrain the women and insert a tube either through the nostril or deep into the larynx, pushing it up to the stomach.

From The Guardian

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