Biography
Hilda Blumberg 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. Held at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia or the District of Columbia Jail, many of these prisoners joined hunger strikes and were force-fed.
Stevens distinguishes an earlier September 1917 picketing imprisonment carrying a thirty-day sentence at Occoquan from the November 10 arrest carrying fifteen days. The earlier episode is missing from the case ledger and is recorded with unknown endpoints and no nominal-as-served counter. The existing November interval is preserved.
Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, Appendix 4, printed page 355.
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.
