Among the demonstrations was a revival of the ancient Irish custom by Sylvia Pankhurst, who in addition to her hunger strikes within prison, “fasted on” the doorstep of Premier Asquith to compel him to see a deputation of women on the granting of suffrage to English women. She won.
Irish prisoners have revived the hunger strike to compel either release or trial of untried prisoners and have Lyon. As I write, almost a hundred Irish prisoners detained by England for alleged nationalist activities, but not brought to trial, hunger struck to freedom. As a direct result of this specific hunger strike England has promised a renovation of her practices in dealing with Irish rebels.
And so it was that when we came to the adoption of this accelerating tactic, we had behind us more precedents for winning our point than for losing. We were strong in the knowledge that we could “fast on” President Wilson and his powerful Administration, and compel him to act or “fast back.”
Among the prisoners who with Alice Paul led the hunger strike was a very picturesque figure, Rose Winslow (Ruza Wenclawska) of New York, whose parents had brought her in infancy from Poland to become a citizen of “free” America. At eleven she was put at a loom in a Pennsylvania mill, where she wove hosiery for fourteen hours a day until tuberculosis claimed her at nineteen. A poet by nature she developed her mind to the full in spite of these disadvantages, and when she was forced to abandon her loom she became an organizer for the Consumers’ League, and later a vivid and eloquent power in the suffrage movement.
Her group preceded Miss Paul’s by about a week in prison.
These vivid sketches of Rose Winslow’s impressions while in the prison hospital were written on tiny scraps of paper and smuggled out to us, and to her husband during her imprisonment. I reprint them in their original form with cuts but no editing.
“If this thing is necessary we will naturally go through with it. Force is so stupid a weapon. I feel so happy doing my bit for decency-for our war, which is after all, real and fundamental.”
“The women are all so magnificent, so beautiful. Alice Paul is as thin as ever, pale and large-eyed. We have been in solitary for five weeks. There is nothing to tell but that the days go by somehow. I have felt quite feeble the last few days—faint, so that I could hardly get my hair brushed, my arms ached so. But to-day I am well again. Alice Paul and I talk back and forth though we are at opposite ends of the building and, a hall door also shuts us apart. But occasionally—thrills—we escape from behind our iron-barred doors and visit. Great laughter and rejoicing!”