"Early histories of the suffrage movement present a more sympathetic picture of prison life than many subsequent accounts. Metcalfe, for example, writing in 1917, speaks of the “scenes of horror which had taken place in Holloway and other prisons ... in the unavailing effort to govern women against their consent”. However, it is the history written by the constitutional suffragist, Ray Strachey, a member of the NUWSS and hostile to the WSPU, that became the influential text. Strachey blames the WSPU women themselves for the treatment they received... Unwilling to acknowledge the hunger strike as a political tool, Strachey comments how the suffragettes, once in prison, ceased to be militant and created a number of protests including the refusal to eat food. “Forcible feeding was tried in vain”, she continues; “the prisoners struggled so violently against it that the process became actually dangerous, and the prison officials were obliged to let them starve till they came to the edge of physical collapse, and then to let them go”. In spite of the severe pain and damage to health which the process involved, “scores of suffragettes adopted it ... The officials tried everything they could think of in vain ...”. This picture of irrational women, deliberately seeking their own torture was eagerly seized upon by male historians who sought to ridicule the WSPU and its politics. George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England, first published in 1935, discusses the suffragette movement as... a form of “pre-war lesbianism” of “daring ladies”... Dangerfield too presents the suffragettes as fanatical women who chose the hardships of prison life in a sado-masochistic way ... “How can one avoid the thought”, he questions, “that they sought these sufferings with an enraptured, a positively unhealthy pleasure?” If the victim does not resist, “forcible feeding is no more than extremely unpleasant. But the suffragettes were determined to resist”. In view of the fact that Dangerfield’s account contained no footnotes whatsoever to primary sources to support his claims, it is incredulous that his analysis was received so enthusiastically and became so influential. The Times and Tribune, for example, hailed it as “brilliant”... Thus the scene of the drama is set and the props are changed only with slight variations. Roger Fulford in 1957... mocked their prison experiences, claiming that solitary confinement in prison was “not always unwelcome to adults”. Furthermore, although “forcible feeding is a disgusting topic ... it was not dangerous ... [It] is of course a familiar form of treatment in lunatic asylums”. While Andrew Rosen is much more sympathetic to the women prisoners, he too, in a matter of fact way speaks of how forcible feeding involved mouths being prised open, lacerations, phlegm, vomiting, pain in various organs, loss of weight “and so on”..."