When Emmeline Pankhurst chose the famous slogan of the British Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903, ‘Deeds, not words’, she was expressing the frustration suffrage campaigners felt at the unproductive political conversations that had been had for many years about whether women are sufficiently human to participate fully in the affairs of the male-run public world. ‘Deeds, not words’ was also the motto inscribed on the proscenium arch of a unique women’s military hospital which opened in London in the spring of 1915. Healthcare is the main subject of this chapter: how women healthcare workers and reformers acted to enlarge and humanize the provision of health services; their scientific endeavours to understand and care for both physical and mental diseases; and the role the body played in their own struggles for emancipation.

This phrase ‘deeds, not words’ was a lot more than a slogan: it built on a thorough critique of masculine society, a critique that argued for an elision between both words and action and theory and practice in the effort to restructure social institutions and ideologies. Yet, what lingers in our historical memory is rather different: a crude mélange of images of indignant Edwardian ladies in beribboned hats squabbling among themselves and hurling bricks mindlessly through windows; emaciated suffragettes emerging from prison; and the repetitive complaints of men in authority about the inherent unreasonableness of women. As Louisa Garrett Anderson, daughter of Britain’s first woman doctor, explained to the readers of the British Medical Journal in 1912, the reason why some women suffrage protesters decided to refuse food when imprisoned was completely understandable. The reason was ‘political, not pathological’, and the appropriate treatment was therefore not forced feeding but the granting of political rights. Women doctors and prison reformers had especially close ties to movements for peace and citizenship rights. The issues they confronted are all embedded in the practice of welfare, and they were a pivotal part of women’s collective attempts to transform the public policy landscape.

Marion Wallace-Dunlop, a British art nouveau sculptor and illustrator, joined the WSPU in 1908. The following summer she stencilled on the wall of St Stephen’s Hall in the Palace of Westminster an extract from the Bill of Rights about the illegality of prosecuting people for claiming the right possessed by all subjects to petition the King. Imprisoned for this act, she decided to refuse food.