Told about her illegitimacy for the first time, and taunted about it, Catherine committed serious acts of violence against other children.

Even more grim than her accounts of actual fighting are her accounts of the context and the aftermath: constant brutal cold or heat, disease, accident, and dead bodies, human and animal. The road from the harbour to the camp became sickening to ride along from the numbers of dead & dying horses.

In DDB 's fictionalised account of her father, he is irrationally and childishly jealous, given to uttering threats of serious violence. Like Mary Wollstonecraft , Dorothea knew what it was as a child to try to protect her mother from her father.

Higginson would go into drunken rages against GE , which she later fictionalized in her first volume of short stories.

She was appalled by what she witnessed, writing I was almost struck dumb and I felt sick for hours. It was a most horrible experience. I have rarely been in anything more unpleasant—it was ghastly and the loud laughter & hideous remarks of the men—so-called gentlemen—even of the correctly attired top-hatted kind—was truly awful.

JW as a child was often left hungry, or beaten, or shut outdoors all night as a punishment. When a church elder tried to convert her to heterosexuality by first beating, then kissing her, she bit his tongue, letting quantities of blood.

Later, while she was kept by the Marquess of Lorne but in love with Lord Ponsonby, Frederic Lamb visited HW and, when she refused to have sex with him, almost raped her. In casual conversation with friends, he talked of his emotional pain while inflicting physical pain on her.

After the baby was born she would sit between my sleeping children's cots, just in case, when bombs fell.

Not long after the separation, EW had a court case brought against her at Edinburgh for assaulting a woman whom she seems to have employed as a companion. She was directed by the magistrate to compound the matter.

When AW was thirteen she was persuaded by her sister Ruth to visit the mortuary to see the body of a woman (mother of one of her classmates) who had been murdered by her husband. Ruth wanted Alice to be able to bear witness.

FT 's husband abducted their youngest daughter, Aline , on her way to school. A violent confrontation between Chazal and his wife ensued, which ended in her arrest.

When Reynolds briefly left her alone at the common dining-table of an inn in Calais, LS was insulted by men who apparently regarded her as common property.

Hand-to-hand fighting raged through the grounds of Drishane, ES 's house in County Cork.

She worked with Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst , and became a militant suffragette. Like Constance Lytton , she overcame both natural timidity and physical frailty to take part in demonstrations which were often met with a violent response from police. She was once painfully ejected from a meeting after formally refusing, according to suffrage policy, to shake Asquith 's hand till you give women the vote. She was never arrested, partly through the good advice of a London policeman, Donald Taylor , who married one of her maids and lived in fear of having to take her into custody.

After the horrifying sale (for 57 Bermuda pounds), her female owner began to teach her what slavery could be: she was licked, and flogged, and pinched by her pitiless fingers (with ingenious variations to make it worse, like being flogged while hung up by the wrists, naked) for even a very slight offence.

Their relationship was intense, volatile, even violent, from the beginning. At a party he kissed [her] bang smash on the mouth. Then as he kissed her neck, she bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face.

At a particularly passionate by-election in 1908, they were pelted with vegetables, eggs, stones, snowballs. In July 1910 two activists were killed during a confrontation with police, who were also said to have sexually or physically assaulted others.

Overt political violence was not the only kind practised. A gentile boy threw Kaethe down and was raping her when she managed to scare him off. When she told a teacher, the response she received was: But in fact nothing happened.

NH 's father would physically punish her when her behaviour deviated from prescribed Victorian gender roles. Denise Hooker , NH 's biographer, notes that her father regularly tried to beat her into submission with a bamboo cane.NH recalls the perversity of her father's violent episodes: If I had behaved badly during the morning I was locked into his dressing-room to wait for him to come home. . . . When he arrived, he made a noise like a lion, took the bag of canes, and tried each one out on his hand to see which was the most effective, then as I skipped about and screamed he would cut me on the legs or anywhere he could.

When LLH was about ten and her father was imprisoned in the Tower of London, the home of her family in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, was broken into at midnight by an armed mob.

Laura Richards apparently had a very difficult relationship with her daughters. A woman friend who observed the eight-year-old Pearl being impudent to her mother wrote: I was not pleased—but laughed inside. She is such a clever monkey.JOH 's biographer Mildred Davis Harding describes Laura Richards as tactless, tyrannical, superstitious, fanatically religious, and eccentric to the point of madness—a constant embarrassment and trial to Pearl and her sister, indeed driving them more than once to the verge of suicide.JOH recalled beatings by her mother (often with the heel of her shoe), and there were constant arguments between the two throughout their lives.

EJ 's autobiography alludes mysteriously to a secret which she cannot reveal—a shadow which has haunted me like a vampire—and repeatedly to her stepfather as being her tormenter from some time following the start of her first job, when she was approaching puberty. She describes herself as near suicide by drowning herself in the Paisley Canal. Instead, she fled her home, only to be returned by her uncle to her mother who, when Ellen would not divulge her reasons for leaving, beat her, EJ says, till I felt as if my brain were on fire. Ellen still kept her secret (divulged only much later when her mother was close to death) and in the space of four years she ran away five times.

When Anna and Louis arrived at the palace the next day, they were confronted there by a party of rude fellows and soldiers, who thrust us back with threats, and even took up stones to throw at us. I dare not think what might have been our fate, but for the generous rescue of a crowd of the poorest slaves, who at that hour were waiting for the opening of the gate. These rallied around us, and guarded us back to our home. It was indeed a time of terror for us. I felt that my life was in great danger . . . .

View reference

Leonowens, Anna. The English Governess at the Siamese Court. Oxford University Press, 1988.

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Eventually the rift between AL and Mongkut was repaired and she returned to work unthreatened, but this incident seemed to confirm her early wisdom in insisting that she should reside outside the walls of the harem.