Biography
Eleanor Calnan 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. Doris Stevens recorded her term as: July 14, 1917: 60-day sentence, pardoned after three days; September 1917: 60 days; February 1919: eight days in Boston's Charles Street Jail.
Updated Boston custody chronology: arrested and incarcerated February 24, 1919; sentenced February 25; released March 4, 1919. The dated stay is eight elapsed days. These dates follow the supplied record correction; earlier source notes are retained as historical background where accounts differ.
Updated Boston custody dates
Updated Boston custody chronology: arrested and incarcerated February 24, 1919; sentenced February 25; released March 4, 1919. The dated stay is eight elapsed days. These dates follow the supplied record correction; earlier source notes are retained as historical background where accounts differ.
Stevens distinguishes three episodes: the existing July 14, 1917 case, a September 1917 Occoquan sentence of sixty days, and a February 1919 Boston sentence of eight days at Charles Street Jail. The latter two were combined in the old July sentence text but absent as separate case rows. They are added without treating either nominal sentence as fully served.
Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, Appendix 4, printed page 356.
James J. Kenneally’s reconstruction identifies Eleanor Calnan among the February 1919 Boston suffrage prisoners whose proceedings were heard by Municipal Court Chief Justice Wilfred A. Bolster. The eight-day sentence described in this episode was nominal; individual releases after fines were paid must not be replaced with an assumed eight days served.
Kenneally, Historical Journal of Massachusetts 45(1), Winter 2017, printed pages 113–118.
Stevens identifies Calnan of Methuen as a congressional-district chair of the Massachusetts branch of the National Woman’s Party.
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.
