Biography
Mary Winsor 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. A Pennsylvania suffragist and writer.
Stevens records an imposed sixty-day September 1917 sentence and later ten-day Lafayette Square sentence, not an explicit completed actual term. The documented-day override merely repeats the nominal term without separate support in this source or the included raw narrative and is removed. Existing dates are preserved.
Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, Appendix 4, PDF pages 17.
After describing Winsor’s September 1917 sixty-day Occoquan sentence, Stevens records a later ten-day sentence for participating in a Lafayette Square meeting. The later episode is distinct, but the entry does not print its individual arrest, sentencing, admission or release date. No ten-day actual service or inferred year is entered.
Stevens identifies Winsor with Haverford and a Quaker family, describes study at Drexel, Bryn Mawr and abroad, and reports her survey of the English suffrage movement for the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The entry identifies her as founder and president of Pennsylvania’s Limited Suffrage Society and a participant in the February 1919 Prison Special tour.
Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, Appendix 4, printed page 370.
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.
