Skip to content

Margaret Fotheringham

Released
Date of birth:1890
Date of death:01. 10. 1949
Age:59† Deceased
Gender:Female
Era:1910s
State:District of Columbia
Support
Women's Suffrage
Margaret Fotheringham

Biography

Margaret Fotheringham 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. Doris Stevens recorded her term as: August 1917: 60-day sentence.

Stevens records a sixty-day sentence following an August 1917 picket, not sixty days actually completed. Her work as a Red Cross and Walter Reed dietician is separately identified. The stored nominal-as-actual day override is removed; no unsupported admission or release endpoint is substituted.

Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, Appendix 4, PDF pages 6.

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.

Case

Incarcerated: Sep 4, 1917
Sentence: August 1917: 60-day sentence.