Janet Stuart Oldershaw Durham

Durham née Oldershaw was born on May 14, 1879, in Chicago, Illinois to Percival Piggatt Oldershaw, a Union Army veteran and commission merchant, and Florence Stuart Gould Oldershaw. In 1904 she graduated from University of Chicago. The same year she married the Baptist minister James Ware Durham.^[1]

In the early 1910s Durham joined the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia. After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 Durham was a charter member of the Virginia League of Women Voters, the successor organization of the Equal Suffrage League.^[1] In 1921 Durham was one of two women who ran in the Democratic primary for a Richmond seat in the Virginia House of Delegates. The other female candidate was Mary Bell Perkins.^[2] Neither women won their primaries.^[3] In 1923 Durham ran again for the House of Delegates, again losing in the Democratic primary election.^[1]

Durham then focused her attention on her education; earning a master's degree from Columbia University in 1925, and then earning a B.L. at the T. C. Williams School of Law in 1926. She had already passed the Virginia bar exam in 1925. She went on to practice law.^[1]

Durham served a six-year term on the board of the Virginia Home and Industrial School for Girls at Bon Air, a state juvenile correctional center. She was a member of the Virginia chapter of the General Federation of Women's Clubs and the Virginia Federation of Garden Clubs.^[1]

Durham died on March 13, 1969, in Richmond.^[1]