Biography
Edith Mary Ainge was an English-born Jamestown, NY suffragist who served as treasurer of the National Woman's Party. First arrested September 4, 1917 — the "March of Draftees" day — for unfurling a banner reading "How Long Must Woman Be Denied a Voice in a Government Which is Conscripting Their Sons." Arrested approximately five times between September 1917 and January 1919.
Stevens records five actual jail sentences: September 1917, August 1918 for the Lafayette Square meeting, and three short January 1919 watchfire stays in the District Jail. Only the September episode was previously a case row. The August sentence was fifteen days nominally; the three January durations are unspecified. No full fifteen-day service, exact date or additional counter is inferred.
Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, Appendix 4, printed page 354.
In chapter 9 of her 1920 firsthand account, Doris Stevens includes this suffragist among the named signers of the imprisoned women’s joint demand for political-prisoner treatment. The signers refused prison labor as a matter of principle and asked for access to counsel, correspondence, books, outside food and visits. Stevens reports that the authorities answered the petition by transferring its signers and Lucy Burns to the District Jail and placing them in solitary confinement. This describes a transfer within existing imprisonment, not an additional arrest or an independently measured custody term.
Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (1920), chapter 9 of Part III.
Irwin identifies Edith Ainge among the October 10, 1918 Capitol guardroom detainees: police insisted no arrests had occurred, and the women walked out freely. She also appears in the October 13 guardroom group. Separately, the January 1919 account names her among courtroom applauders sentenced to forty-eight hours for contempt. Those episodes do not establish one continuous jail term or another completed forty-eight-hour stay in addition to every separately recorded January confinement. Irwin, pp.374–401.
