By Jayce Oran and David Baker
Undergraduates, Louisiana State University
Anne Dorris (sometimes spelled Doris) was born in Pennsylvania in December 1863. On May 29, 1912, she married William Wallace Chisholm (also Chisolm), who had a law practice in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. She was active in the Red Cross and had a stained-glass business. It is unknown how she became involved with the 1917 suffrage protests of the National Woman's Party. On September 4, 1917, she joined the picket line at the White House gates. She and twelve other women were arrested, refused to pay a fine, and accepted their sentence of 60 days in Occoquan Workhouse. Stevens' Jailed for Freedom states that Mrs. Chisholm died shortly after her imprisonment at Occoquan, and her obituary in the Tyrone (Pa.) Daily Herald noted that she died in January 1918, due to pneumonia.
Sources:
A census record confirms Anne Dorris’s birthdate and place of birth and notes her parents, William and Julia M. Dorris. See 1900 Federal Manuscript Census, Huntingdon (PA) Ward 2, Roll 1414, page 1a, Enumeration district 091. Accessed through Ancestry.com. Information concerning her arrest are detailed in “Suffragists Sent to Occoquan,” Pittsburgh Post Gazette, September 4, 1917, p. 1. Mrs. Chisholm is mentioned briefly in Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 357 as one of the militant suffragists who picketed the White House. A reference to a stained glass piece by Dorris exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 is accessible at Pennsylvania Board of World’s Fair Managers, Catalogue of the Exhibits of the State of Pennsylvania and of Pennsylvanians at the World’s Columbian Exposition (July 31, 1893), p. 162. Her obituary is found in the Tyrone Daily Herald, January 9, 1918, p. 3.