Biography
Elsie Hill was a prominent suffragist, daughter of Connecticut Congressman Ebenezer J. Hill, and a member of the National Woman's Party. On August 12, 1918, Hill and fellow suffragists marched into Lafayette Square across from the White House to protest the Senate's continued delays in voting on the Nineteenth Amendment. When she ascended the pedestal of the Lafayette monument to deliver a speech. Police dragged her to the ground and arrested her for "speaking in a public park without a permit" and "assembling without a license." She was sentenced to 15 days at the infamous Washington House of Detention. Later on February 24, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson returned to the United States from the Paris Peace Conference via Boston where the National Women's Party held a protest with 1,000 attendees on the Boston Commons. Police violently dispersed the crowd and arrested Hill along with two dozen other protestors for, "speaking on the Common without a permit." She was sentenced to 8 days.
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.
Custody chronology
August 1918 case: arrest August 12, 1918; sentencing and incarceration August 26, 1918; calculated release September 10, 1918, fifteen elapsed days later.
Boston case: arrest and incarceration February 24, 1919; sentencing February 25, 1919; release March 4, 1919. This interval is eight elapsed days.
Stevens records Hill’s education at Vassar and abroad, teaching French in a District of Columbia high school, membership on the Congressional Union executive committee in 1914–1915, presidency of the District’s College Equal Suffrage League branch and subsequent National Woman’s Party organizing.
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.
