Why British Suffragettes Went Vegetarian ‹ Literary Hub

On April 4, 1908, The times contained a short article on the ‘release of women suffragists’. The morning before, forty women – who had been sentenced to a fortnight in prison for ‘disorderly conduct outside the Houses of Parliament’ – had been released from Holloway Prison. A large crowd of supporters waited at the gates, led by Emmeline Pankhurst, the founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union, who accompanied them on a victory parade through central London. Led by a marching band, the women marched through the streets of the city, singing activist songs and shouting campaign slogans.

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This challenging parade ended according to The timesat the ‘Eustace Miles Restaurant in Charing Cross, where the released suffragists were entertained over breakfast.’ This was no ordinary restaurant. Spread over three floors and containing a gymnasium, consultancy and lecture hall, as well as several large dining rooms, it was the most popular vegetarian eatery in Edwardian London. Significantly, the first meal these prisoners chose voluntarily and as free women was a meat-free meal. Not only is it somewhat surprising, but it also sheds light on how political history has been shaped by what we do and do not consume.

Meat abstinence was mobilized by these early feminist thinkers to challenge patriarchal assumptions, structures, and systems.

When we think of dining in Britain in the early twentieth century, we are more likely to think of hearty steak stews, boiled mutton and mince pies than of fruit and vegetables, but meatless restaurants were hugely popular at the time. After the formation of the first Vegetarian Society in Manchester in 1847, the movement grew in popularity and by 1900 there were more than twenty vegetarian restaurants operating in London alone.

The Eustace Miles was open for almost thirty years, serving more than 1,000 meals a day and enjoying the patronage of famous meat avoiders such as George Bernard Shaw. It was one of the most famous restaurants in the city. This was, at least in part, due to the charismatic owner. The eponymous Eustace Hamilton Miles, hailed in 1907 as the ‘Nut King, the Bean Emperor and the Milk Kahn’, was an ex-Olympic fitness fanatic who built a health food empire that included a series of self-help books, a country retreat, a range of branded protein products and a popular monthly magazine.

Promoted as a ‘restaurant with ideals’, the Eustace Miles strove to educate its customers on the benefits of the meatless diet. In addition to serving lunch and dinner, there were also evening lectures on food reforms and satisfied guests could pick up a recipe book and recreate the restaurant’s menu at home. It was also an important place of progressive organizing in the city. The vegetarian diet had long served as a culinary expression of anarchist, atheist, or otherwise radical political leanings, and the Eustace Miles played host to discussions of socialism, spiritualism, the rights of temperance workers, and, most importantly, women’s suffrage.

In 1912, Miles found himself in trouble when he was called before the Magistrates Court to explain why he was ‘harbouring dangerous criminals’, as several suffragettes who frequented his establishment were wanted by the authorities. He rather bravely refused to reveal the identities of his customers and the restaurant continued to serve as a kind of social club for the Women’s Social and Political Union, which programmed a public lecture series in one of the upstairs rooms and put on campaign pitches. on the sidewalk outside.

The Eustace Miles was not the only vegetarian establishment to fulfill such a purpose: the Gardenia in Covent Garden also hosted meetings and dinners, as did the Criterion on Piccadilly and the Teacup Inn at Kingsway. It’s worth asking how meat-free eateries became so essential to Britain’s suffrage campaign?

Part of the answer lies in the role vegetarian restaurants played in the lives of women who worked in the city. By the end of the nineteenth century, women were entering the workforce in increasing numbers as teachers, telegraphers, accountants, and typists. This population – often young and mostly unmarried – was confronted with an urban environment that offered new freedoms, but also new challenges that had to be negotiated on a daily basis.

One of these daily obstacles was the problem of where to have lunch. As solitary diners, unaccompanied by male companions, women could not safely access much of the city’s food culture: discouraged by the rowdy chauvinism of eateries and warning against the inappropriateness of street eating, some restaurants banned women to eat alone and women were excluded from gentlemen’s clubs. These restrictions, coupled with the persistent threat of harassment, made the issue of lunch essential to women’s socio-economic advancement.

The vegetarian restaurant stepped into the gap. In part because most did not serve alcohol and many discouraged smoking, they were seen as the most respectable of establishments, and their owners were eager to encourage single female diners. Several restaurants went so far as to offer special facilities to encourage feminine habits: the St. George on Martin’s Lane, the Wheatsheaf in Clerkenwell and the Elephant in Soho all had tea rooms for ladies; the People’s Café Company in Farringdon advertised a special ladies’ chess club; and the Pudding Bowl hosted an evening institute where women could learn practical skills, practice writing and improve math skills. In the early twentieth century, meat-free eateries were among the few public spaces where women could eat, socialize, and learn without men.

However, the connection between vegetarianism and suffrage goes deeper. Suffragettes owned and operated several vegetarian restaurants, most notably the Minerva Café on High Holborn. Founded in June 1916 by the Women’s Freedom League (WFL), an offshoot of the WSPU that advocated nonviolent tactics, the company functioned both as the group’s headquarters and as a means of generating revenue for the franchise campaign. The president of the WLF, Charlotte Despard, was a committed vegetarian and the Minerva Café functioned as a place of political organization not only for suffragettes, but also for anti-war activists, anarchists and socialists. When the Representation of the People Act was finally passed in 1918, the café served its customers a festive menu of vegetable soup, lentil cutlets and rhubarb pie.

Meat-free eateries were essential spaces for socializing and campaigning, and this was because vegetarianism was an important moral touchstone for many radicals during this period. After Alexandrine Veigelé founded the Women’s Vegetarian Union in 1895, the diet presented itself as a cause for progressive women, alongside sexual reform, anti-vivisection, rational dress and higher education; and early feminist journals such as those of Margaret Sibthorp Assen—which described itself as a ‘magazine of progressive thought’ – often publishing vegetarian recipes and articles expressing support for the cause.

In one, writer Edith Ward advocated the introduction of a meat-free diet based on the argument that “what is true for the animal is the same for women.” According to Ward, the oppression of women and the exploitation of non-human animals were the result of the same system of power: to overthrow the gender hierarchy it would be necessary to also address species-based inequalities. Abstaining from meat is more than just a dietary choice; it was mobilized by these early feminist thinkers to challenge patriarchal assumptions, structures, and systems.

By drawing a connection between the injustices women face and the plight of animals, the suffragettes recast the dinner table as a place of radical resistance and political disruption.

A year after their victorious parade from Holloway Prison to the Eustace Miles Restaurant, the suffragettes encountered a violent assertion of male authority in the form of force-feeding. In 1909, an activist named Marion Wallace Dunlop was convicted of violating the House of Commons and sentenced to a month in prison. After the institution’s board refused to classify her as a political prisoner, Wallace Dunlop stopped eating and fasting, which lasted ninety-one hours, ending only when she was released early, because the prison management feared she would otherwise die.

After this success, the hunger strike became a key strategy for the suffrage movement and a major problem for the government. Early release meant capitulating to the demands of a militant group, but allowing female prisoners to slowly starve themselves to death was politically toxic. Force-feeding, a practice long used by asylum doctors, offered a solution. In cells across Britain, women were held down, tied up, had their mouths ripped open and tubes forced down their throats.

To draw attention to these atrocities, the WSPU distributed leaked letters, written from prison, with graphic descriptions of force-feeding and condemnations of the medical profession’s complicity in the torture of defenseless women. These shocking revelations caused significant public concern and raised questions about the proper role of physicians in relation to the state, the rights of detainees, and the scope of individual bodily autonomy.

Ultimately, the election campaign turned the horror of force-feeding to their political advantage. Not only did it generate sympathy for the cause, but the harrowing experience of being forced to eat, drink and digest against your will also helped to forge solidarity among the protesters. Upon their release from prison, hunger strikers received military-style medals to commemorate their bravery and admirable commitment to the cause. Starting with Marion Wallace Dunlop, these were handed out at a festive breakfast hosted by the Eustace Miles Restaurant. Dining on a menu of lentil soup, nut cutlets and chicory coffee, these courageous women united feminism with vegetarianism. By drawing a connection between the injustices women face and the plight of animals, the suffragettes recast the dinner table as a place of radical resistance and political disruption.

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By Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut: The Secret Story of the Body’s Most Fascinating Organ by Elsa Richardson. Copyright © 2024. Available from Pegasus Books.