| Sumario: | This article explores how the practices of hunger-striking and force-feeding worked to build unity among suffragettes within the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) during the years of the militant suffrage campaign, 1903–1914. It uses evidence of these practices found in publicly available archives in Australia – The Sarah Jane Baines Correspondence, 1907–1909 (SJBC) and The Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family Suffrage Research Collection (KCPC) – to illustrate the forms of solidarity that sustained the activities of suffragettes who formed cross-class alliances of collectivity on the front lines of the campaign. Using feminist historiography and feminist archival research, we argue that the practice of hunger-striking, employed as a tactic of political protest, and the response of force-feeding, enacted by authorities to deter hunger-striking and break down women's resistance, had a profound effect not only on the women themselves, but on the movement as a collective of women united under a common goal. The article demonstrates how, by drawing attention to their lack of status as political subjects inside the prison system, hunger-striking suffragettes revealed the lack of political status for all women outside the prison walls.
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