101 Women Who Shaped South Carolina

By Valinda W. Littlefield and Walter Edgar

Prior to the twenty-first century, most historical writing about women in South Carolina focused on elite White women, even though working-class women of diverse backgrounds were actively engaged in the social, economic, and political battles of the state. Although often unrecognized publicly, they influenced cultural and political landscapes both within and outside of the state's borders through their careers, writing, art, music, and activism. Despite significant cultural, social, and political barriers, these brave and determined women affected sweeping change that advanced the position of women as well as their communities.

The entries in 101 Women Who Shaped South Carolina, which include many from the landmark text The South Carolina Encyclopedia, offer a concise and approachable history of the state, while recognizing the sacrifice, persistence, and sheer grit of its heroines and history makers.

A foreword is provided by Walter Edgar, Neuffer Professor of Southern Studies Emeritus and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Dec 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781643361604

Book preview

Introduction

ON FEBRUARY 25, 1871, the Woman’s Journal published a quote from Charlotte (Lottie) Rollin. Two sentences from her statement rang as true then as they do today. Charlotte noted that We ask suffrage not as a favor, not as a privilege, but as a right based on the grounds that we are human beings and as such entitled to all human rights. In addition, she argued that public opinion has had a tendency to limit woman’s sphere to too small a circle and until woman has the right of representation this will last, and other rights will be held by insecure tenure. Southern manners—a double-edged sword that could cut differently based on factors of race, gender, and class, to name a few—have often limited women’s quest to reach her highest potential. Rollin and others recognized these limitations and the negative impact not only on women but also on society as a whole. The women profiled in this volume allow a glimpse of the lives of a selected group of 101 South Carolina women who have made a distinctive impact on the state and in so doing enhanced not only the position of women but also of the greater community.

Much of the early historical writing about women in South Carolina focused on elite White women. Sins of covert and overt omission left out the experiences of working-class women and others. Within the last two decades, historians and others have added herstories to the history of South Carolina. Women of diverse backgrounds were actively engaged in the social, economic, and political battles of the state. They influenced cultural and political landscapes both within and outside of the state’s borders through their careers, writing, art, music, and activism. Some women were quite successful in affecting sweeping change while others had more incremental impacts. These collective changes, often over long periods of time, transformed areas such as suffrage and civil rights. Women, while working in segregated arenas for much of the state’s history, shared common goals such as healthy children, access to education, and financial independence. Many either formed or joined organizations to support temperance, suffrage, equal pay, and civil rights. Some, however, formed or joined groups to fight against the expansion of voting and civil rights for all citizens. These diverse and complex experiences represent a legacy that we are still living with today.

Organized into six sections, these women’s lives relate to larger historical developments within the state and the nation. Collectively, they provide a framework to examine the importance of their contributions, explore patterns of organizing and activism as well as illuminate tensions based on race, class, and gender from the era before the first permanent English settlement in Carolina in 1670 to the present day.

Much more research is needed to examine these and other experiences. Women of South Carolina’s past and present provide a glimpse of the future. Hopefully, this collection serves as encouragement for further exploration of the lives of all South Carolina women.

PART 1

Reformers, Organizers, and Leaders

THE WOMEN IN THIS SECTION REPRESENT a diverse group of reformers, organizers, and leaders whose work helped to shape South Carolina in myriad ways. Some, like Sarah and Angela Grimké, took a prominent role in social reform movements. The Grimkés, born into a prominent slaveholding family in Charleston, became active in antislavery politics, joining the American Antislavery Society in 1835 and becoming among the first female antislavery agents. Another Charlestonian, Sallie F. Chapin, was a leader in another of the great reform movements of the nineteenth century. In June 1880 Chapin organized the first local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in South Carolina in Charleston. She helped to organize local chapters throughout the state, and the WCTU was an important vehicle for allowing women, particularly elite White women, to participate in public life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Though they faced a double burden of both racial and gender discrimination, African American women also made inroads into public life. During Reconstruction, when South Carolina briefly experimented with a program of biracial democracy, the Rollin sisters—Frances, Lottie, Louisa, and Kate—were active in South Carolina politics. Lottie and Kate taught in Freedmen’s Bureau schools in Columbia, and Lottie worked as a clerk in the office of Congressman Robert Brown Elliott. Frances, Lottie, and Kate were also active in the Woman Suffrage movement. In 1870, Lottie was elected secretary of the South Carolina Women’s Rights Association. She received the first charter from the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) for a suffrage organization in South Carolina in 1871 and served as a delegate to the AWSA Conference in New York in 1872. Frances became a writer, educator, law clerk, and civil rights activist. In 1868, she wrote a biography of the abolitionist and emigrationist Martin R. Delany, The Life and Times of Martin R. Delany, which she published under the pseudonym Frank A. Rollin. In the same year she married William J. Whipper, an influential Black legislator in South Carolina.

Other women in this section were civic and business leaders. Mary Putnam Gridley was born in Massachusetts. She moved to Greenville with her family in the 1870s when her father became active in the development of cotton mills in the upstate. Gridley began working for her father as bookkeeper and assistant in 1879. When her father died in 1890, she was named mill president, becoming the first woman mill president in South Carolina. She held the position for twenty-two years until the mill was sold in 1912. Crandall Close Bowles also gained prominence leading one of South Carolina’s textile manufacturers. In 1997 she assumed the role of chair and chief executive officer (CEO) of Springs Industries, headquartered in Fort Mill and once the largest industrial employer in the state. Springs Industries combined with Brazil’s Coteminas in 2001 and eventually moved the bulk of its manufacturing operations to South America. Bowles served as cochair and co-CEO of the renamed Springs Global until her retirement in 2007. Financier and philanthropist Darla Moore made her mark at the investment firm Rainwater, Inc., which she helped to lead 1994–2012. In 1997 she became the first woman featured on the cover of Forbes magazine and was later named by Forbes as among the fifty most powerful women in American business. Moore, however, has made her name in her home state even more by her philanthropy than her business acumen. Her donations have supported business schools at both the University of South Carolina and Clemson University. She has also supported development in her hometown of Lake City, including founding the ArtFields festival, which began in 2013 to celebrate artists working in the southeast. These and the other women included in this section demonstrate women’s long and influential role as leaders both within the state and beyond.

LADY OF COFITACHEQUI (1540). The leader of a powerful chiefdom, the Lady of Cofitachequi encountered Hernando de Soto and his conquistadors in 1540 as they passed through her territory (probably near the modern town of Camden). Narratives by the Spanish, including Garcilaso de la Vega, portray the encounter as a chivalrous and romantic one, in which the Lady formed a pact of friendship and peace with de Soto by offering him a magnificent strand of pearls from around her neck and graciously supplying provisions. It is more likely that de Soto demanded and received them after attempting to capture the Lady’s mother by force in the guise of a friendly visit. Despite the fact that the region had been hit with a pestilence, the natives complied, giving de Soto corn and a large quantity of freshwater pearls. After ascertaining that the region had no gold, only pearls, de Soto and his men, accompanied by the Lady as a hostage, journeyed to the borders of her realm, the village of Xuala, near the Cataloochee River in modern North Carolina, where she and her attendants escaped. The Spanish were fascinated by the young woman ruler, and their later accounts compared her arrival in canoes to Cleopatra’s by barge, although their actual treatment of the Lady of Cofitachequi was far from chivalrous or romantic. MARGARET SANKEY

Galloway, Patricia, ed. The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography and Discovery in the Southeast. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

King, Grace. De Soto and His Men in the Land of Florida. New York: Macmillan, 1898.

PINCKNEY, ELIZA LUCAS (ca. 1722–1793). Planter, matriarch. Born on December 28, ca. 1722, in the West Indies, probably Antigua, Eliza was the oldest of four children of George Lucas and Anne Milldrum. Her father was a sugar baron of fluctuating fortune who later served that island in its military forces and as lieutenant governor. At an early age, Eliza was sent from the remote plantation there to attend school in London. After she briefly rejoined her family in Antigua, they moved to the Lucas family’s property on Wappoo Creek near Charleston. When George Lucas returned to the West Indies in 1739, Eliza was left in charge of the Wappoo plantation.

With the world rice market declining and Britain’s New World supply sources disrupted by wars with Spain and France, George Lucas, from Antigua, sent his daughter a variety of seeds from the West Indies, hoping that Wappoo would provide a profitable crop. In the case of indigo, fresh seed of a desirable type was essential. In 1740 young Eliza wrote her father that she had greater hopes from the Indigo (if I could have the seed earlier next year from the West India’s) than any of the rest of the things I had tryd. George Lucas sent Nicolas Cromwell, an experienced dye maker from Montserrat, to South Carolina to construct an indigo works at Wappoo. In the fifth year of experimentation, the plantation could make use of its own seed supply and produced a crop worthy of marketing. We please ourselves, Eliza wrote her father, with the prospect of exporting in a few years a good quantity from home and supplying the Mother Country with a manufacture for which she is now supplied from the French Colony and many thousand pounds pr annum thereby lost to the nation which she might be as well supplied here if the matter was applied to in earnest. The six pounds of the finished dyestuff were sent to England to try how tis approved there. A London broker tried it against some of the best french, and in his opinion it is as good.

Indigo was considered a valuable crop for Carolina since the early days of colonization and stands of it were regularly included on many plantations. In the 1740s Eliza was the link in demonstrating that Carolina could produce a superior type. Her efforts were instrumental in alerting other planters to greater profitability, and she gave away indigo seeds in small quantities to a great number of people in the area. By July 1744 she was able to write to her father of the prospect of exporting in a few years a good quantity from hence and supplying our mother country with a manufacture for which she has so great a demand.

On May 27, 1744, Eliza Lucas married Charles Pinckney, a widowed Charleston attorney and member of the Royal Council twenty-four years her senior. The Pinckneys settled into his Belmont plantation near Charleston on the Cooper River. During the next five years Eliza had four children, including the future soldier, diplomat, and Federalist Party leader Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and the future governor, diplomat, and congressman Thomas Pinckney. At Belmont, Eliza experimented with silk culture, producing in her factory enough thread to be woven later in England into three different patterns.

In 1753 the Pinckneys moved to London, where Charles represented South Carolina at the Board of Trade and the boys could be established in suitable schools. Leaving the two boys enrolled in schools there, the Pinckneys returned to Charleston in May 1758. When Charles died of malaria on July 12, Eliza readjusted to the role of directing plantations and spent increasingly more time with her daughter Harriott Horry’s family at Hampton Plantation on the Santee River. Both sons returned from England in time to take up arms against the mother country. Eliza rode out the Revolutionary War at Charleston, Belmont, and Hampton. During the final stresses of British occupation, she wrote to an English friend, I have been rob[b]ed and deserted by my slaves; my property pulled to pieces, burnt and destroyed; my money of no value, my Children sick and prisoners. But with victory, the fortunes of the area were reversed. Eliza Pinckney died on May 26, 1793, in Philadelphia, where she had gone for cancer treatments. She was buried in St. Peter’s Churchyard, Philadelphia. ELISE PINCKNEY

Coon, David L. Eliza Lucas Pinckney and the Reintroduction of Indigo Culture in South Carolina. Journal of Southern History 42 (February 1976): 61–76.

Pinckney, Elise. The World of Eliza Lucas Pinckney. Carologue 13 (spring 1997): 8–12.

Pinckney, Eliza Lucas. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 1739–1762. 1972. Reprint, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.

Ramagosa, Carol Walter. Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s Family in Antigua, 1668–1747. South Carolina Historical Magazine 99 (July 1998): 238–58.

Treckel, Paula A. Eliza Lucas Pinckney: ‘Dutiful, Affectionate, and Obedient Daughter.’ In Developing Dixie: Modernization in a Traditional Society, edited by Winfred B. Moore Jr., Joseph F. Tripp, and Lyon G. Tyler Jr. New York: Greenwood, 1988.

Williams, Frances Leigh. A Founding Family: The Pinckneys of South Carolina. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

Williams, Harriet Simons. Eliza Lucas and Her Family: Before the Letterbook. South Carolina Historical Magazine 99 (July 1998): 259–79.

GRIMKÉ, SARAH MOORE (1792–1873), and ANGELINA EMILY GRIMKÉ (1805–1879). Abolitionists. Sarah Moore Grimké, born on November 26, 1792, and her sister Angelina Emily Grimké, born on February 20, 1805, were the daughters of jurist and cotton planter John Faucheraud Grimké and Mary Smith. With familial ties to many of the lowcountry elite, the Grimké family was among the upper echelon of antebellum Charleston society. However, Sarah and Angelina rejected a privileged lifestyle rooted in a slave economy and became nationally known abolitionists no longer welcome in South Carolina. They first became involved in the public sphere through charity work in Charleston. Their mother was the superintendent of the Ladies Benevolent Society in the late 1820s, and both sisters were members. Serving on the society’s visiting committees, they entered the homes of the poor White and free Black women of the city. They later described the conditions in which the poor lived in speeches and letters. Sarah also worked as a Sunday school teacher for Blacks at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church. In this capacity, she questioned why African Americans could not be taught to read the Bible instead of relying on oral instruction. Both sisters began to challenge the contradictions between the teachings of Christian faith and the laws and practices of slaveholding society.

Sarah Moore Grimké (left) and Angelina Emily Grimké (right), wood engravings (Library of Congress, Print and Photographs Division)

Sarah began spending time in Philadelphia with Quaker friends while Angelina befriended a Charleston minister from the North in 1823. Angelina soon embraced egalitarianism and attended the intimate Quaker services available in Charleston, leading to quarrels with her other siblings and suspicion from the community. In November 1829, Angelina left Charleston for Philadelphia as Sarah had done years earlier. The sisters found acceptance in the North. They joined the American Antislavery Society in 1835 and became the first female antislavery agents, speaking out against racial prejudice and using their firsthand experiences in South Carolina as examples. State and local governments in the South responded to the published letters and speeches of abolitionists by banning all antislavery messages through censorship of local newspapers and incoming mail. In Charleston a mob broke into the post office in July 1835 and burned the antislavery literature. Following the Charleston riot, Angelina wrote a letter to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison that declared emancipation a cause worth dying for, which Garrison published in his antislavery newspaper, The Liberator. Other newspapers reprinted the letter, bringing the Grimké sisters notoriety, and they became pariahs no longer welcome in their native state. After a speaking tour throughout New England, Angelina became the first American woman to speak to a legislative body when she addressed a committee of the Massachusetts legislature in February 1838 asking for a stronger stance against slavery. She proclaimed herself a repentant slaveholder and said, I stand before you as a southerner, exiled from the land of my birth by the sound of the lash and the piteous cry of the slave. Angelina believed, It is sinful in any human being to resign his or her conscience and free agency to any society or individual. Thus, she rejected not only slavery but also society’s restrictions on women.

Sarah and Angelina had cut themselves off from their family and community in the South, but they were not alone in the North. Their intimate circle of friends, which included Harriet Beecher Stowe, was supplemented by new family members. On May 14, 1838, Angelina married Theodore Weld, minister, abolitionist, and temperance speaker. They had two sons and a daughter. Her role as mother did not lessen Angelina’s commitment to abolition and, later, women’s rights. After emancipation, the Grimké sisters discovered that they had nephews living in the North who were the sons of their younger brother Henry and a slave mistress. The Charleston Grimkés had refused to acknowledge their biracial relatives, but Sarah and Angelina cultivated a friendly relationship with them—a relationship that further distanced them from Charleston’s White society. The Grimké sisters remained public figures, supporting women’s suffrage until their deaths. Sarah died on December 23, 1873, and Angelina on October 26, 1879. KELLY OBERNUEFEMANN

Birney, Catherine H. The Grimké Sisters: Sarah and Angelina Grimké, The First American Women Advocates of Abolition and Women’s Rights. 1885. Reprint, New York: Haskell House, 1970.

Lerner, Gerda. Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition. Rev. ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

CUNNINGHAM, ANN PAMELA (1816–1875). Preservationist. Born on the Rosemont plantation in Laurens District on August 15, 1816, Cunningham was the daughter of the upcountry planter Robert Cunningham and Louisa Byrd of Virginia. As a young girl Cunningham was educated by a governess, and she later attended the South Carolina Female Institute at Barhamville. She distinguished herself with her riding ability and keen intelligence. At age seventeen Cunningham was thrown from her horse, an accident that permanently injured her spine and left her an invalid. She was sent north by her parents in hopes of receiving better medical care.

On returning to South