Cooking on Sunday is kind of a thing for me. It makes me feel nourished in more ways than one. It’s when I take the time to try tricky recipes and break out (sometimes break) the decent dishes. Sometimes, about halfway through this ritual, I realize I might have bitten off more than I can chew. Yes, a food pun. Deal with it. Anyhow, that’s today.
As I build my Sunday dinner of tofurky divan (why did I try something so fussy?!) I am contemplating how I want to write about the hundredth anniversary the women’s vote (“women’s suffrage”) in the United States. Yep. I contemplate stuff like that.
Maybe it’s the bubbling sauce of tahini, cashew and white wine talking but I’m going at it through food. More than food, really. Our agency over our bodies. Bear in mind I am documenting my own cerebral and experiential meanderings. I’m not trying to deliver an ultimate truth. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of one of those little beauties. In other words, bear with me. Okay, here we go.
Women got the franchise in 1920 in the U.S. and in 1928 in the U.K. In both countries, suffrage activists were pushed, hit, thrown, spit on, and jailed. They held the 1913 women’s march to protest the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson (an event that was heavily compared with the women’s marches in the U.S. after Trump was elected). At this event over a hundred women were injured badly enough to wind up in the hospital when Wilson supporters were unleashed on the marchers by unfriendly police.
The Secretary of War had to dispatch federal cavalry to help quell the violence and allow ambulances to help the women. The D.C Police Commissioner was forced out in the subsequent scandal which even included special congressional hearings into the matter.
Two of the most notorious prisons where these women activists ended up were the Occoquan Workhouse in Virgina, U.S. and the Holloway Women’s Prison in London, U.K. Once in jail they were deliberately (not surprisingly) treated with optimal lack of dignity.
They were often charged in ways that put them on an equivalency with prostitutes when, as activists, they demanded instead to be treated as political prisoners. As women were moved in and out of these prisons for repeat sentences, they developed collective action strategies. They first tried to refuse wearing prison uniforms (a marker of a person with special political prisoner status) but male guards were perfectly happy to be called in to undress them. At the worst prisons some were stripped, chained naked to cell doors, and sometimes raped.
The most successful action the women developed across the continents (though certainly very unhealthy for them) was the infamous hunger strike. This was a collective action known to be practiced by political prisoners. In Europe, people who were allowed to hold that designation were protected from force-feeding. The women, of course, were not offered that protection.
Women would take turns hunger striking. They were so effective at this tactic in England that, also in 1913, Parlaiment enacted the “Prisoners Temporary Discharge for Ill Health Act” that was more commonly known as “The Cat and Mouse Act.”
Basically they would turn hunger-striking women out of prison when they were close to death and then round them back up after they’d gone home to recuperate on their own dime. The other intervention used by corrections staff against the women prisoners was force-feeding.
This was a violent process virtually the same as a sexual rape in which women’s agency over their bodies was violated with food. It wasn’t a “here comes the airplane into the hanger” scenario. Women were held down by several corrections officers, sometimes also trussed in heavy restraints, after which fairly large and unhygienic rubber hoses were shoved down their throats through the mouth or nose. Many got pneumonia from food and liquid reaching their lungs. Permanent damage was common. Some of the Holloway survivors gave testimonials that the BBC has available here.
What does all of this have to do with my tofurky divan? Of course, there is the obvious. I’m grateful for my privilege to choose my own food and to eat it. I’m grateful for the right to cast a vote. I’m grateful that I have the safety to make choices about what goes in and out of any part of my body. We’re used to thinking about this in terms of sexual agency, including reproductive rights. It occurs to me that we’re more used to thinking about our agency in terms of our sexuality. That’s certainly important and appropriate. Yet, it’s at least as important to think about our agency over food. Like with our sexuality and (I’m pondering this) perhaps even more, it’s an agency we are taught to very easily give away.
There are many ways to understand our agency around food. Can we afford the food we want? Do we feel safe and able to follow diets according to our religion or ethics? Do we feel emotionally and physically in control over our food choices? Do we see our diet as a battle with food waged over our self-image or the opinions of others? In what ways has our dietary agency been taken by others? In what ways are we giving it away?
According to stats compiled for the 2020 eating disorder awareness week, the Eating Recovery Center shares that 2.8 percent of American adults deal with a binge eating disorder in their lifetime. While we think of this as a women’s issue, about a third of adults with reported eating disorders are men. It’s pretty hard not to worry about our size and appearance given all the media messages out there. And those are far from new. The diet and image industries have been churning away in our lives and inside our heads through the generations.
In my own life story I had a sort of split-screen reality of a childhood. I lived two very different ways in my parents’ two households. My mother was a battered woman. My father was a rural minister. In both of those realities, I was low-hanging fruit to fall prey to eating disorders. In my mother’s household there was abusive misogyny that left all of us as our batterer’s victims feeling like objects (and not very valuable objects). In my dad’s house was the middle class pressure to be the minister’s kid who is polite, polished, and always able to make a good impression.
Both of my parents loved me and parented the best that they could. These issues around self-image and food are cultural more than individual, though individual resources and resilience can help. In fact, I understand as an adult that my father had self-image and dietary issues to rival my own. I wish we could have supported each other in a productive manner while he was alive, rather than suffering on our own. Though, adopting animals to fund at the Catskill Animal Sanctuary was a special experience and I am so grateful we did it. It was a process where we teamed up to take dietary choices beyond the plate and into the ethics, and I think we both felt more empowered. I highly recommend it.
I remember learning about the force-feeding of suffragettes while I was in college. I happened to be in active treatment for my eating disorders at the time. I recall having a kind of epiphany about my agency in my diet at that point. It helped me in my recovery. For me the awareness dawned that I had arrived at the safety and the privilege to decide what I ate. Why was I wasting my time and energy torturing myself? I can’t say my battle was totally over at that moment, but it was a meaningful step forward. I eventually settled into a rather uneasy peace with myself. I committed to allowing my body to be as it was, as long as I was eating healthfully and in accordance with my ethics. That brings me to the veganism.
Back in college I was also learning to be a vegetarian. This was another piece of my puzzle. The ethics of diet that I learned by reading books like Carol J Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat gave me another reason to see my food as more than a malicious list of calories, fats and carbs. Like sex, food is power. And even the most rapacious of paramours probably don’t have sex nearly as often as they eat. As Will Tuttle points out in The World Peace Diet, dietary ethics are the core of our ethics. They are a big factor in our impact upon our worlds both personal and global. As I grew into that material I gradually became totally vegan. In terms of my self-image and my relationship to food it’s worked really well for me.
During this period of discovery, material in Carol Adams’ work (The Pornography of Meat as well as Sexual Politics of Meat) brought me right back around to the suffragettes. Alice Paul, the subject of my previous blog, was a dedicated vegetarian. She picked this up from the London ladies along with her propensities for other radical collective actions. So many of the British suffragettes of the Women’s Social & Political Union were vegetarian that they ran their own veggie hostels so they’d have places to rest and to dine the way they wanted when they were on a lecture tour or recovering between stints in prison.
Vegetarianism wasn’t just a frivolous fad for these women. It was part of the beliefs that informed all their actions. A great and very detailed research project on this topic is, at the time I write this, available in full online. This is, “The awakened instinct: vegetarianism and the women’s suffrage movement in Britain” by Leah Leneman.
As documented by Leneman, the suffrage activists advocated for vegetarian food when they weren’t hunger-striking. They even did this when they were in jail. Maude Joachim, after doing a stint in Holloway in 1907, recorded this fact in her memoirs, saying:
“Dinner is supplied in two tins. In the deeper one lurks two potatoes in their skins; in the shallower, are an egg, and some cauliflower or other vegetable. Many of us are always vegetarians, and acting on expert advice, others are so [for a time], for the meat supplied is so generally disliked.”
In her 1914 memoir “Prisons and Prisoners,” staunch vegetarian Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton recalled watching stockmen abuse a sheep on its way to slaughter. In that moment, watching an innocent creature being brutalized by those with power for no reason other than cruelty, she made a connection we would now label as one of “intersectionality.” She wrote:
“[The incident] seemed to reveal to me for the first time the position of women
throughout the world. I realised how often women are held in contempt
as beings outside the pale of human dignity, excluded or confined,
laughed at and insulted because of conditions in themselves for which
they are not responsible, but which are due to fundamental injustices
with regard to them, and to the mistakes of a civilisation in the shaping
of which they have had no free share.”
Those who were ethics-motivated vegetarians experienced even more horror from force-feeding because the food being forced was invariably derived from animals. Lady Lytton recounted that she was force-fed violently, at least eight times. Besides giving vivid details about the pain of the tools they used to shove tubes in her nose or sometimes mouth (past her bridgework, which cut into her gums), she “had the strongest objection to it of a vegetarian kind, and I begged [the doctor] not to give it to me again. . . It was only when I was sick that I knew what were the ingredients put down my body.” (Cited by Leneman and derived from Lytton’s Prisons and Prisoners).
A tough lady by any standard, Lytton was more upset by the use of animal products in her feeding than the permanently debilitating pain. This, even though she knew at the time that she had a heart condition and could easily have died. She did rather casually recount having “double pneumonia and pleurisy” due to the feedings, but she recovered to write her memoirs and eat many more vegetarian meals.
Lytton’s experiences showcase two of the core elements of food agency. In prison she lost her choice over whether she ate and she lost her choice over what she ate and why (for her ethical beliefs). Sometimes seeing the absence of choice helps us to see its importance.
How does all of this (as I forewarned) cerebral and experiential meandering tie together, if it does?
For one thing, I hope we can all embrace our own food agency in an empowering and perhaps even joyous way. It occurs to me that:
If we are able to purchase foods we prefer, that’s a win. If we are free to make our own ethical choices about diet, that’s a win. If we can find peace with our bodies and eat to care for ourselves instead of make war with our forms, that’s a win. If we have the added bonus of having supporting community to back up any or all of those choices, we are very blessed.
I hope you find that at least some of these blessings apply to you.
I suppose, as I watch the world shift and change around the animal-agriculture implicated pandemic of COVID-19 and the fires of unrest due to police racism in my own country, I am also looking to all my power-sources past and present for the lessons of agency.
As we put our society back together (micro and macro), we will surely have opportunities as well as barriers. When putting our food infrastructure back together post-pandemic, we could take the opportunity to look at what types of large-scale farming we do with an eye toward food equality and environmental sustainability. A well-fed world is a great resource site for this work.
When addressing the terrible pain beneath civil unrest, we could use the intersectionality of social justice movements to try and heal inequities related to gender, race, and even species. Speaking of intersectionality, VINE animal sanctuary in Vermont has a great resource page on the topic. Focusing in on race in particuar, Dr. A. Breeze Harper does the work on her website and with her book, Sistah Vegan. The resources are there for us if we decide to take them up.
Beyond that, I don’t have an easy answer. I can’t even tell you whether I’d bother with the tofurky divan. Not bad but lots of work. What I do think we should all do is nourish ourselves and try to nourish each other. That’s always worth the effort. Right?
Oh, happy hundredth anniversary, girls. Vote.
It’s important to remember that women haven’t always been encouraged to write. Or read. Or leave the house. As evidenced by this patronizing pencil ad. This kind of copy could only be authored by A.B. Dick.
