01/17/2026
Alice Thornton was arrested in 1913 for throwing a rock through a parliament window. Her demand: votes for women. Her sentence: six months. Her response: a hunger strike.
The prison’s response was brutal: forced feeding three times a day. Leather straps held her to a chair. Guards pried open her jaw with metal clamps. A rubber tube was shoved down her throat into her stomach, and liquid food was poured in. Weeks later, Alice vomited blood.
This tintype was smuggled out by a sympathetic guard—fired three days later. In it, Alice is strapped to the feeding chair, tube in place, four matrons holding her down. Her eyes reveal something unbreakable: she would never surrender.
The forced feeding left permanent damage. She could barely swallow solid food for the rest of her life. When released after four months, she weighed seventy-three pounds and could barely walk. Yet within six weeks, she was back throwing rocks at government buildings. Arrested again. Hunger strike again. Forced feeding again. This cycle repeated five times between 1913 and 1918, each time devastating her body, each time she returned to the fight.
Women finally won the vote in 1920. Alice, thirty-five, was wheeled to the polling station because her legs never fully recovered. She lived to cast her first ballot. She died in 1954 at sixty-nine. Her tombstone reads:
“She swallowed tubes so her daughters could swallow their pride and vote.”
