Annie Hollingsworth Hoskins
March 12, 1857- March 29, 1950
By Amy Rosenkrans, PhD
Annie Hollingsworth was born in Harford County in 1857. Her family was Quaker and belonged to the Little Falls Meeting House.
Annie attended Swarthmore Preparatory School, a co-educational Quaker boarding school in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, in 1878. By 1880, she was back in Fallston where she was teaching at the Little Falls Meeting House School. Meeting records show that she taught approximately 12 pupils at the one room schoolhouse during the years 1880-1882.
In 1882 or 1883 Annie married Joseph B. Hoskins, a farmer, also from Fallston. The couple had one child, Raymond Hollingsworth Hoskins (1889-1910).
Although little documentation still exists, Annie was an active participant in Maryland’s early woman suffrage movement. Ida Husted Harper’s History of Woman Suffrage reported that she had been an officer in the Maryland Woman Suffrage Association (MWSA) for ten or more years. It is known for sure that she was the recording secretary for MWSA as evidenced by a 1906 Baltimore Sun article that said she was one of the women who had “given unremitting attention to the work for the past eight years.” The same article lists Hoskins as a member of the Baltimore City Suffrage Club and the Friends Suffrage Club.
After her husband’s death in 1931, Annie moved to Baltimore City where she lived until her death in 1950. She is buried in the Little Falls Meetinghouse Cemetery.
Sources:
Demand the Right to Vote, Baltimore Sun, January 7, 1906
The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V, Ida Husted Harper
Little Falls Monthly Meeting Records, November 2, 1880
Little Falls Monthly Meeting Records, November 7, 1882
Swarthmore School Catalog, 1878