Ernestine Hara
Biography
Ernestine Hara 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. She left an oral history of her imprisonment. (January 25, 1896 - November 1, 1978; later Ernestine Hara Kettler)
She was arrested on September 22, 1917. After about an hour awaiting bail she was tried on September 23 and sentenced to thirty days for obstructing traffic. She entered the Occoquan Workhouse and was transferred to the District Jail for the final three days of the term. Her oral history says she served the full thirty days, which would place completion around October 23, but no discharge record has been located and that date is not entered.
Calculated release date for the stay beginning September 23, 1917: October 23, 1917, adding the recorded completed custody duration of 30 days with elapsed-calendar-day counting. This is a calculated date from the recorded admission and duration, not a separately documented physical-discharge date.
Calculated release date
Calculated release date for the stay beginning September 23, 1917: October 23, 1917, adding the recorded completed custody duration of 30 days with elapsed-calendar-day counting. This is a calculated date from the recorded admission and duration, not a separately documented physical-discharge date.
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.
