It demands considerable obtuseness to believe, as some persons apparently do, that close confinement in the heat of Summer or the cold of Winter within a solitary and unwholesome cell, deprival of exercise for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, subjection to menial authority, ignorance of the welfare of one's friends, the performing of dull and alien tasks, deprivation of writing materials, partial suffocation and the wearing of ugly, ill-fitting clothing that has already been worn by the vilest criminals, are for delicate and sensitive women the elements of a comedy. They compose a great and terrible torture.... Because they are suffering for an idea their stringent imprisonment is indefensible. It violates the public conscience and the law and the courts cannot wage war on the public conscience without forfeiting respect and authority.
Mrs. Pankhurst and Christabel hiding from the police in the roof garden at Clement's Inn, October 12th, 1908
Footnotes:
[27] Other suffrage societies soon afterwards also adopted colours. The Women's Freedom League chose yellow, white and green, and the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies red, white and green.
[28] The efforts of Dr. Mary Gordon (the first lady Inspector of Prisons, who had been appointed during the previous April, admittedly owing to the publicity given to the condition of women in prison by the Suffragettes) now secured that when exercising in the future the women should be provided with cotton sun-bonnets. By her advice the prisoners were also supplied with notebooks and pencils, but the latter privilege was afterwards withdrawn. Eventually she succeeded in abolishing the unsanitary wooden spoon—at any rate, for Suffragette use.