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After WSPU member Marion Wallace Dunlop was released from Holloway Prison after three days of refusing food for fear that she might die in 1906, some of the other imprisoned suffragettes followed suit. They believed that they had found a powerful weapon with which to fight the British government.
However, the authorities soon decided that prisoners would be force-fed rather than released when they fell ill from hunger-striking. This involved a rubber tube being stuck up the nose or down the throat and into the stomach. The striker was also restrained in a chair and had a steel gap pushed in their mouth, screwed open as widely as possible to fit the tube. While the government defended force-feeding as a medical procedure, it was invasive, demeaning, dangerous and, in some instances, damaged the long-term health of the victims.
The so-called Cat and Mouse Act of 1913 curtailed force-feeding but instead created a vicious cycle: starving prisoners were sent home to recover before being imprisoned again once they were healthy. This led to suffragettes’ sentences — already often disproportionately harsh — effectively being greatly extended.