Lytton , Lady , Constance Georgina Bulwer , 1869-1923 , suffragist

Constance Lytton was born in 1869, the daughter of Robert, the first Earl of Lytton and Viceroy of India, and Edith Villiers. She was educated at home, in India and then in Europe where the family returned in 1880. In the 1890s Constance Lytton's attachment to a young man of a lower social class was ended by her mother while her sister Elizabeth married Gerald Balfour. Balfour and his sisters, Frances and Emily, were deeply involved in the women's suffrage movement, and influenced their new sister-in-law, but it was not until 1909 after Lytton had made contact with Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and Annie Kenney that she joined a suffrage group: the Women's Social and Political Union. The following year, in 1910, Lytton took part in a demonstration at the House of Commons where she was arrested. Her imprisonment was made easier, however, when her identity and her poor health were discovered and she was sent to spend her sentence in the prison infirmary. Consequently, at later demonstrations she took a false name and was arrested as Jane Warton, a London seamstress. She was sentenced to fourteen days, went on hunger strike, and was forced fed eight times until her identity was again uncovered and she was immediately released. In 1910 she was appointed a paid WSPU organiser and in 1911 she was arrested once again for breaking a post office window after the failure of the Conciliation Bill, but the trial was delayed when she suffered a heart attack in custody. She was released when the poor state of her health became clear and her fine was paid anonymously. Soon afterward Lytton suffered a stroke which left her partly paralysed. Her activities from now on were concentrated on writing propaganda for the WSPU. She published a series of pamphlets and articles and a book on her experiences and those of fellow inmates with the title, 'Prisons and Prisoners'. After the cessation of militant activity at the outbreak of the First World War, Lytton began to work with Marie Stopes in the campaign to establish birth-control clinics in Britain but spent much of her time as an invalid cared for by her family. She died in 1923.