Sustenance For Suffragettes

Written by Billy Nicholles

Artwork by Beca Summers

When I think about being nurtured, I think of our relationship with food. The food we eat nourishes our bodies:, it provides us with strength and comfort. The power of food stretches beyond its material sustenance; it fosters communal bonds through the shared experience of nourishment it provides.

In the early 1900s, the British Suffragettes chose to abstain from consuming any food in protest of their exclusion from the political establishment. democratic processes of the British state.

In response, the government forcibly fed hunger strikers.

Whilst food still nurtured them, the shared experience of forcible feeding was of pain, not pleasure. It was the shared experience of a patriarchal government physically invading these women’s bodies, and applying the nurturing power of food mechanically, and by force.

And yet, Suffragettes still found sustenance in the process. The oppression of women, epitomised in this most brutal of practices, nurtured these womenćs spirit and conviction in their cause.