Background
Doris N. Lindsey was born in Greensburg, the seat of government of Saint Helena Parish, one of the Florida Parishes of southeastern Louisiana. The daughter of Hollis Womack Lindsey (1873-1955) and the former Minerva Thompson (1878-1959), 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.
Career
She did not seek a second term in the Senate but instead ran for and was elected and served two terms in the Louisiana House of Representatives from Saint Helena Parish. 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. Shehee, also an insurance businesswoman, was the first Louisiana state senator who did not succeed a husband in the position.
Upon leaving politics in 1948, Holland edited and published the family-owned newspaper, the Saint Helena Echo, and worked as an insurance agent.
Apparently the two were married for only a short time, as Rhodes died on June 12, 1968. In 2004, she was posthumously inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield.
Inducted along with Holland Rhodes was later female state Senator Virginia Shehee. Holland died in the spring of 1997 at the age of eighty-seven.
Membership
Her first husband, Thomas Myers Holland (1900-1936), a member of the Louisiana State Senate from Saint Helena and neighboring Tangipahoa Parish, died in March 1936, leaving her as a 27-year-old widow with two children, Philip and Dorothy Jane. Holland was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. 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.