The daughter of Hollis Womack Lindsey and the former Minerva Thompson,[1] she lived nearly all of her life in Greensburg, located south of the border with Mississippi and some fifty miles northeast of the state capital of Baton Rouge.
[2] Her first husband, Thomas Myers Holland (1900-1936),[1] a member of the Louisiana State Senate from St. Helena and neighboring Tangipahoa Parish, died in March 1936, leaving her as a 27-year-old widow with two children, Philip and Dorothy Jane.
[6] A woman did not again serve in the state Senate until 1976, when Virginia Shehee of Shreveport began a single term of service in the body.
She retired in 1968, when she married bank president and department store owner James Harrell Rhodes of Zachary in East Baton Rouge Parish.
A Democrat, she was inducted in 1994 as a charter member of the Louisiana Center for Women and Government Hall of Fame at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux.