The Suffragettes
     
As the suffragettes developed their movement they increasingly came under attack from the press, Conservative politicians and those who believed the cause was wrong. because they were willing to break the law many people felt they were acting in a 'unfeminine way'. Remember that in the early 1900s many people hade very distinct ideas about what a women should and should not do. However, the suffragettes understood that they were really not getting anywhere by being polite and simply hoping that the justice of their case would eventually win. 

You can see one way that the suffragettes were treated by the press. The cartoon shows very prim and proper women of the sort the paper says 'have never been kissed'. It means that this group are only interested in the vote because they have nothing else in their lives.

As respectable women decided to make their protest by forcing the police to arrest them (as seen in the picture), the government became more and more worried about the bad publicity it was receiving.  

It is one thing to take someone to court for breaking the law, but as these women would then refuse to pay a fine they would then be sent to prison. This really did look bad on a government that was priding itself with its forward looking policies.

 

   The government tried a number of things to cope with the protests that continued from suffragettes even after they had been sent to prison. Some refused to eat. The government ordered them to be forced fed. It believed it would be unacceptable if it allowed women (many from very respectable families) to die in prison. Unfortunately for them, the publicity associated with the degrading process of forcing a tube into a women's stomach was just as bad. Below is a suffragette poster that really did cause the government to think again.

The next step for the government was much more clever. It introduced a law called the cat and mouse act. Just as a cat will not kill a mouse instantaneously, but play with it, the Liberal government would let women leave prison who refused to eat. They would then allow time for them to recover their strength for them to be taken back into prison. This could happen as many times as it was needed. The sentence would be served and any publicity associated with eating protests had been taken away.

It took a protest of the ultimate kind to really shock people into looking at the issue again. To find out about Emily Davison click here.