Prisons and Prisoners : Some Personal Experiences

Prisons and Prisoners is a rare document of early feminism, telling the personal story of an activist for the vote who was repeatedly imprisoned.

Prisons and Prisoners is the autobiography of aristocratic suffragette Constance Lytton. In it, she details her militant actions in the struggle to gain the vote for women, including her masquerade and imprisonment as the working-class “Jane Warton.” As a member of a well-known political family (and grand-daughter of the famous novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton), Lytton''s arrests garnered much attention at the time, but she was treated differently than other suffragettes because of her class—when other suffragettes were forcibly fed while on hunger strikes, she was released. “Jane Warton,” however, was forcibly fed, an act that permanently damaged Lytton’s health, but that also became a singular moment in the history of women’s and prisoner’s rights.

This Broadview edition includes news articles, reviews, and illustrations on women’s suffrage from the periodicals of the time.