British suffragette hunger strikes began 100 years ago

I found this fascinating and inspiring story by June Purvis at CommonDreams.org. It originated on www.guardian.co.uk.

One hundred years ago, on 5 July 1909, the imprisoned suffragette Marion Wallace Dunlop, a sculptor and illustrator, went on hunger strike. A member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903 to campaign for the parliamentary vote for women, she had been sent to Holloway prison for printing an extract from the bill of rights on the wall of St Stephen's Hall in the House of Commons. In her second division cell, Wallace Dunlop refused all food as a protest against the unwillingness of the authorities to recognise her as a political prisoner, and thus entitled to be placed in the first division where inmates enjoyed certain privileges. Her hunger strike, she claimed, was "a matter of principle, not only for my own sake but for the sake of others who may come after me … refusing all food until this matter is settled to my satisfaction". After three and a half days of fasting, she was released.
Other suffragettes that summer of 1909, believing they had found a powerful weapon with which to fight a stubborn Liberal government, also went on hunger strike. However, the government feared that the early release of such rebellious prisoners would make a mockery of the justice system and by the end of September forcible feeding was introduced, an operation justified as "ordinary hospital treatment" to save the women's lives. Over the next five years, this vicious circle of events was to shape the representation of the suffragette movement for years to come.

Purvis implies that British suffragettes invented the hunger strike, and says that their use of this tactic influenced such activists as Mahatma Gandhi and the Irish nationalist James Connolly. Wikipedia, however, implies that the tactic dates back thousands of years.

Although Purvis doesn't mention this, one political activist much influenced by the tactics of the British suffragettes was the US suffragist Alice Paul. According to Wikipedia, Paul studied in Britain between 1907 and 1910. After hearing suffragette leader Christabel Pankhurst speak in 1908, Paul joined the Women's Social and Political Union, and she was arrested and imprisoned three times as a result of her suffrage activism in Britain. Upon her return to the US, Paul became active in the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Dissatisfied with the conservatism of NAWSA, Paul and her colleague Lucy Burns founded the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage.

When their lobbying efforts proved fruitless, Paul and her colleagues formed the National Woman's Party (NWP) in 1916 and began introducing some of the methods used by the suffrage movement in Britain. Tactics included demonstrations, parades, mass meetings, picketing, suffrage watch, fires, and hunger strikes. These actions were accompanied by press coverage and the publication of the weekly Suffragist.^[3]

Alice Paul is widely credited with helping to revive a near-dead US suffrage movement and playing a critical role in winning the vote for US women in 1920. And she used the tactics that she'd learned from her British sisters.