Mary Richardson was one of the more militant suffragists involved in the Suffrage Movement. She believed that ends excused the means and thus protested for the right to vote through arson and the destruction of various forms of property, activities which landed her in prison multiple times. This poem describes one of those times, during which she underwent a hunger strike as a form of protest and was subjected to the horrors of the force-feeding techniques used in prisons. Her accounts are some of the best we have regarding the hunger strikes and force-feeding techniques used in both the United Kingdom and the United States, and give us an insight on what it was like in those prisons during these times.