Biography
Dora Kelly Lewis was a Philadelphia widow from a prominent family who became one of Alice Paul's earliest and most steadfast supporters, joining the Congressional Union at its 1913 founding. On the November 14, 1917 Night of Terror, thrown into a tiny Occoquan cell, struck her head on an iron bedstead and lost consciousness; her cellmate Alice Cosu suffered a heart attack believing Lewis was dead. With Lucy Burns led the prisoners' hunger strike and endured force-feeding "gasping and suffocating with the agony of it."
Photo: Harris & Ewing, Washington, D.C. Borders cropped from the original scan.
The Library of Congress identifies its photograph titled Mrs. Lawrence Lewis of Philadelphia as Dora Kelly Lewis. Its catalog describes an August 1918 Lafayette Square arrest carrying fifteen days and a January 1919 watchfire arrest carrying five days in District Jail, matching the separate later episodes in Stevens’s Mrs. Lawrence Lewis entry. These episodes are distinct from her two recorded 1917 cases. The sentence lengths are imposed terms, not measured service; no physical admission or release date is established.
Library of Congress, Mrs. Lawrence Lewis of Philadelphia [Dora Lewis]; Doris Stevens, Appendix 4, printed page 364.
Stevens’s entry for Mrs. Lawrence Lewis records National Woman’s Party executive-committee service from 1913, finance chairmanship in 1918, service as national treasurer in 1919 and chairmanship of the ratification committee in 1920.
