Career
She was orphaned at fourteen, but continued her education, graduating from the two-year Georgie Robertson Christian College, now Freed-Hardeman University in 1904 and from West Tennessee Business College in Dyer County in 1905. She worked for some time as a court reporter in Henderson and Jackson. White joined the woman suffrage movement in 1912.
She was originally active in the moderate Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association (an affiliate of the National American Woman Suffrage Association), and was elected recording secretary for that organization in 1913, but gradually concluded that Alice Paul and Lucy Burns" more radical National Woman"s Party, whose speaking tour through Tennessee by Maud Younger she had helped facilitate, was advocating policies and methods which would be more effective.
She joined the NWP in 1918, became chair of the Tennessee chapter, and moved to Washington, District of Columbia, where she edited the organization"s newspaper, The White, with others, was arrested and jailed. After her release, White and others like her chartered a railroad car they called the "Prison Special," which toured the United States to keep the issue of suffrage before the public.
She worked in the 1932 presidential campaign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and from 1934 (when she moved to Washington, District of Columbia) held a variety of posts in the New Deal, culminating in her role as principal counsel of the Social Security Administration. She died in 1943 of cancer.