"The object was to create an absolutely impossible condition of affairs in the country." In exclusive archive BBC interviews, two activists look back at their turbulent time fighting for women's rights – from window-smashing and arson to hunger strikes and force feeding.

Lilian Lenton knew early on in her life how she felt about inequality. As a child, she was "extremely annoyed at the difference between the advantages men had and boys had, and the ones girls had", she told the BBC in 1955. "Everybody wanted a boy… and it irritated me simply, enormously. And then when one grew up and saw the differences in opportunities that men had, well, of course that just increased that feeling," she told the interviewer.

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Lenton, who was born in Leicester in 1891, was the eldest of five; her father was a carpenter-joiner and her mother a homemaker. Having trained as a dancer, as a young woman she attended an open-air meeting of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), where the speaker explained that "lunatics, criminals, paupers and women may not vote". She immediately joined up, she says, and was soon attending "poster parades" through London.

In March 1912 she and fellow members, armed with hammers, participated in a window-smashing campaign in London – and she was jailed for two months. In July 1912, following the arrest of the group's leader, the suffragettes turned to arson. Lenton and Olive Wharry conducted a series of arson attacks, and were arrested. The arson attacks were initially extremely high-risk for the activists, though they were careful never to put the public at risk. "We only just got out in time on one occasion," said Lenton.

In prison she, along with many of her fellow protesters, embarked on a hunger strike. She told the BBC that she had been striking "for release, on the grounds that they had no right to imprison women for breaking man-made laws".

Before long, the women were being violently restrained and force-fed by order of the prison authorities – a brutal and inhumane procedure. In the interview, Lenton looks and sounds haunted by the memory of it. "The forceful-feeding process was really extremely unpleasant," she says, with clear understatement. "I don't like talking about these things… I've never told people."

Lenton nevertheless goes on to describe in graphic detail the invasive and barbaric process which – in her case – led to her becoming dangerously ill with pleurisy and double........

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