Miss Frances Mary Parker

Other sources: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4769024
Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866?1928 (1999)

Family information: Niece to the future Lord Kitchener.

Additional Information: Frances joined the WSPU in 1908 and was arrested that year for taking part in a deputation to the House of Commons. She was sentenced to six weeks in prison. By 1909, and unusually, she was running (with a friend from Newnham College, Kate le Lacheur) 'a suffragette dairy and farming school' to train women to be self-sufficient and to raise money for the WSPU at the same time. She also undertook speaking tours in Scotland for the Scottish University Women's Suffrage Union, and organised its caravan tour. In 1912, she took part in the window-smashing campaign and was sentenced to four months in prison. She was described by fellow suffragette Ethel Moorhead as looking 'innocent and disarming' but having 'an exquisite madness ? daring, joyous, vivid and strategic'. She was sentenced to five days in prison again in 1912 for 'causing a breach of the peace', at a meeting in Aberdeen held by Liberal politician Lloyd George. Afterwards, she was based in Dundee as an organiser and was suspected of being responsible for burning down a church in retaliation for the forcible feeding and treatment of Ethel Moorhead in prison. Frances was arrested in 1914 while attempting to blow up a historical house once lived in by Scottish poet Robert Burns. She went on hunger strike and was forcibly fed using a tube and, in addition (and arguably even more horrifically), was fed through her rectum. Frances described this experience as an 'indecent outrage, which could have been done with no other purpose than to torture'. A prison doctor also noticed that she had abrasions to the genital area consistent with an 'instrument' being put into the vagina. She was released into a nursing home after her brother intervened on her behalf, and she escaped after recovering for two weeks. She never went back to prison, as the Home Office amnesty for suffragettes took effect in August that year. Frances worked during the First World War for the Women's Freedom League National Service Organization, which sought to put women in touch with employers to find the right work.