Anna Hiss

Anna Hiss (1893–1972) was a 20th-Century American professor of physical education at the University of Texas at Austin and older sister of Alger Hiss and Donald Hiss.

Anna Hiss was born on May 11, 1893, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Mary "Minnie" Lavinia (née Hughes) and Charles Alger Hiss. She was the eldest of five children: Anna, Mary Ann (1895), Bosley (1900), Alger (1904), and Donald (1906). In 1906, her father committed suicide. In 1926, her brother Bosley Hiss died of Bright's disease. In 1929, her sister Mary Ann also committed suicide.

As a child, she attended the Aloha Kanaka camp.

She studied at Bryn Mawr School, then Hollins College (1911–1912), and graduate from the Sargent School of Physical Education in Boston (1917).

Hiss taught briefly at the Friends School in Baltimore.

Then, she arrived at the University of Texas in 1918 and served there 36 years until retirement in 1957.

In 1918, her first role was to teach "physical training" to women. In 1921, she received promotion to director. In 1925, her four-year curriculum to train teachers in women's physical education received approval. By 1948, she had become a full professor. Harry Ransom had her designed professor emeritus upon her retirement.

From 1921 to 1929, she founded sports clubs on campus, including swimming, dance, tennis, horseback riding, fencing, and archery. In the late 1920s, she secured funding for a women's gymnasium, built in 1931. During the 1930s, she administered a three-year course for physical training called "Freshman Fundamentals." She had tennis courts constructed and playing fields for field hockey, archery, golf, and volleyball.

In 1923, she helped found the Texas Athletic Federation of College Women, which she directed for its first four years.

She co-founded the Delta Kappa Gamma chapter of the national teachers honor society.

Hiss never married.

Hiss continued her own higher education, earning a BS from Columbia University (1936) and conducting graduate studies at the University of Colorado, University of Wisconsin, Stanford University, Columbia University, Mills College, and abroad. In 1949, Boston University awarded her an honorary doctorate.

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