A NATIONAL “HUNGER STRIKE."

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 85, 5 December 1912, Page 7

A NATIONAL “HUNGER STRIKE."

Tlio suffragette campaign lias produced nothing stranger or more amusing than Miss Mary Gawthorpe’s appeal to women who want votes to starve themselves in their own homes, and so compel their menfolk to remove the injustice done to the sex. -She has doubtless been moved to make the appeal by the success of the “hunger strike” in gaols, which has secured the release of so many suffragettes that a Magistrate, in sentencing one the other day to a month’s imprisonment, said: “I suppose tjiat will mean 48 hours.” Miss Gawthorpe announced a few weeks ago that if the Government’s pledges to women were evaded ■during the corning session, she proposed to initiate a national “hunger strike,” to commence at midnight on Christmas Day. Perhaps she reflected that it would be wiser to defer the self-denial until the junketings of Christmas were over. If such a step became a necessity, it would, she said, “be our women’s duty to conduct the strike with determination, and in full consciousness that death may be the prize for many of us if the strike continues.” Miss Gawthorpe concluded with these words: “Now let the women of Great Britain speak in readiness.” The women of Great Britain, however, did not seem to be very excited over the proposal. In twentyfour hours Miss Gawthorpe. had received but one offer from a woman to -starve herself to death, and that was conditional on other women .doing the same. But when the mail left she had not given up hope, of rousing England to this heroic self-sacrifice. Tin charge that she was inciting to suicide did not disturb her; until she was enfranchised she refused to he bound by the laws of the land except in so far as she wished to be boh ml by them—a comprehensive attitude that might he used to justify every crime under the sun.