Biography
Doris Stevens was an Oberlin-trained organizer (1911); served as executive secretary of the Congressional Union and a key NWP strategist. Born in Omaha to a pastor and a Dutch immigrant mother. Picketed the White House on Bastille Day July 14, 1917 with fifteen others; sentenced to 60 days at Occoquan; served three days before President Wilson pardoned the group. Her 1920 book "Jailed for Freedom" is the principal firsthand account of NWP imprisonment.
In her own appendix entry, Stevens records another arrest during a March 1919 picket demonstration at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House and says that she was not sentenced. This is separate from her July 1917 picketing case. The report does not establish a statutory charge, physical release, jail admission or conviction outcome; absence of a sentence is not entered as an acquittal.
Stevens’s autobiographical entry describes her work as a social worker and teacher, campaigning in Ohio and Michigan, joining the Congressional Union in 1913, organizing the 1915 convention of women voters at the Panama-Pacific Exposition and managing the National Woman’s Party’s 1916 California election campaign. It lists her successive organizing, legislative, political and executive roles.
Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, Appendix 4, printed page 368.
In chapter 25, Stevens recounts her own arrest during the March 1919 suffrage demonstration outside New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. She says police entered charges of disorderly conduct, interfering with police and assaulting police against her group, locked them in separate station-house cells and announced a forthcoming night-court trial. About half an hour later a lieutenant received a telephone order releasing them; she returned to the ongoing demonstration. This firsthand account distinguishes brief police-cell detention and release from a completed court hearing or a prison sentence. No precise calendar day or served-day total is inferred here.
Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (1920), chapter 25 of Part III.
Irwin names Alice Paul, Elsie Hill and Doris Stevens among six women arrested for disorderly conduct during the March 4, 1919 Metropolitan Opera House protest in New York. They spent about half an hour at the station before release. Returning to the protest and being assaulted afterward is not reported as a second arrest or another prison stay. Irwin, The Story of the Woman’s Party, pp.401–416.
