Biography
Ethel Byrne was a registered nurse and one of the three principal operators of the Brownsville birth-control clinic, the first in the United States, which opened at 46 Amboy Street in Brooklyn on October 16, 1916. Byrne, a trained nurse and the younger sister of Margaret Sanger, instructed women in contraceptive methods and supplied or demonstrated contraceptive articles. Police arrested her with Sanger and Fania Mindell on October 26, 1916 under New York Penal Law §1142, which forbade selling, giving away, possessing for distribution, or giving information about articles intended to prevent conception. Byrne spent the night at the Liberty Avenue police station in Brooklyn — Sanger and Mindell were held separately at Raymond Street Jail — and was released the next morning on $500 bail. Her trial opened in the Court of Special Sessions on January 4, 1917; the guilty verdict came on January 8 and was reported the following day, and on January 22 she was sentenced to thirty days in the Workhouse on Blackwell's Island. She entered custody the same day and announced that she would refuse both food and prison labour. A federal habeas corpus application brought her back from the island on January 23 before Judge Augustus N. Hand denied it, and she was placed in Cell 139, near the workhouse hospital, on January 24. Contemporary reporting says prison physicians began force-feeding her shortly before midnight on January 26, after roughly 106 hours without food, and that she had been fed by force about twelve times by February 1; the widely repeated figure of 185 unbroken hours without food or water is best understood as the length of her attempted fast overall, including the days she was being fed forcibly. Governor Charles S. Whitman pardoned her at about 7 p.m. on February 1, 1917, on the understanding that she would not break the law again — an assurance Margaret Sanger gave on her behalf, believing her sister close to death — and she was carried off Blackwell's Island at about 10:30 that night, having served about ten days of the thirty. Her documented custody in the case came to roughly eleven days, counting the night after her arrest. She was born in Corning, New York in 1883 and died in Massachusetts in 1955.
