Biography
Lucy Burns was Alice Paul's closest collaborator in the National Woman's Party; suffragist who served the most prison time of any American woman in the campaign. Vassar 1902; born in Brooklyn to an Irish Catholic family. On the November 14, 1917 "Night of Terror" she was beaten at Occoquan and chained by her wrists to her cell bars overnight; later force-fed via nasal tube by five guards. After ratification she retired to Brooklyn.
Stevens distinguishes the September 1917 sixty-day sentence and November 10, 1917 six-month sentence from three January 1919 watchfire stays that Burns actually served: three, five and five days. The three January terms total thirteen documented days, with no exact endpoints supplied. Her existing July 1917 case is preserved despite this appendix describing an earlier three-day episode as June; no fourth early short stay is invented. Four English prison terms are outside this US case expansion.
Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, Appendix 4, printed page 356.
Doris Stevens’s chapter 3 identifies Lucy Burns and Katherine Morey as the first White House picketers arrested and describes hours at the police station before their release on their own recognizance. The Library of Congress chronology independently dates their arrest to June 22, 1917 and confirms that they were never brought to trial for this episode. Stevens reports the traffic-obstruction charge; no conviction, jail admission, precise discharge date or completed prison day is inferred. This initial arrest is distinct from Burns’s already recorded July, September and November 1917 cases.
Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, Part III chapter 3; Library of Congress, 1917 chronology.
Irwin places Burns among the August 28, 1917 pickets whose imposed penalty was appealed; the January 8, 1918 hearing concerned the actual August 23 and August 28 appellants, and their convictions were reversed and cases dismissed on March 4. This limited ruling should not be applied automatically to every suffrage conviction. She also names Burns among courtroom applauders sentenced to forty-eight hours for contempt in January 1919; that account does not independently resolve how the short January imprisonments overlap. Irwin, pp.228–264,389–401.
