An aristocrat disguises herself as a seamstress to prove that British justice had a class price tag.

Prisons and Prisoners

Constance Lytton · 1914

Constance Lytton's 1914 memoir is a firsthand account of militant suffrage protest and its consequences, built around one of the most striking experiments in the movement's history: to test whether prison authorities treated suffragette prisoners differently by social class, Lytton — daughter of a former Viceroy of India — had herself arrested under a false, working-class identity, "Jane Warton," and endured forcible feeding with none of the caution shown to Lady Constance. The result is both a piece of direct political evidence and a personal testimony, written by a woman whose health had already been permanently damaged by the campaign she was still defending.

17 chapters · 95,496 words · ~7.2 hr read