Biography
Ada Louise Davenport Kendall was a member of the National Woman’s Party and one of the "Silent Sentinels" imprisoned during the 1917-1919 campaign to picket the Wilson White House for woman suffrage. (March 31, 1867 - April 14, 1950)
She was arrested on September 13, 1917 and sentenced to thirty days at the Occoquan Workhouse. A complete term would have ended about October 13, 1917, but no personal discharge record has been found.
This record previously dated her arrest to August 1917 and was filed under her husband’s name, as Mrs. Frederick W. Kendall.
Photo credit
Ada Louise Davenport Kendall, identified portrait published by Turning Point Suffragist Memorial. Photographer and capture date unspecified; no open license asserted. Original JPEG retained unchanged. Memorial source.
Doris Stevens’s chapter 6 identifies her as Mrs. Frederick Kendall and records her account of punishment at the Occoquan Workhouse. After protesting that scrubbing floors was too strenuous when she could not eat the prison food, she was placed in solitary confinement on bread and water. Stevens reports that she was denied clean clothing for eleven days and initially denied washing water; friends’ intervention eventually secured clean clothing and removal from the punishment cell. The eleven days concern the clothing restriction, not a newly established total prison term.
Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (1920), chapter 6 of Part III.
