Biography
Lucy Gwynne Branham 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. She was a noted hunger striker and later a touring speaker on the "Prison Special".
Stevens lists two different women: Miss Lucy G. Branham, the Baltimore organizer sentenced in September 1917, and Mrs. Lucy G. Branham, her mother and the widow of Dr. John W. Branham. The January 1919 three-day sentence is in the mother’s entry. It does not establish three days of actual service by the daughter. The daughter’s September 1917 record is preserved; the disputed January entry is qualified pending a full identity and record-assignment correction.
Doris Stevens, Appendix 4, printed page 355, separate Miss and Mrs. Branham entries.
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.
