Suffrage Journalism against State Brutality: Surveillance Art in Votes for Women and The Suffragette, 1910–1914

Between 1910 and 1914, as militant activists faced down physical violence from a variety of state agents in the final years of the campaign for women’s suffrage, the newspapers published by the militant suffragist Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) mobilized brutality as a framework through which to categorize the state’s actions. Their weekly newspapers, Votes for Women (1907–1915) and The Suffragette (1912–1915) argued that state-sponsored brutality against women was symptomatic of a deeply-seated culture of male violence that pervaded both English society and the Government, and that this brutality could only be rectified by giving women the vote. By this time, decades into the women’s suffrage movement, the Government was going to great lengths to suppress militant suffrage activism, and the WSPU’s disruptive and dangerous tactics in pursuing the vote had alienated other suffrage organizations and the general public. As it became clear that this approach was unlikely to succeed, it was crucial that the WSPU find new means of laying the state’s actions open to feminist critique. Doing so would, in theory, revivify their campaign and recapture the sympathies of the British public. To this end, the organization chose a rhetoric of male brutality to unify its representations of the patriarchal state and its agents.[1]

The images of forcible feeding created and circulated by the suffrage press may be the suffrage campaign’s most intense condensation of the regimes of surveillance, suppression, and imprisonment. This article argues that Votes for Women and The Suffragette characterized law-breaking suffragettes’ experiences of prison brutality through visual strategies common to the aesthetic and theoretical framework that scholars of surveillance have dubbed “surveillance art.”[2] Surveillance art is generally understood as a contemporary set of aesthetic practices through which (usually visual and often digital) artists respond to the proliferation of surveillance under the aegis of various projects of securitization. Anticipating these works by as much as a century, the WSPU’s campaign relied on the visual techniques of surveillance art to make state actions available for critique.

Scholarship treating surveillance art commonly focuses on contemporary works.[3] This periodizing neglects surveillance art’s longer historical traditions, which reach back to earlier moments in which artists used similar representational strategies to critique expansions of surveillance as a state project. The modernist period in Britain is emphatically one such historic watershed. It saw the early effects of the Official Secrets Acts (1889 and 1911), the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police Service (commonly known as “Scotland Yard,” founded 1883), and the birth of the intelligence organizations MI-5 and MI-6 (both 1909), as well as the proliferation of new forms of surveillance and surveillance technologies developed under the newly-created authority of these groups. We should not be surprised, then, that it is also a moment in which activists targeted by these new authorities reached for the tools of surveillance art. Reading the modernist period as one in which new modes of surveillance art emerged widens the scope of surveillance studies’ current preoccupation with the contemporary, revealing longer trajectories of aesthetic development. Similarly, reading suffrage militancy and journalism as coevals of modernism contributes to a corrective project within modernist studies, advocated by scholars like Anne Fernald and the contributors to Erica Gene Delsandro’s Women Making Modernism. Such scholars highlight how the “expansionist” program for the New Modernist Studies (as outlined by Rebecca Walkowitz and Douglas Mao’s now-canonical 2008 PMLA piece) directed scholarly attention away from feminist analytic frameworks and women’s cultural production during the modernist period. As a result, women’s works and history remain marginal to modernist studies as a discipline, to its detriment.[4]

Forcible Feeding in the Context of the Visibility Predicament

From around 1908, WSPU newspapers consistently convey one of its leaders’ core beliefs: that the state, and in particular the Liberal Government was determined to suppress suffrage by nearly any means available. This was a belief, grounded in the long history of intentional neglect of the suffrage issue by many successive governments and the mainstream press, that might lead a person to embrace radical militancy in the 1910s. Yet these papers do not represent anything like the mainstream of the women’s suffrage movement; rather, they are artifacts of the movement’s most militant wing. The WSPU papers commenced publication in 1907, 75 years after the 1832 Reform Bill’s disenfranchised women at the national level and provoked women’s suffrage advocates to organize, and 40 years after John Stuart Mill brought the first parliamentary proposal to enfranchise (some) women. In the intervening decades, a broad range of approaches to suffragism developed, from attempting to persuade one’s male relatives to vote to expand the franchise, to public speeches, to massive demonstrations (most notably the 1908 Hyde Park March that numbered between a quarter and half a million participants), to militant activism that began with socially disruptive acts and progressed through illegal acts of violent and non-violent resistance.[5] After what is usually recognized as the first instance of militant law-breaking, Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney’s assault on a constable in 1905, the movement split into militant and constitutionalist (non-militant) factions. Most suffragists chose non-militant groups: membership in the largest of the constitutional societies, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), was orders of magnitude larger than the WSPU at its height. Even among militants, the WSPU tactics were at the extreme edge, as was its rhetoric, and the organization’s official communications and institutional culture took a strong anti-male turn under the controversial leadership of Christabel Pankhurst around 1911.

In 1910, after years of escalating militant tactics, a pause in militancy—known as the “truce”—was declared between militant organizations and the Government, as a Conciliation Bill that proposed limited women’s suffrage moved through parliament. That bill was “torpedoed” by Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith’s Liberal Government in November of 1911, with little hope of new legislation in sight.[6] The Government was widely perceived to have behaved duplicitously, but the movement’s options for effective agitation narrowed in light of the legislative impasse that resulted from this collapse of negotiations. Similarly, as I document elsewhere, after the truce the Government turned its efforts to pre-emptively suppressing suffrage militancy and its advocates, including Votes for Women.[7]

This impasse that constituted the immediate context for much of what followed. By 1912, militancy’s recent history was affectively somewhat incoherent, and likely felt so to its adherents: sine 1905, it had swung from disrupting political meetings to mass marches and then widespread, attention-getting window smashing campaigns, with an ongoing background of legal protests like tax resistance, only to see the momentum of these campaigns grind to a halt during the truce, which ended up not paying off with any sort of legislative gains. Ewa Płonowska Ziarek has argued that “[t]he contradiction between transformative action and melancholic impasse raises a fundamental question . . . namely, how the haunting history of destruction and the ongoing exclusion of women from politics and literary production can be transformed into inaugural possibilities of writing and action.”[8] The WSPU met this threat of melancholic impasse after the Conciliation Bill’s failure by doubling down on property destruction—most notably arson—that was meant to re-engage the public and serve as a recruiting ground for new suffragettes, as well as consolidate the commitment of the Cause’s veterans. At the same time, the aesthetic choices made by Votes for Women’s editors reinforced these choices. The slogan of the WSPU was “Deeds Not Words!” and in 1912, a high-flying recklessness reigned in both word and deed. While earlier militant protests had chosen their targets with symbolic precision, by 1912 WSPU militancy included acts that affected members of the public at random, such as attacks on public facilities and acid attacks on ballot- and letter-boxes. The Christmas issue of The Suffragette that year reminded readers—in verse—that letter box arson put not only their tax bills but also their Christmas celebrations at risk:

Christmas, I believe is coming. Soon

            its missives will be here…

Haply these may never reach me; haply

            they are destined yet

For the blacking or corrosive of the

            ardent suffragette.[9]     

“Give us the Vote or we’ll give your Christmas cards an acid bath” is fairly typical of The Suffragette’s rhetorical choices. These efforts to hold the public captive to suffragette havoc reflect the WSPU’s growing desperation to regain momentum.[10] WSPU newspapers justified activists’ extreme measures by arguing that Government suppression of the campaign for women’s suffrage was disproportionately violent, and that their attacks on property paled in comparison to the state’s brutal attacks on the person.

In support of this perspective, the WSPU’s journalism represented the Government’s forcible feeding of hunger-striking suffragette prisoners as a form of intentional brutality, akin to using sexual violence as a weapon of state. Forcible feeding was first used on a suffragette hunger striker in 1909, and generated controversy and condemnation from many quarters. When the Votes for Women and The Suffragette images I take up below were published in 1913–14, the implementation of Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913, colloquially known as the “Cat and Mouse” Act, was adding new fuel to the forcible feeding debates. The Act allowed hunger-striking prisoners whose health forcible feeding seriously imperiled to be temporarily released from prison, recuperate for a short period, and then be re-arrested to continue serving their sentences. When these provisions went into effect in 1913, the suffrage press was documenting a steady stream of arrests, hearings, sentences, releases, and licenses, which created the impression of the police stations, courts, and prisons as a revolving door for suffragettes. “Torture” was the most commonly used descriptor of the practice across the papers. As one example, militant arsonist Kitty Marion, because of her extremely long sentence and equally extreme commitment to the hunger strike, was reportedly forcibly fed 232 times before being released. By then, she was openly suicidal and had tried to obtain poison from the prison doctor.[11] The number of women undergoing prolonged sentences and repeated forcible feeding made publicizing the torturous experience increasingly urgent.

At the same time, practical problems arose for the WSPU around the question of how to effectively make their activism visible. Activists who undertook militant acts, even legal ones, faced a double-bind in seeking visibility in the face of the state’s attempts to deny their claims a hearing: militancy needed to be visible to create its intended effects, but this meant keeping it invisible to surveillance agents until the last possible moment. While the images I discuss below use the conventions of surveillance art, it is necessary to recall that this art arose in the context of militants’ ongoing counter-surveillance practice.[12] Militants needed to negotiate state surveillance (and the suppression toward which it was geared) and carry out counter-surveillant measures, but these needs came into conflict with the public visibility persuasive activism required. While the element of surprise kept militants out of prison, it potentially circumscribed the audience and public impact of their work. 

The activist situation was further complicated by the proven inefficacy of the forms of visibility that suffragists had successfully pursued. Historians have extensively documented Edwardian suffragism’s reliance on spectacle as a mode of political persuasion.[13] As Katherine Kelly points out, “suffragists and suffragettes invested prodigious amounts of money, time and labor into becoming and remaining visible,” but nevertheless “even sympathetic commentators questioned the political efficacy of such complex and extravagant display” (Kelly, “Spectacles,” 329, 343). After the march of 1908, Asquith explicitly refused to recognize the enormous scale of the demonstration as reflecting the will of women as a group, explicitly refuting the hope that the Government would take peaceful, large-scale demonstrations as demographic proof of the will of voteless women (Pugh, Pankhursts, 180). The WSPU took Asquith’s derision to heart. In 1913, the Suffragette mocks a nation-wide “pilgrimage” made by women of the non-militant NUWSS (whose acronym appears on the backs of the credulous oysters in the illustration) as the Liberal Government tricking them into wasting their resources (fig. 1). The Suffragette graphic argues campaigns could not count on the visual impact of sheer scale to persuade, and that suffragists would need to reconfigure their regimes of argumentation if they were to succeed.

Suffrage periodicals offered unique resources for meeting this challenge. The suffrage press was a forum where editors could make the militant presence visible to the public and offer arguments to support specific acts of militancy. Between 1912 and 1914, the WSPU papers used this power to advance a wide variety of arguments that linked women’s enfranchisement to the prevention of male brutality at all levels of society. They reached a fairly large audience: by the summer of 1909, Votes for Women had a weekly circulation of 30,000 copies—a number that doesn’t take into account the public visibility of the paper’s female newsvendors, who were an attention-grabbing novelty on the streets of cities across England, Scotland, and Wales.[14] (The same could be said of the vendors of The Suffragette, which had a smaller circulation.) After the truce, WSPU militancy kept some prominent leaders out of the public eye—because they were in prison, hiding in an attempt to evade (re)arrest, or, in the case of Christabel Pankhurst, in “exile” in France avoiding sedition charges.[15] In this absence, the papers stepped in to depict the results of surveillance, suppression, and police violence in graphic and visual terms, through cover illustrations and photographs. They filled gaps in coverage by the mainstream press, which generally either “boycotted” suffrage news or presented militancy as incomprehensible disorder, and corrected existing tropes that viewed suffragists as ridiculous, hysterical, or unintentionally humorous madwomen.

The forcible feeding of hunger-striking militants became the key site through which the papers resisted these tropes by mobilizing a visual rhetoric of male brutality. Suffrage journalism and fiction also depicted police brutality and surveillance in narrative rather than visual forms, using modernist aesthetic strategies different to the ones depicted here that were often intent on theorizing the experiential aspects of being surveilled.[16] Suffrage papers created images that anticipated surveillance art’s visual strategies, and used forcible feeding to renegotiate and reconfigure their viewers’ embodied relation to state power. Forcible feeding became a common reference in suffrage fiction and memoir, and the papers had the advantage of joining timely reporting with shocking, if not photographic, visuals.

The hidden nature of forcible feeding, out of sight behind the prison walls, created obvious difficulties for conveying the experience to the public. While photography captured suffragist events and photo-realistic illustrations approximated prison experiences (fig. 2), no case of prison forcible feeding was documented photographically. It would have been considered a violation of prisoner’s rights had prison authorities done so, and authorities would obviously never allow photography of the widely-condemned practice by a prisoner or journalist.[17] This posed a practical obstacle for suffragettes attempting to convey its horrors, and for members of the public who might have been looking for accounts of it out of curiosity or concern.

Narratives of forcible feeding were, inherently, fraught with political difficulties. First, because when violence against women made it into the press, it was often framed as funny, readers, especially male readers, were ill-prepared to take the issue seriously.[18] Those unsympathetic to the suffragette cause found accounts and images of forcible feeding humorous, because they were primed to do so. Secondly, forcible feeding not only rendered the female activist problematically passive (she is the recipient of violence, of undesired “nourishment,” and thus lacking in the agency), it also coded her as too aggressive: the suffragette forces the state’s hand by inflicting forcible feeding upon herself, since it could easily be avoided by not hunger striking, or by staying out of prison. Neither of these were the story of female political agency that the WSPU wanted to tell. A final complication was added by existing discourses that were circulating about the WSPU leadership, in which “[c]ritics charged that WSPU leaders exploited willing women by subjecting them to violence at the hands of the government, and then capitalized on their victimization for publicity’s sake.”[19] While this was a charge levied against WSPU tactics generally, it could be seen as an especially relevant interpretive context for incidents of police brutality and prison violence, where the degree and nature of the violence women experienced made the stakes particularly high. If this violence could be laid at the feet of the WSPU, it would be the organization itself, not the Government, responsible for brutalizing women. If women’s activist strategies inflicted collateral damage on each other while failing to hit their actual targets, they could hardly continue arguing that they were savvy political actors worthy of the vote.

In addition, depictions of forcible feeding changed over time, in part as the purpose of the hunger strike changed. Hunger strikes in 1909–10 specifically protested the treatment of suffragette prisoners as “common” rather than “political” prisoners, and this classification changed in 1910 (Green, Spectacular Confessions, 101). In the post-truce years, hunger strikes aimed to demonstrate the physical effects of hunger striking on the once-again-publicly-visible bodies of prisoners when they were released from prison on the grounds of the health impacts, or aimed at literal martyrdom at the hands of the state (Howlett, “Writing,” 21).[20] As a result, accounts of forcible feeding occur in what Caroline Howlett has identified as two waves: a pre-truce wave of women trying to create awareness of the physical brutality and health consequences of the practice, and a post-truce wave, initiated by then-WSPU-member Sylvia Pankhurst’s story of being forcibly fed in 1912. Pankhurst emphasized “the horrors of the feeding itself, rather than . . . the accompanying violence,” which Howlett reads as a template for future accounts: “There is evidence to suggest that second-wave forcible feeding accounts were carefully constructed to produce maximum political effect,” their composition orchestrated to a degree by Emmeline Pankhurst (Howlett, “Writing,” 19, 21). In Chloe Ward’s reading, this set of representations were “explicitly devised to inspire the kind of visceral and empathetic reactions that could be historical agents, arousing sympathy for the suffrage movement and provoking viewers to take action.”[21] The images I consider here form part of this carefully constructed set.

Surveillance Art Responds

Illustrations of forcible feeding in the suffrage press respond to the aspects of the visibility predicament I have outlined in the previous section. Where my reading differs from previous considerations of these images is in attending to how they deploy the representational techniques typical of surveillance art, and arguing that they do so in pursuit of the goals that all surveillance art shares. According to the definition offered by Gary Kafer, these goals include “mobiliz[ing] a critical discourse on the rise and proliferation of surveillance in contemporary society by engaging with the politics and power relations configured by surveillance systems” (Kafer, “Reimagining Resistance,” 230). Andrea Mubi Brighenti adds that surveillance art takes as its premise the idea that surveillance “contributes to the formation of an ideoscape and a collective imagery about what security, insecurity, and control are ultimately about, as well as the landscape of moods and affects a surveillance society . . . expresses” (Brighenti, “Artveillance,” 137). In each case, the question of mediating carceral regimes and the spatial and psychological environments they create is central to the project of surveillance art. The specific surveillance system in the case of forcible feeding is the carceral regime of the prison (including forcible feeding and the totalizing medical and bodily surveillance on which it relies), to which the public does not have direct access. This lack of public oversight constitutes part of the protest’s rationale: if forcible feeding’s full horror is to be grasped, it must be made imaginatively available to a public with no direct means of witnessing it. During the Cat-and-Mouse period, the spectacle of women’s visibly malnourished bodies once released from prison came to stand metonymically for the entire complex of hunger/thirst strike, forcible feeding, physical degeneration, release, and rearrest. In the earlier years of the hunger strike, when the visible bodily effects of the hunger strike were less remarkable because sentences were typically calculated in days or weeks rather than months or years, posters attempted to reveal the hidden brutality of forcible feeding.

The papers’ illustrations anticipate key formal strategies deployed by contemporary surveillance artists to establish a close identification between image and viewer. They do so iteratively over time: the repeated use of the forcible feeding image as an image of bodily violation relies on repetition and intensification in order, ultimately, to indict surveillance in the prison for perpetuating a regime of state-sponsored rape—a literally grotesque interpretation of the doctor’s understanding of medical surveillance as care. If surveillance art attempts to render experiences of being surveilled intelligible to an audience who may not be under direct threat of surveillance, or who understand surveillance intellectually rather than experientially, then one aspect of the work this genre performs is to convey a sense of the “emotional spaces” of surveillance.[22] I understand “emotional space” as the various ways that emotions roused by being surveilled (and by recognizing surveillance as such) inflect how subjects understand and consequently navigate surveilled spaces. They may do so in ways that seem incomprehensible to an observer who experiences the space differently. Bringing the viewer into the surveilled person’s emotional space requires communicating that sense of threat, so that it can be intuitively understood, shared, and perhaps acted on. Surveillance art, then, uses the shared perceptions of artist and viewer to reveal surveillance dynamics that are operative but concealed, in order to clarify one or more aspects of how surveillance is experienced by its subjects. It also served as a riposte to one function of forcible feeding itself. Mary Jane Corbett emphasizes that the collective nature of suffrage struggle informed women’s sense of their political subjecthood, and argues that forcible feeding specifically aimed to disrupt this collectivity: “the intensely personal experience of forcible feeding was directed at the individual and designed to break down all connections between self and world” (Corbett, “Representing Femininity,” 165). In particular, it disrupted the militant’s sense of her actions as transcendently meaningful. The desire to convey emotional experiences of surveillance, including its ability to disrupt the tangible bonds of collective action, motivates a significant portion of the visuals in Votes for Women and The Suffragette during this period. 

This desire is most legible in depictions of forcible feeding, which position suffragettes at the mercy of a variety of state and other surveillance agents. They promise to disclose what these interlocking regimes keep hidden behind—namely, the experience of forcible feeding as torture, often coded visually and in first-hand testimony as a form of rape. They repeatedly draw on the visual repertoire of surveillance art in order to offer graphic representations of forcible feeding as a proxy for an experience that could not be made directly accessible. The papers argue that this sexualized violation is sanctioned not only by prison authorities but also by Government, medical, and religious authorities, and, by extension, the public in whose name they act.

These images contributed to the WSPU project that insisted on male brutality as systemic and unchecked so long as women had no recourse to the vote. Images of forcible feeding recurred on the cover of at least fifteen issues of Votes for Women and The Suffragette between 1910 and 1914. The timeline suggests that the visual emphasis on forcible feeding was specifically driven by the editorial policies associated with Christabel Pankhurst. Pankhurst led the WSPU with an autocratic style, and unsurprisingly, during her tenure as one of its editors, Votes for Women shows “less evidence of debate or disagreement in the paper” than other suffrage papers.[23] The WSPU suffered multiple organizational splits over Pankhurst’s tactics, which affected its newspapers. The most notable splits took place in 1907, when the Women’s Freedom League broke away as a splinter group, and in the fall of 1912, when Christabel and her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst, fell out with the editors of Votes for Women, the longtime WSPU co-leaders and funders, Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence. The Pethick-Lawrences left the WSPU but, awkwardly, retained control of Votes for Women.[24] In response, Christabel founded and tightly controlled The Suffragette. The only time one of these images appears on the cover of Votes for Women is in 1910, and the last time any image of forcible feeding appears in the newspaper is in May of 1913. That Votes for Women wound down their use of these images while they were used with such frequency in The Suffragette, suggests that Christabel drove the image campaign at the same time as she helmed the misandrist turn the WSPU’s organizational culture and public rhetoric took around 1910.[25] Likewise, the images of forcible feeding that appeared in Votes for Women were the work of Alfred Pearse (published under the pseudonym “A Patriot”). Pearse, a friend of the Pethick-Lawrences, stayed with Votes for Women after the split.[26] This meant that when Christabel commissioned The Suffragette images, rather than dealing with a long-standing contributor with an established style, the choice of new illustrators likely gave her even greater control over images. It also meant that she could opt not to work with a male illustrator.[27]

The first image of forcible feeding in the suffrage press, from January 28, 1910, serves as a template for several later iterations, almost all of which reference Alfred Pearse’s original poster for the WSPU with varying degrees of explicitness (fig.4). The original circulated widely among audiences interested in militancy and women’s enfranchisement, in part because the WSPU also sold it as a poster (in four-color 80” x 60” and 20” x 15” versions) which was displayed in suffrage shops and events, among other spaces, and also acted as a fundraiser.[28] It circulated in a particularly poster-rich environment: in 1910 there were an unusual high number of bye-elections as well as two general elections, and the prevalence of political posters in public spaces led the Pall Mall Gazette to describe the January election as “the poster election.”[29] As the imperative printed on the original version, “Electors! Put a stop to this Torture by voting against the Prime Minister” suggests, it initially circulated as an anti-Liberal election poster. There are two different dynamics here that are relevant for interpreting the WSPU poster’s historical impact: its graphics needed to be particularly dramatic to stand out in this in this environment, but it was also a moment in which people were attuned to posters in public spaces, and so likely to take notice of the WSPU’s image. As a result, it would likely be familiar to viewers of the later images.[30]

Taken as a pair with the image that appeared on the cover of the previous week’s paper, some aspects of the campaign against forcible feeding become salient (fig. 3). The January 21 cover offers a contrast to the following week’s: in illustrating “the way that political prisoners are treated by a Liberal Government,” the earlier image places the viewer behind the bound suffragette prisoner, whose face cannot be seen, as she watches a wardress exit her cell.[31] The image includes the viewer in the state’s withdrawal of care, positioning her as someone who, like the political prisoner, might be abandoned by the state whose charge, among other responsibilities, is to secure her welfare. The image also places the viewer more or less in the position of the suffragette, gendering the viewer by virtue of placing them in a feminized space. We share an approximate line of sight with the prisoner, we watch the same indifferent figure retreating, and when the wardress has departed we are, to extrapolate a narrative from the scene, locked away with the suffragette in her cell, immobilized and equally unable to affect the scene. By placing the viewer alongside the prisoner, whose posture suggests that she is weakened, passive, and possibly unconscious, the illustration seems calculated to elicit empathy, it allows for a political passivity in the face of the image. It does not offer the viewer a means of redressing the problem it depicts.

The covers that followed sought to correct this. The January 28 cover image positions the reader as a spectator to a “barbarous” scene of forcible feeding. This visual disposition of the scene generates a radically different ethics of viewing than the previous image. We might wonder: if we were positioned as the “political prisoner’s” unwilling cellmate on January 21, who are we now?

This image, I argue, positions the viewer as a surveillor in order to interrogate the ethics of surveillant looking. The title indicates “the Government’s Methods of Barbarism,” telling us both who is responsible—not, importantly, any of the people in the scene, but rather the absent Liberal Government—and how we are to interpret what we see—as a concrete instance of a “method” or system as much as an individual “barbaric” act. However, the dramatic image is likely to catch the viewer’s eye before the title does, which gives the viewer a moment of decontextualized, immediate response to the image itself.  The black border’s framing of the scene as a tableau and the disposition of the bodies within it provides both proximity to and distance from the act of forcible feeding. The formal arrangement of this scene presents it to the viewer as a scene that can be apprehended synoptically. The inclusion of the barred window indicates our return to the prison, but unlike the previous week’s illustration, this image positions the viewer as relatively powerful. In contrast to the imprisoned woman, the viewer, who likely purchases the paper or views the poster while occupying public space, is not confined or constrained, and has the power to attend to the image or turn away as they choose. Importantly, this freedom may make the viewer’s power feel voyeuristic: none of the participants in the scene register the viewer’s presence (instead, their gazes direct us to the prone, possibly unconscious woman who is the focus of their attention), and this allows the viewer to consume the scene however they are inclined to do so. Likewise, where the previous image placed us in an empathetic relation of shared space with the political prisoner, in this image the arrangement of bodies leaves the viewer equally free to feel empathy, alienation, disgust, or even pleasure at the sight of the prisoner, according to their inclination.

It is this freedom that places the viewer in a surveillant relation to the event depicted, and determines the ethics of that relation. It gives the viewer privileged access to what is otherwise hidden: the prison workers’ obliviousness to the viewer’s presence reveals that they know they will not be overseen or made accountable for following the orders to feed the suffragette forcibly. It also emulates such authorities’ unwillingness to acknowledge such witnesses, including the forcibly fed themselves.[32] This freedom also creates privacy for the viewer who deliberates over a response: we are placed as if behind a one-way mirror in an observation room. This positioning mimics the visual disposition of much contemporary surveillance art, which places the viewer in the position of surveillance agent at a remove from the scene (often, behind a camera) and so stages the ethical dilemma of their relationship to what they observe from that vantage. Surveillance scholar Torin Monahan has argued that in “interpreting critical surveillance artwork . . . we could question the extent to which artists invoke contradictions in multiple modes of interpellation to destabilize viewers and suggest possibilities for resolution or containment, perhaps through recognition of complicity and collective responsibility” (Monahan, “Ways of Being Seen,” 563). This image offers precisely such a multiplicity of interpellations. It places the viewer in the position of deciding how they will be interpellated by the act of viewing. It makes demands: are you the voyeuristic onlooker, the powerful surveyor, the helpless bystander, or will you join the militants working to resist the forms of masculine authority represented by the prison doctor and the warden in the scene? As Monahan suggests,

By fostering ambiguity and decentring the viewing subject, critical surveillance art can capitalize on the anxiety of viewers to motivate questions that might lead to greater awareness of surveillance systems, protocols and power dynamics. Works that use participation to make viewers uncomfortable can guide moments of self-reflexivity about one’s relationship—and obligation—to others within surveillance networks. (576)

In this case, the image likely did prompt viewers to “self-reflexivity about one’s relationship—and obligation—to others within [the] surveillance network” of police, prison, and medical authority. Such viewers included members of the medical profession itself: when forcible feeding began in 1909, Votes for Women ran letters from physicians protesting the practice as inhumane, and when The Suffragette puts a version of the forcible feeding on the cover in February 1914, they are able to do so above claims from a number of medical doctors attesting to the fact that it is “an act of brutality beyond common endurance” (fig. 5).[33] These claims are useful as a condemnation of the practice by men of equal authority to those carrying out the practice and denying that it harmed prisoners, but it is equally rhetorically valuable as a testament to the brutalizing effects it had on prison medical officials charged with implementing it. 

The questions that arise from the act of viewing may have destabilized viewers’ relation to their previously held political beliefs, including their views on state violence against women. Crucially for its purpose as a suffrage recruiting tool, the poster opens the possibility of agency in response to a scene at which, after all, the image’s viewers were not present. If the viewer is made uncomfortable by their own impulsive response or social positioning—if the viewer does not wish to remain in the position of voyeur or bystander—the image and the accompanying text offers opportunities to productively reorient that response.[34] It suggests that the viewer may intervene to prevent future instances of such torture through political activism and militancy. Such a reorientation requires a rejection of the role of surveillor and a suspicion, perhaps new, of the ways in which surveillance and surveillant looking are imbricated with carceral, medical, and legal systems. It also highlights that male voters’ current complicity in the totalizing surveillance of regimes of state power could be reversed by giving women the vote, which would grant women the power to meaningfully refuse their consent to such practices by supporting legislative reforms.

Weaponizing State Brutality, 1913–1914

While the 1910 image works as a piece of surveillance art that establishes the brutality of forcible feeding, the later images build on this foundation to demonstrate how what I elsewhere term “selective surveillance” was weaponized against the forcibly fed. I define selective surveillance as

the choice by surveillance agents not to see actions or people that their official duties would normally require them to see, because the refusal to see serves political or other goals . . . Selective surveillance by police in public clashes between suffragists, the police, and anti-suffrage militants engenders sexual violence and other forms of female vulnerability. (Brown, Watching Women, 144-5)

With the forcibly fed militant, that vulnerability starts with street protests, but extends to her prison experiences. Post-truce images indict the state for the withdrawal of its care, rendering women vulnerable to brutal, and brutalizing, treatment under a regime of selective surveillance that sees women as threat, but ignores its duty to protect them from state violence.

In these images, this strategy targets two men in particular: Asquith and his Home Secretary, Reginald McKenna. In the initial poster, and the versions that most directly duplicate it, the authorities involved are anonymous prison workers: four female wardens, a doctor, and a male warden. In later versions, the politicians leading the Government take the role of forcible feeders, offering a visual metonymy for governmental responsibility as an attempt to hold them accountable. McKenna appears once in May 1913, in the final image of forcible feeding to appear in Votes for Women (fig. 6). A reprint from The Daily Herald showing him saying “Grace” over a suffragette who has been tied to a chair, whose face he grips while forcibly feeding her. Here, McKenna acts entirely without assistance. McKenna’s Home Office, the image implies, works the will of the “Force-Feeder-in-Chief,” who is authorized in turn by Liberal Party leaders in the Cabinet. Asquith’s role, on the other hand, is given repeated emphasis: he appears in at least five of the images as the “Prime Administer” behind the elaborate forcible feeding apparatus (figs. 7, 8, 9, twice in 10, and 11). Tellingly, with one exception, Asquith is not directly shown doing the work of forcible feeding (fig.10). Instead, his actions corrupt those around him or under his authority His callousness has infected the prison doctor (fig. 7), and his violence toward a female prisoner, menacing her from above while holding her in a posture that echoes that of a forcibly fed woman (fig. 8), requires religious authority in the form of “my Lord Bishop” to “whitewash” his crimes. His obsequiousness to male voters and Irish Home Rule militants corrupts institutions of justice (figs. 9 and 10). The final image in which he appears likewise compounds his culpability in the practice of forcible feeding by invoking sexual assault (fig. 11). This image echoes figure 10 in its split cell comparison of the treatment of suffragettes with the treatment of militants in Ulster, but the absence of the apparatus of forcible feeding, and Asquith’s position on top of the suffragette while choking her codes it as simultaneously a forcible feeding and a rape.[35]

In these images and their accompanying text, the language of brutality and the language of sexual violence are often elided, with imagery that simultaneously invokes both categories. Suffragette accounts of forcible feeding often invoked rape as a point of comparison, at times figuratively, and at others more literally in highlighting the penetrative violation of bodily autonomy forcible feeding entailed. Such depictions of rape entered a field already saturated with connotations that were difficult to navigate in the context of political argument. If forcible feeding innately raised the possibility that the militant was both too passive and the wrong kind of active, coding the forcibly fed militant as raped by the state was an even more tenuous path. At the time, “the elision of the aggressive male act often mean[t] that rape [was] misread as self-inflicted violence” in much the way that forcible feeding was understood to be self-inflicted (Howlett, “Writing on the Body,” 12). Thus, images connoting rape risked reinforcing, rather than contradicting, the notion that militants incited the violence that accompanied forcible feeding. Conversely, some militants resisted drawing parallels with rape because it threatened their sense of political agency: through rape analogies “women are transformed from independent subjects who demand a right to be heard into sexual objects.”[36]

The images from The Suffragette, taken as a whole, address these risks by refocusing attention on perverse male pleasure in the helplessness of women as a form of violation that grows increasingly overt and sexual over the course of the series. The series culminates in the most demonstrably rape-like image on July 31, 1914, whose style differs radically from the others (fig. 12). Just one year earlier, the hunger-striking suffragette was depicted as a weakened but saint-like figure stumbling through the door to “torture” and death to attain glory for her suffrage martyrdom, crowned by cherubim with laurels in lieu of a halo int he afterlife (fig. 13). In the later image, torture is not merely a door that the suffragette must pass through. It is a harrowing, and ongoing, experience of bodily and emotional trauma. This violation is rendered in a highly sensational visual idiom, one that would have reminded contemporary readers of imagery that circulated around narratives of sexual violation. Such imagery would have included dramatic depictions of kidnapping from the moral panic around the “white slave traffic” (which reached a fever pitch in the 1880 and 90s with W. T. Stead’s yellow journalism crusade, the “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”), penny dreadful novels, and coverage of sensational crimes like the Jack the Ripper murders in the weekly Illustrated Police News and other illustrated papers.

In this image, these popular visual conventions of sexual peril are used to elaborate the emotional space of forcible feeding as one in which the victim is even more confined than she is in the physical space of the feeding room. The placement of the bars across the image is unintelligible in a realist visual idiom, so must be understood figuratively. The close framing of the forcible feeder emphasizes his powerful hands, the crudeness of his features, and the coarseness of his expression. These elements represent the forcible feeder’s bodily presence through late-nineteenth century eugenicist tropes of criminal degeneracy as physically legible in facial features and proportions—tropes which, somewhat ironically, Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso developed by taxonomically “reading” the physiology of prison inmates.[37]

At the time these illustrations were produced, The Suffragette was leaning into a eugenicist language of police brutality that mobilized the idea of the brute fairly literally, depicting the police as animal and irrational when confronted with suffragists. For example, the March 1914 headline describing Emmeline Pankhurst’s arrest calls police “Hysterical and Brutal” and their behavior—which included an officer bludgeoning Pankhurst’s head with a truncheon, and two different officers getting into a literal tug-of-war over her semi-conscious body in an attempt to take credit for the arrest—as “Disgraceful.”[38] In the cover image of this scene, the police appear in a chaotic mass, wielding truncheons and looking like an early-twentieth century illustration of mob irrationality, while an angelic-looking Emmeline speaks from a platform, standing between the mass of men and a personification of “Justice” tied droopily to a stake (fig. 14).  Both of these images take advantage of the popular legibility of Lombroso’s criminal types to foster antagonism toward the state’s agents. They suggest that it is state actors (whether doctor, warden, policeman or Prime Minister), and not the suffragette, who should be surveilled and imprisoned for their criminal tendencies, or as a threat to public safety. The suffragette is at the mercy of such men because the state withdraws the care for the citizen that police surveillance is intended, but fails, to instantiate. This withdrawal becomes one of The Suffragette’s justifications for militancy, but expands from there to indict the entire judicial system and its police apparatus.

Like contemporary surveillance art, these images addressed a public whose acceptance of authoritarian state violence was at odds with activist goals. They connect police and prison brutality to the state’s abnegation of its responsibility to disenfranchised subjects, highlighting historical continuities between both forms of coercive state power and the means through which activists have sought to resist that power. Votes for Women and The Suffragette’s deployment of images that depict and enact surveillant mechanisms feature as its contribution to a canon of critical surveillance art—a contribution that suggests continuities with contemporary surveillance artists’ projects, but which is grounded in the specific modes of theorizing male brutality and gendered political violence that suffrage militancy enabled.