[McKenna] was responding as any caring doctor should to a patient hell-bent on injuring herself. ...McKenna endorsed 'artificial feeding', as he coolly referred to it, as a therapeutic measure to save the lives of suicidal suffragists. The practice, he said, was 'unattended by danger and pain' and presented no danger to life unless it was met with 'violent resistance'. This is chillingly reminiscent of the prominent English gynaecologist Robert Lawson Tait's infamous assumption that 'no man can affect a felonious purpose on a woman in possession of her senses without her consent' because, as he reportedly remarked, 'you cannot thread a moving needle'. Lawson Tait was implying, despicably, that rape was impossible if women submitted, and that if a woman claimed she was raped, she must have submitted. The violation, the assault, is not in the action, but in the resistance to it. McKenna, similarly, was suggesting that women's refusal to submit to a horrific  abuse of their bodies was the cause of their suffering. This assessment is particularly sickening, because some suffrage prisoners were force-fed through the rectum and vagina.For centuries, many medical 'cures' for women's apparent deviancy and defiance had been punishment masquerading as therapies. Force-feeding was not a health-preservation measure; it was an unremittingly cruel tactic to break women's resolve, to weaken their will, to make them submit. Women's suffrage, according to many physicians, was already a destructive illness, a dangerous pathology. By virtue of their intent to upset male supremacy, these women were displaying all the traits of mental breakdown, insane possession and hysteria. Over the last three decades, hysteria had evolved from a clinical speculation into a gendered slut. Those suffragists who fought back against the horrors of the feeding tube were resisting all the social forces that, for too long, had justified medicine's attempts to diminish women's lives and control their bodies.

From the book "Unwell Women" by Elinor Cleghorn

“There is a discouragingly high failure rate in the treatment of anorexia. In spite of the variety of approaches from psychoanalysis to behaviour modification, present treatment models share the common assumption that the anorectic is wilful and stubborn in her refusal to eat. This refusal is so annoying to practitioners and so terrifying to family and friends that interventions focus almost entirely on attempting to make the woman give up the refusal. When the anorectic is unable to comply with the dietary plan offered, she may well be force-fed. In civilized hospitals throughout the United States and England, doctors are perfecting ever more elegant techniques to bypass women's mouths and push food into their stomachs. The general consensus is that the patient has recovered when the normal weight is reached and appropriate sex role functioning is achieved. Such interventions reflect, at best, only superficial attempts to understand the problem, and the goals they are meant to achieve are inevitably short-lived. Further, such treatments are paradoxical. The woman cannot maintain the weight gain, and her original insecurity and lack of self-esteem are amplified. In the anorectic denial she could achieve some private form of success, a sense of achievement. Now she feels she is failing again. Cognitive approaches, by far the most common, assume that if only the anorectic could be made to see what she is up to, she would be able to give up her troublesome and difficult behaviour. However well reasoned, such approaches cannot possibly penetrate to the level of the unconscious except as further judgments. For anorexia is not so much a conscious act of will.“

Susie Orbach - Hunger Strike

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