18. Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton gave up a life of luxury to fight for women’s votes and ended up paying the ultimate price
While in prison, serving time for affray, Constance Lytton took a piece of broken pottery and carved the letter ‘V’ into the flesh of one of her breasts. It was a V for ‘Vote’. As one of Britain’s leading campaigners for female suffrage, Lytton was prepared to go the extra mile for her cause. While some of her contemporaries believed in taking a soft, long-term approach to achieving her goal, she was far more radical, both in her aims and her methods. Indeed, Lytton paid a high price for her beliefs: she forsook a life of luxury for the cause, and she even died young as a result of her sacrifices.
Born in 1869 to an aristocratic family, Lytton turned her back on her inherited privilege almost as soon as she entered her teenage years. Not content with a quiet, lazy life, she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). The group were the most extreme of all the organizations campaigning for female suffrage in Britain. They would take direct action and their members were often arrested. For this reason, Lytton assumed an alias, Jane Wharton, so that she would not be given preferential treatment due to her aristocratic background.
In all, Lytton was jailed on four occasions. While serving time in a Liverpool jail in 1910, she went on hunger strike and ended up being force-fed. Then, when war broke out in 1914, the WSPU agreed to halt its direct actions. Instead, Lytton turned her attention to the issue of birth control. She aided Marie Stopes in her mission to establish family planning clinics across England, though alongside this, she never stopped giving lectures and writing pamphlets calling on the government to finally give women the right to vote.
Finally, in 1920, the suffragettes’ wishes were granted. Parliament passed a law giving women over the age of 30 the vote. Just three years later, Lytton died, aged just 54. According to most accounts, she never fully recovered from her time behind bars, and especially her time on hunger strike. She was buried in a casket draped in the colors of the suffragettes museum and interred in the family grounds. Today, she is remembered as a martyr for the cause and one of Britain’s most committed and passionate feminists.
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