Flower o’ freedom to deck her hair!
Mothers and wives and daughters, we,
Shall we ask in vain, with suppliant hand?
We, who are children of the free!
We, who are builders in the land!
A Prisoner in Bow
By Sylvia Pankhurst
(A leader of the Suffragette movement of England. The following, quoted from “The Woman’s Journal,” is an account of one of her imprisonments in the London jails.)
My eight days’ license had expired. The police were massed outside the Bromley Public Hall where I was speaking, waiting to arrest me. Numbers of detectives in plain clothes within were amongst the audience; the people hissed and howled at them and they threatened them with sticks. At the close of the meeting, the people, declaring that I should not be arrested, crowded down the stairs and out in a thick mass with men in the center of them all. The police rushed at us, striving to break our ranks and to force a way through to me.... Policemen were on every side of me. Two of them gripped and bruised my arms, dragging me along. The crowd followed, calling to me.... The policemen dug their fingers into my flesh. One of them took out his truncheon and grasped it tight against my hand and arm. The back of my left hand was bruised from it all next day. Several women rushed up to me and were arrested, and one girl who did not know any of us, or what the trouble was about, called out: “Oh, you should not hurt her,” and was taken into custody. They dragged me into a Cannon Row police station....
So, hatless, and without so much as a brush or comb, I was taken back to gaol to begin my hunger, thirst and sleep strike. When I reached my cell, the same cell in the hospital in which during February and March I had been forcibly fed for five weeks, I began to pace up and down.