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. 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. Neither women won their primaries. In 1923 Durham ran again for the House of Delegates, again losing in the Democratic primary election. 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. 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. Durham died on March 13, 1969, in Richmond. ==References==