{"id":99850,"date":"2016-06-29T10:30:58","date_gmt":"2016-06-29T14:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=99850"},"modified":"2016-06-29T10:05:57","modified_gmt":"2016-06-29T14:05:57","slug":"woman-alive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/29\/woman-alive\/","title":{"rendered":"Woman Alive"},"content":{"rendered":"

The memoirs of an imprisoned suffragette.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"suffragette-votes-for-women\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Max Nelson is writing a series<\/a> on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on John Cleland\u2019s very erotic prison novel, here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1908, when she was thirty-seven, Lady Constance Lytton took a vacation by the sea in Littlehampton. She\u2019d accepted a friend\u2019s offer to spend the summer at the Esperance Club, a charity meant to teach working-class women traditional English dances and folk songs. During a walk through town one day, she found a crowd gathered around \u201ca sheep which had escaped as it was being taken to the slaughterhouse.\u201d Watching the animal stagger around to the crowd\u2019s amusement, she wrote,<\/p>\n

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A\u00a0vision suddenly rose in my mind of what it should have been on its native mountain-side with all its forces rightly developed, vigorous and independent. There was a hideous contrast between that vision and the thing in the crowd.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The vision of the sheep comes at the start of her 1914 autobiography,\u00a0Prisons and Prisoners<\/em>, in a chapter titled \u201cMy Conversion.\u201d \u201cIt seemed to reveal for me for the first time,\u201d Lytton continued, \u201cthe position of women throughout the world.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

From then on, in Lytton\u2019s telling, the need for women\u2019s suffrage moved her like a religious calling. Three of her housemates that summer were the suffragettes Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and Annie and Jessie Kennedy, the last of whom had only recently been released from Holloway\u2014the London prison where Lytton herself would be confined only months later for joining a march to demand women the vote. For Lytton, that imprisonment initiated three years of increasingly high-profile involvement with the suffragist cause, a period she spent moving in and out of jail.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Lady<\/a>

Lady Constance Lytton.<\/p><\/div>\n

Lytton soon befriended prominent suffragettes like Pethick-Lawrence, the Kennedys, and Emmeline Pankhurst, and she wrote about them with reverence and comradely gratitude. They had nurtured in her a trait she\u2019d been cultivating since adolescence: a tendency toward self-denial, a readiness to give herself over completely to the defense of what was right or just. In 1892, as the historian Lyndsey Jenkins relates in her recent biography of Lytton, Constance was already writing her sister Betty to lament \u201cwhat a mistake it is to care only for little things, or to care for things only a little,\u201d and to insist that \u201cif one only cares enough, there is strength enough to overcome every obstacle, or at least to endure every martyrdom.\u201d<\/p>\n

To Lytton, the suffragettes not only suggested something worth \u201ccaring enough\u201d about to suffer for, they also confirmed that her comfortable life as an unmarried upper-class woman had been systematically cleared of great purposes and crowded instead with \u201clittle things\u201d about which it didn\u2019t make sense to care. \u201cI myself,\u201d she wrote slightly later in Prisons and Prisoners<\/em>, \u201cwas one of that numerous gang of upper class leisured spinsters\u201d for whom \u201ca maiming subserviency is so conditional to their very existence that it becomes an aim in itself.\u201d The restrictions applied to these women inspired some of Lytton\u2019s most extravagant rhetoric, precisely because it was largely overlooked by the middle- or lower-class suffragettes among whom she moved:<\/p>\n

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To the single woman, the old maid of later years, the paralysing worship of incapacity dominates life, the chain of limitations and restrictions is but seldom broken, and never overcome save by exceptional force of character or ability. Even then how often it is only the beating of wings against unyielding and maiming bars.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When she was diagnosing social pathologies or advocating for legal reforms, Lytton would seethe. \u201cWhether or not the women alive to-day in the working class can be cured is of comparatively little importance,\u201d she reflected later in the book, \u201cbut clearly the causes which have brought them forth must be altered at the root.\u201d And yet even as her gestures of resistance grew bolder and the abuses visited on her grew more extreme, she was careful not to judge any single police officer, judge, prison wardress, doctor, or chaplain uncharitably. She comes off equally in her own book and in Jenkins\u2019s careful reconstruction of her life as a figure of blinding decency and good will. Her younger sister Emily wrote in an 1890 letter to an elderly reverend that Constance \u201cis such an angel and seems to make everyone happy,\u201d with one exception: \u201cwhen there is someone very good near me, it seems to make me feel extra bad.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u00a9 Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, ca. 1917.<\/p><\/div>\n

Lytton\u2019s was a troubled, prominent family with a history of shameful episodes. Her grandfather, the famous novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, denounced his wife, Rosina, after she rebelled against his ongoing infidelities; he took custody of their children, kept her to a modest income, and, when she started satirizing him in her own novels, had her briefly committed to an asylum. (She would later describe that experience in her memoir,\u00a0A Blighted Life<\/em>.) The couple\u2019s only son, Robert, hoped to be a poet, but his father, as Jenkins notes, concluded that it wouldn\u2019t do for \u201ctwo of the same name to have a permanent reputation in literature.\u201d He joined the diplomatic service instead.<\/p>\n

Constance, his second daughter, was born in Vienna. When she was seven, the family moved to India, where Robert began a doomed tenure as Viceroy. (His years in power included both the Great Famine of 1876 to 1878 and the second Anglo-Afghan war, for both of which he\u2019s since been more or less qualifiedly blamed.) The family returned home when Constance was eleven. Prisons and Prisoners<\/em> never refers to her early years abroad; she skims over nearly thirty years of her life in several brisk paragraphs. Left unmentioned is her protracted and painful informal engagement to the army officer John Ponsonby, who never made the formal proposal both families expected. Her health was always fragile and her temperament seemingly gentle. \u201cI was an average ordinary human being,\u201d she would write, \u201cexcept perhaps with an exaggerated dislike of society and of publicity in any form.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the riddles of Prisons and Prisoners<\/em> is how someone with such an aversion to \u201csociety and publicity\u201d could have done what Lytton managed to do between 1909 and 1912. During her first imprisonment in Holloway, indignant that the prison authorities were favoring her with a lengthy hospital stay on account of her aristocratic background, she resolved to carve the slogan VOTES\u00a0FOR WOMEN<\/small>\u00a0across her chest with a hairpin and \u201cshow the first half of the inscription to the doctors, telling them that as I knew how much appearances were respected by officials, I thought it well to warn them that the last letter and a full stop would come upon my cheek.\u201d (She only got through the V<\/small>.)<\/p>\n

Her next imprisonment, at Newcastle, later in 1909, came after Gladstone\u2019s Home Office had begun forcibly feeding suffragettes on hunger strike using tubes inserted through the nose or mouth. She expected to receive the same treatment and felt ashamed when, instead, she was released \u201cbecause of the state of my heart\u201d\u2014another sign of what she and her fellow well-connected suffragette Jane Brailsford called, in a letter to the Times<\/em>, the \u201cglaring partiality and injustice\u201d from which wealthier militants benefited. In January of 1910, she decided to put that partiality to test. She had her hair \u201ccut short and parted\u201d unflatteringly, bought weak eyeglasses, sought out a cheap draper, renamed herself Jane Warton, and had herself arrested and imprisoned again for agitating outside a prison in Liverpool. This time she was force-fed eight times before her sister tracked her down and negotiated her release.<\/p>\n

Whenever she was together with Emmeline Pankhurst she found herself \u201covercome by the sense of being superfluous.\u201d When the two of them visited a newly released hunger striker, Lytton observed that the woman \u201clooked ethereal,\u201d the kind of figure that she\u2019d previously scoffed at in Fra Angelico paintings for bearing \u201ca look of purity that no living creature has.\u201d In the company of such rarified beings, she was burdened by a sense of her physical frailty and by the inconveniences of having a recognizable name, although she knew that her name gave her a special power to campaign for the cause. After her release from Walton Gaol in Liverpool, the Women\u2019s Social and Political Union (WSPU) put her on the payroll as an organizer to offset the costs of her speaking tours.<\/p>\n

\"Emmeline<\/a>

Emmeline Pankhurst, ca. 1911.<\/p><\/div>\n

The incident that led to her second arrest, at Newcastle, is suggestive of the odd balance she struck between her militancy and her urge not to do harm. She had been assigned to throw a stone at a window or car, a common tactic among suffragettes affiliated with the WSPU. At a demonstration timed to a series of meetings held by David Lloyd George, she resolved that her stone-throwing \u201cmust be more zealously done, more deliberate in its character than the stone-throwing at ordinary windows \u2026 I was determined that when they had me in court my act should inevitably be worse than that of other women.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first car to come around the bend at which she stood poised was of no importance, but she couldn\u2019t resist (\u201cthe instinct was too much for me\u201d). At the same time, \u201cto throw a stone against the car as it ran along the side was dangerous, as there were two men in front.\u201d She threw it low to miss. The following night, she wrote an inscription on the wall of her cell: TO DEFEND THE OPPRESSED,<\/small>\u2009\/\u2009TO FIGHT FOR THE DEFENSELESS,<\/small>\u2009\/\u2009NOT COUNTING THE COST.<\/small>\u00a0She did, however, count many of her costs, to her antagonists as much as to her family and friends, and her writing reflected her carefulness not to cause any unnecessary collateral damage.<\/p>\n

Again and again in Prisons and Prisoners<\/em> the jailhouse officials Lytton encounters are praised for their small kindnesses and partially excused for their cruelty and callousness. The wardress in Holloway whose kind inquiries betray the \u201cunspoiled human being\u201d below \u201cher rigid exterior\u201d; the visiting magistrates who strike Lytton as \u201cneither kind nor unkind,\u201d simply \u201cangry\u201d and \u201cdispleased\u201d; the senior medical official who seems to have \u201cmastered the fundamental matter of treating prisoners as he would treat other human beings\u201d\u2014the figures Lytton comes across in prison are a procession of basically decent people, certainly not wicked, forced into a noxious line of work. \u201cIt was obvious,\u201d Lytton wrote midway through her memoir about the prison officials\u2019 often inhumane attitude, \u201cthat this official manner was quite detached from the individual personality of those who assumed it. They looked and spoke in this way, not to serve their private ends, but in compliance with some strangely mistaken tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"suffragettes1-620x350\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Even the repellent doctor who slaps the disguised Lytton after subjecting her to a force-feeding regimen avoids her resentment. When she describes his conduct to the governor, it\u2019s with a startlingly forgiving tone:<\/p>\n

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He slapped me on the cheek; he did not hurt me, but seemed to wish to show his contempt; about this, too, I do not wish to complain as of an insult to me personally. He no doubt was irritated by his repulsive job, but this is hardly the right mood for an official, and what he could do to one woman he might possibly do to another.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Much of Prisons and Prisoners<\/em> is taken up with hair-raising descriptions of the conditions Lytton and other imprisoned suffragettes endured: \u201cfilthy\u201d walls; \u201cdirty\u201d public lavatories; \u201cblackened\u201d slippers; \u201ccoarse\u201d clothing; towels on which \u201cblood had freely been wiped,\u201d and the grisly details of the force-feeding procedures themselves. This was a book of propaganda; it was meant to startle its readers out of complacency and awaken them to a widespread injustice. But one also senses, reading the book, that prison had a strange, potent attraction for Lytton as an alternative to the cloistered life she\u2019d led as a spinster approaching middle age. If not for her conversion, she might have become one of those women whose situation she memorably described: \u201cThe fearful unnecessity of their disablement awakens no pity \u2026 a yoke so submitted to, so uselessly endured, can claim no reverence of martyrdom.\u201d As a suffragette, it was precisely her frailty and her \u201cdisablement\u201d and her upper-class title that helped make her a figure of large stature and high moral energy, someone who could easily claim \u201creverence of martyrdom.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"41+0qZPtDDL._SX332_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a>In 1912, Constance suffered a stroke. She finished writing Prisons and Prisoners<\/em> without use of her dominant hand. By the mid-1910s, she was living in a house with her elderly mother and what her sister called \u201ca most peculiar set of servants who shout and sing all day.\u201d She died in 1923 at fifty-four, five years before the Representation of the People Act 1928 expanded women\u2019s suffrage to the same parameters as that of men. Her sister Betty, according to Jenkins, had always been interested in occult phenomena, and \u201cjust before the Second World War broke out, she \u2018contacted\u2019 Constance at a s\u00e9ance.\u201d She described seeing \u201ca woman who passed to this life some time ago,\u201d seeming \u201cas if in some way in life she was a lonely person. She shows me Prison clothes. But she does not say what crime she committed \u2026 She says, \u2018prison gave me my freedom.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

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Max Nelson\u2019s\u00a0writings\u00a0on film and literature\u00a0have appeared in <\/em><\/em>The Threepenny Review,\u00a0<\/em><\/em>n+1, <\/em><\/em>Film Comment, and<\/em><\/em>\u00a0Boston Review, among other publications.\u00a0He lives in New York.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Previous entries in Prison Lit<\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n