1-192-803 - © London Museum/Heritage-Images

Suffragette, Lady Constance Lytton wearing a prison number badge and hunger strike medal, c1912. Lytton became involved with the women's suffrage movement in her late thirties, and was first arrested for joining a protest demonstration in February 1909. Having been sentenced to four weeks in Holloway, she was confined to the prison hospital with an alleged heart condition, but soon suspected that she was being given preferential treatment because of her social rank. Her treatment in Newcastle prison following a second arrest in October of the same year confirmed her suspicions: after a 56-hour hunger strike she was not forcibly fed, like other suffragettes, but examined by a heart specialist and allowed to go free. The following year, at a protest demonstration in Liverpool, Lytton disguised herself as a working-class woman and gave the false name of Jane Warton when she was arrested. This time she suffered the same treatment as the other suffragettes in prison. In 1912 she suffered a stroke and remained an invalid for the rest of her life.