- [6] This bill, I believe, was passed in Norway, with some alterations.
Another of the hospital patients, a member of our Deputation, Miss Leslie Lawless, was gravely ill with her lungs. She seemed in a high fever and we were very anxious about her. The prison clothes hang loosely upon one, and, though this is healthy in principle, they seem draughty and cold after modern garments, such as close-fitting undervests, etc. She had caught a severe chill waiting about for more than an hour in the draughty passages after the reception bath. She had been very ill and suffered much in her cell before being brought, only after the third day, to hospital. Mrs. Duval, a member of the Freedom League, was another really suffering patient. She had come up to London to see the results of the Freedom League Deputation. She was walking about the street when the Deputation had already been arrested. She was not taking part in any form of disturbance or demonstration. She was arrested on the ground that she was “known to be one of them.” Two gentlemen, total strangers, who witnessed her arrest, volunteered to come into court and speak on her behalf. She was nevertheless found guilty and sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment. She had twice been in prison before; she had not intended to risk arrest as she was in a very delicate state of health, having suffered considerably from her previous imprisonments. She was now in hospital with acute neuritis and a most irritating rash. She had many children at home and was anxious about them, not having been able to make adequate arrangements for them owing to her sudden and unexpected imprisonment. When I looked into her suffering face and heard from our whispered conversation that this was her third imprisonment I felt overcome. I envied her courage, but felt myself quite incapable of following her example.
Flowers were provided by the prison authorities, both in our ward and the one below; sometimes, too, our friends sent them to us. We were not allowed to know from whom they came, and they could not be destined for any particular prisoner, but flowers are expert ambassadors, and their messages of good-will from our friends were generally understood. They had to be taken out of the ward at night and returned to the ward in the morning; they had to be refreshed, the water changed and dead leaves picked off. I usurped this office. I feel ashamed, on looking back, to remember with what selfish greed I took it over, never giving the others a choice or chance in the matter. The joy of handling the flowers seemed like food and rest rolled into one. All the patients rejoiced in them. When a new lot were sent in they were handed round for each prisoner to see them and smell them at close quarters. Their appearance in prison used to remind me of Filippino Lippi’s Florentine picture of the Virgin appearing through the sky with a trail of coloured angels behind her to St. Bernard in his ascetic and joyless surroundings. They brought moments of rapture which revitalised one’s spirit and counteracted many of the stunning effects of prison existence. Some people whom I told of this have resented the fact that prisoners should be given the joy of flowers, but unless it be recognised as part of the punitive system to impose physical illness, I think the prison hospital authorities are to be congratulated on their wisdom in this respect; the flowers did more than the drug-basket to heal our complaints.
One of the reasons I took on as many housemaiding jobs as I could was that it enabled me to be let out of the ward for the emptying of slops, and this afforded a good opportunity for seeing and occasionally communicating with ordinary prisoners. They seemed to come and go pretty quickly from our floor of the hospital, and I seldom saw any of them more than twice or three times. The prisoner’s dress has a wonderfully disguising and unifying power, and it was a never-ending interest to try quickly to diagnose the type of prisoner, so as to make the most of any possible communication by whispers. Washing up was done in the bath-room cell and the door left open. Sometimes the handling of plates would prove that such work was unaccustomed and uncongenial, others were skilled but sullen and grudging in their service, some again would be keen and willing and showed the pathetic eagerness of a newcomer to inquire as to rules, to be friendly with her fellow-prisoners, to court the approval or advice of the wardresses. But such liveliness was not the fashion and was always repressed. One could watch the light and spirit of these human beings wane, as a lamp wanes for want of oil. Sometimes many days would go by without opportunity for the smallest communication with ordinary prisoners, then again there would be occasions of unexpected good luck. Once when emptying a basin at the sink a little woman, newcomer, who was dusting the top of the walls and fittings with a long-handled broom, came close up behind me. In prison one seems to develop eyes at the back of one’s head and that kind of cunning which is engendered in human beings and animals who are much restricted. I realised that no official eye for the moment was upon us. The splashing of the tap covered the sound of our low voices; without looking round, without changing expression or gesture so as not to arouse suspicion, the following conversation took place. Self: “The dust collects quickly here, doesn’t it?” Prisoner: “Yes, how long have you got?” (The invariable first question for all prisoners.) Self: “A month.” Prisoner: “I’m on remand for a week.” Self: “What is it for?” Prisoner: “Attempted suicide.” Self: “Poor you. Why did you do that?” Prisoner: “Well, I had a pot of trouble and I thought it was the quickest way out.” Self: “I remember feeling like that too, once, but I don’t now.” Prisoner: “And nor do I now, life’s sweet while it lasts, isn’t it?” This with a beaming smile. We had meanwhile exchanged furtive glances at each other. She had a round, rose-like face, with a look of abundant health and kindliness. Apparently, the “pot of trouble” had been of no long duration. Self: “It seems odd to send people here for suicide?” Prisoner (eagerly): “Yes, it does indeed. It seems a shame.” Then, with some hesitation, “What are you in for?” Self: “Suffragette.” She looked at me wonderingly, as if she supposed this to be the technical term for some form of vice unknown to her, though her sympathy and respect were not withdrawn. We were, however, interrupted at this point and I was summoned to return with my much scrubbed basin to the ward. I never saw the little rose-like face again.
Beside the sink there was a tiny sash window about the level of my head. When this was open I could catch sight of the yard where remand prisoners exercised. I was surprised to see that many of them wore prison dress. This meant either that they had been made to change their clothes, or that remand and convicted prisoners were exercising together. Seeing a great number of prisoners in a group was a most depressing sight. They were packed quite close, touching each other as they went round the narrow asphalt path in single file. They nearly all of them looked ill. Their faces wore an expression of extreme dejection; the lifeless, listless way they walked, enhanced the look of entire detachment of one from the other; in spite of being so closely herded, each seemed in a world of her own individual sorrow. Anxiety, suffering, bitterness, and a harrowing tale of want or degradation was told by the clothes of those not in prison dress. The procession was more heartrending than anything my imagination could have conceived; it took away my breath to look at them. Why are they there? What has driven these poor wrecks into this harbour? What is being done for them here to give them courage, self-reliance, hope, belief in better possibilities for themselves and their children, opportunity to mend their own lives, better conditions of work, fairer payment, and above all a more honourable recognition of their services as women, of their needs, and of their rights; the vitality to fight for their own welfare against unjust handicaps, prejudiced ignorance of their wants and tyrannous repression of their attempts to cry out for wider labour markets?
We of the remand hospital No. 2 most often exercised in this same yard in the afternoon. We were only about six in number, sometimes only two or three, but, since seeing the procession of the morning, their personalities seemed to haunt the yard. I thought of them as beads of a necklace, detached, helpless and useless, and wondered how long it would be before they were threaded together by means of the women’s movement into a great organised band, self-expressive yet co-ordinated, and ruled by the bond of mutual service. The test of a chain’s strength is in its weakest link. Where is our chain weakest? Not in the wretched victims who daily paced this yard, not in the debtor, the drunkard, the thief, the hooligan, the prostitute, the child murderer. These miseries were mostly the direct outcome of harmful and unjust laws. Amongst the few that remain of spontaneously criminal type, their number is insignificant, their influence negligible; they act as cautions rather than instigators, although they call for all the remedial forces which the State or individuals can devote to them. They themselves are diseased exceptions, but they belong to groups of women, home workers, wage earners, skilled craftswomen, who have kept alight the old traditions of serviceableness, utility, and the powers of women. They have already made many efforts to unite and to preserve their nobility of independence. They, moreover, are quick to respond and eager to serve the modern women’s movement. No, the weakest link in the chain of womanhood is the woman of the leisured class. Isolated and detached, she has but little sense of kinship with other women. For her there is no bond of labour, no ties of mutual service; her whole life is spent in the preservation of appearances, and she seems hardly ever to probe down to the bone of realities. Child-having remains her glory, the one bit of full-livedness in an otherwise most arid desert. This is the one basis on which she feels herself united to other women, and the wrongs and sufferings of child-bearers stand out as the exception on which you can sometimes get her to move on behalf of other women. Until these women can be educated as to the lives of the bulk of women, brought up against the laws with regard to them that now disgrace the statute book, made to feel the horror of custom which still undermines their own existence, and to burst through the gilded bars which hold their own lives in bondage, they act upon the social organism in a way that is almost wholly harmful. Only when their eyes have been opened will their “influence” and “example” bear out a reasonable meaning of those words and their position of privilege make them worthy to lead.
As I had watched the prisoners I saw before me a counter-procession of women of this leisured class, herded as I have so often seen them at ball-rooms and parties, enduring the labours, the penalties, of futile, superficial, sordidly useless lives, quarrelling in their marriage market, revelling in their petty triumphs, concerned continually with money, yielding all opinion to social exigencies, grovelling to those they consider above them, despising and crushing those they think beneath them, pretending to be lovers of art and intellect, but concerned at heart only with the appearance of being so. Subservient to a superficial morality, tested not by the question, “What has been done?” but “What is the general opinion about what has been done?” And immediately the procession of Holloway yard seemed human, dignified, almost enviable by the side of that other. It is these leisured women the women’s movement has hitherto cast aside. They are the dross, the dead fruit. All others have responded in some way, however feeble their power of service, when they have heard the call; but these have not. As I thought of them my pity moved from the procession in Holloway to these other women. Success is impossible for a social system that takes no heed to its outcasts, the pathological victims of national existence are the symptoms which can lead us to diagnose its fundamental flaws. Whether or not the women alive to-day in the ruling class can be cured is of comparatively little importance, but clearly the causes which have brought them forth must be altered at the root. The conditions which go to produce a ruling caste are shifting their ground throughout the world. Such things are moulded by involuntary forces; they cannot, except in the immediate future, be foreshadowed or decreed. But it is now obvious that, whatever this basis, women must have a fair and honourable share in it. Rulers of the best are not reared by bondwomen. The bi-sexual powers must be released at all costs in those sections of the community which, whether by intellect, by birth, or by wealth, have the guiding reins of national life in their hands. The question of what that basis shall be is an altogether separate matter. Who can turn the force of our women’s movement in that direction, who can be a missionary to preach war in their peace-bedeadened country? The answer that came to me in Holloway, and ever since it has seemed to me the only answer, was this—the example of working class organisations, and above all, of those few splendid women who have given their lives to lead this movement. Where doctrine, precept and example all fail to penetrate, the spirit of sacrifice, which wakes an echo in all human hearts, will find a way.