South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 2

By Marjorie Julian Spruill, Barbara L. Bellows, Ronald E. Butchart and 12 more

The biographical essays in this volume provide new insights into the various ways that South Carolina women asserted themselves in their state and illuminate the tension between tradition and change that defined the South from the Civil War through the Progressive Era. As old rulesincluding gender conventions that severely constrained southern womenwere dramatically bent if not broken, these women carved out new roles for themselves and others.

The volume begins with a profile of Laura Towne and Ellen Murray, who founded the Penn School on St. Helena Island for former slaves. Subsequent essays look at such women as the five Rollin sisters, members of a prominent black family who became passionate advocates for women’s rights during Reconstruction; writer Josephine Pinckney, who helped preserve African American spirituals and explored conflicts between the New and Old South in her essays and novels; and Dr. Matilda Evans, the first African American woman licensed to practice medicine in the state. Intractable racial attitudes often caused women to follow separate but parallel paths, as with Louisa B. Poppenheim and Marion B. Wilkinson. Poppenheim, who was white, and Wilkinson, who was black, were both driving forces in the women’s club movement. Both saw clubs as a way not only to help women and children but also to showcase these positive changes to the wider nation. Yet the two women worked separately, as did the white and black state federations of women’s clubs.

Often mixing deference with daring, these women helped shape their society through such avenues as education, religion, politics, community organizing, history, the arts, science, and medicine. Women in the mid- and late twentieth century would build on their accomplishments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Jan 25, 2010
• ISBN: 9780820336121

Marjorie Julian Spruill

MARJORIE JULIAN SPRUILL is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina.

Book preview

South Carolina Women

South Carolina Women

THEIR LIVES AND TIMES

Volume 2

EDITED BY

Marjorie Julian Spruill, Valinda W. Littlefield, and Joan Marie Johnson

The University of Georgia Press

Athens and London

© 2010 by The University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Set in Minion by Graphic Composition, Inc.

Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Printed in the United States of America

09 10 11 12 13    C    5 4 3 2 1

09 10 11 12 13    P    5 4 3 2 1

The Library of Congress has catalogued the first volume of this book as follows:

South Carolina women : their lives and times / edited by Marjorie Julian Spruill, Valinda W. Littlefield, and Joan Marie Johnson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-2935-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8203-2935-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-2936-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8203-2936-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Women—South Carolina—Biography. 2. South Carolina—Biography. I. Spruill, Marjorie Julian, 1951–II. Littlefield, Valinda W., 1953–III. Johnson, Joan Marie.

CT3262.S65S68    2009

975.7'043082—dc22

[B]         2008050102

Volume 2 ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-2937-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8203-2937-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-2938-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-3612-1 (ebook)

ISBN-10: 0-8203-2938-x (pbk. : alk. paper)

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To our husbands:

Don H. Doyle

Daniel C. Littlefield

Don K. Johnson

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

MARJORIE JULIAN SPRUILL, VALINDA W. LITTLEFIELD, AND JOAN MARIE JOHNSON

Laura Towne and Ellen Murray: Northern Expatriates and the Foundations of Black Education in South Carolina, 1862–1908

RONALD E. BUTCHART

Martha Fell Schofield and Elizabeth Evelyn Wright: Women Founders of South Carolina African American Schools

LARRY D. WATSON

The Rollin Sisters: Black Women in Reconstruction South Carolina

WILLARD B. GATEWOOD JR.

Sarah Morgan Dawson: A New Southern Woman in Postwar Charleston

GISELLE ROBERTS

Sallie Chapin: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and Reconciliation after the Civil War

JOAN MARIE JOHNSON

Louisa B. Poppenheim and Marion B. Wilkinson: The Parallel Lives of Black and White Clubwomen

JOAN MARIE JOHNSON

Lucy Dugas Tillman: Child Custody, Motherhood, and the Power of a Populist Demagogue

MICHELE GRIGSBY COFFEY

Eulalie Salley and Emma Dunovant: A Complementary Pair of Suffragists

JAMES O. FARMER JR.

Anita Pollitzer: A South Carolina Advocate for Equal Rights

AMY THOMPSON MCCANDLESS

Irene Goldsmith Kohn: An Assimilated New South Daughter and Jewish Women’s Activism in Early Twentieth-Century South Carolina

BELINDA FRIEDMAN GERGEL

Susan Pringle Frost: Historic Preservation in Charleston and Gendered Identity in the Emerging New South

STEPHANIE E. YUHL

Josephine Pinckney: Literary Interpreter of the Modern South

BARBARA L. BELLOWS

Alice Ravenel Huger Smith and Elizabeth O’Neill Verner: Champions of the Charleston Renaissance

MARTHA R. SEVERENS

Matilda Evans: Health Care Activism of a Black Woman Physician

DARLENE CLARK HINE

Notes on Contributors

Index

Preface

The three volumes of South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times highlight the long and fascinating history of the women of the Palmetto State, women whose stories have often been told as well as women whose lives warrant far more attention than they have received. The collection of essays is designed to enrich our understanding of the history of South Carolina and the nation as we examine the lives and times of the dozens of women whose stories appear within. The essays are intended to be of interest to a wide audience as well as useful to scholars at every level. For that reason we have chosen a life and times approach, through which the lives of individual women are explored within the context of time and place.

As editors we have not attempted to be inclusive: there are countless notable women in the history of the Palmetto State. Readers seeking information on these women should refer to The South Carolina Encyclopedia, edited by Walter B. Edgar.¹

We do seek, however, to be representative, to include in these pages accounts of women from the Carolina Lowcountry, the Midlands, and Upstate; from all social classes; and from the many racial, ethnic, and religious groups that have made the history of South Carolina so full and rich. The women featured in the three volumes range from the well known to the largely forgotten and were involved in many different occupations. They include, among others, a Native American queen, a Catholic mother superior, an entrepreneurial farmwife, a NASCAR driver, and a Supreme Court justice. There are enslaved women and slave mistresses, free black women and poor white women, black and white civil rights activists. Some of these women are quite famous, having earned distinction in a wide variety of areas. Many were path breakers for their sex. Others led quiet, even ordinary lives, serving their families and society in ways that were fairly typical and that rendered their stories quite obscure though no less meaningful. Most lived in an era when prevailing customs dictated that women were not to play public roles or to engage significantly in activities beyond home and family, a time when a respectable woman’s name appeared in the papers only in the announcement of her engagement or in her obituary. A proper woman, it was said, did not seek the limelight.

Thus we have the saying well-behaved women seldom make history, which is true all too often—although not always—in South Carolina.² Most of these women were well behaved and well respected even in their times, though some created considerable controversy—a few to the point that they felt they needed to leave the state. For the most part, however, even those who were social critics and sought to reform their society seemed to navigate South Carolina and southern culture—with all its restrictions on the lives of women—in such a way that they lived comfortably or at least quietly among fellow South Carolinians—even as they fostered change through their ideas and actions. For some, the ability to so navigate was the key to their success. This was of course easiest to do if a woman was from the white elite, protected by racial and class privilege and influential relations. The South Carolina women who were reformers and African American had the most to protest and the least protection but still won great admiration in many circles and, at least in the late twentieth century, managed to prevail.

As we began the task of collecting essays for this project, we anticipated publishing only one volume. As we learned, however, of more and more women whose stories we wanted to tell and found more and more talented scholars interested in writing about them, the project soon grew to three volumes. And still, there are so many wonderful stories left untold. Therefore we hope that these three volumes will not only inform and inspire but also encourage further research and writing on South Carolina women.

The history of women in South Carolina has grown along with the field of women’s history. Early books on southern women, including Julia Cherry Spruill’s Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies (1938), did not focus on South Carolina women in particular but included them.³ This was also true of the work of pioneering historian Mary Elizabeth Massey, who spent much of her distinguished career at South Carolina’s Winthrop College, and whose work, especially Bonnet Brigades: American Women and the Civil War (1966), was an enormous contribution.⁴ South Carolina women also appeared prominently in Anne Firor Scott’s The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (1970) which established southern women’s history as a field.⁵ This book was particularly important given the fact that the outpouring of scholarship on American women that accompanied the success of the modern women’s movement focused principally on women in the Northeast with its highly influential regional culture, the area where the women’s movement originated and was most successful and where many of the scholars in the emerging field of women’s history lived and worked.

Just as much of the early work in women’s history focused on elite white women, so too did the work on South Carolina women. Women of the planter class received considerable attention as did the middle- and upper-class white women who were most prevalent in the campaign for women’s rights. The publication of Gerda Lerner’s award-winning biography, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Authority (1967), about two extraordinary women who were born to an elite white slaveholding family but were among the earliest leaders of both the antislavery movement and the women’s movement in America, directed attention to the South and especially to the Palmetto State.⁶ C. Vann Woodward’s edition of the Civil War diary of South Carolinian Mary Chesnut (1981), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, Elisabeth Showalter Muhlenfeld’s biography of Chesnut (1981), and later, Thavolia Glymph’s award-winning essay African-American Women in the Literary Imagination of Mary Boykin Chesnut (2000) also brought South Carolina women into the public eye.⁷ South Carolina women who participated in the campaign for woman suffrage also attracted early attention, beginning with A. Elizabeth Taylor’s articles on the movement in the state published in the 1970s, and continuing with important work by Barbara Bellows, Sidney Bland, and others.⁸

From these important beginnings, women’s history, including the history of women in South Carolina, has broadened as it has flourished. The last fifteen years has produced an impressive array of scholarship on a diversity of women and subjects. We now know more about South Carolina plantation mistresses and even poor white women. Cara Anzilotti, Barbara Bellows, and Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease have examined the lives of slaveholding women, while Stephanie McCurry’s important work has provided valuable insights regarding gender and the state’s yeoman class.⁹

We also know much more about the African American women whose labors supported the plantation mistresses and who were largely excluded from the suffrage movement. The outpouring of new scholarship on black women in South Carolina is as welcome as it is overdue; after all South Carolina long had a black majority and continues to have one of the highest concentrations of African Americans in the United States. Marli Weiner, Cynthia Kennedy, Emily West, and Julie Saville unearthed important details of slave women’s lives, labors, and loves. Leslie Schwalm traced how African American women transformed their lives after the Civil War, defining freedom for themselves in work and family life during Reconstruction.¹⁰ Joan Marie Johnson helped us to understand how middle-class African American clubwomen fought segregation and established social services for their community at the beginning of the twentieth century, while Voloria Kibibi Mack examined the relations between clubwomen and working women in her book on class relations among African American women in Orangeburg.¹¹ Significant work has also been produced about outstanding professional women, including, for example, the work of Darlene Clark Hine on Dr. Matilda Evans.¹²

Racial identification was essential in both the slave South and the segregated South and played a crucial role in the lives of all South Carolina women. In a state where proslavery defenders dominated antebellum political life, where an African American majority was violently disfranchised and subjected to Jim Crow and economic deprivation, and where whites were so determined to avoid school integration that they voted to remove responsibility for public education from the state constitution as a potential means of avoiding it, choices for black women were quite limited. Yet the large urban population in Charleston, which included a substantial number of both slaves and free African Americans, made it possible for some black women to create financial independence for themselves. Neither the imposition of segregation nor the violence of lynching stopped South Carolina’s black clubwomen and professionals from seeking to improve African American living conditions and challenging the state to provide more substantial resources in education and health.

White women, too, were constrained by the system, and slaveholding mistresses rarely opposed slavery even if they complained privately about its injustice or inconveniences to them. The extraordinary Grimké sisters, who left Charleston and became abolitionists, lived out their lives in exile in the North. Even those women who were sometimes considered outsiders because of their religion, like the Quaker Mary Fisher or the Catholic mother superior Ellen Lynch, did not renounce slavery. White suffragists, including Eulalie Salley and Emma Dunovant, fought for their own enfranchisement while accepting the disfranchisement of African Americans: like most white suffrage leaders in the region, either they favored disfranchisement or knew their cause would be doomed if they allied it with the cause of black suffrage.

Yet by the 1930s and 1940s, conditions in the state had changed to the point that several white women were willing and able to challenge racial oppression in several different ways. Two such women were Hilla Sheriff, a white public health professional who sought to empower and educate black midwives, and Wil Lou Gray, who extended her adult education program to reach African Americans. These women were often inspired by African American women, some of whom had been toiling quietly to raise money and improve conditions, and included Modjeska Simkins and Septima Clark, who were already active in the early phase of the modern civil rights movement. Certainly, the citizenship schools Clark developed and the schoolteacher equalization salary movement underlie recent scholarship that emphasizes that the movement was a long civil rights movement. One of the earliest white women of South Carolina to work along with African American leaders to end segregation was Alice Buck Norwood Spearman Wright, executive director of the biracial South Carolina Council on Human Relations from 1954 to 1967, a woman deeply committed to advancing civil rights for African Americans.

This collection also emphasizes that many women, even in this most conservative of states with its strong emphasis on traditional gender roles, took on very public roles. From the Lady of Cofitachequi, a Native American woman of considerable political power in the 1500s, to Jean Toal, the current state supreme court chief justice, women in South Carolina have a long tradition of influencing local and national affairs. During times of war, women, including Rebecca Motte of Revolutionary War fame, Lucy Pickens and Mary Chesnut of the Civil War era, and the Delk sisters, Julia and Alice, who worked in the Charleston Navy Yard during World War II, demonstrated the ability of women on the home front not only to follow political developments but also to affect them through their willingness to work and sacrifice for a cause.

When social reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century began to make public speeches, lobby legislatures, and advocate woman suffrage, they were careful to disarm critics with their manners and charm. African American reformers in particular had to maintain a reputation of virtue and refinement owing to the negative stereotypes of African American women’s character. Given the importance South Carolinians attached to family, women like the Poppenheims, the Pollitzers, Susan Frost, and Marion Birnie Wilkinson legitimized some of their activism simply by the power of who they were. This attention to character, deportment, and family name continued to serve white women who broke with convention and advocated for African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s. Women without wealth or prominence, however, also broke barriers, including Polly Woodham, a leader among farmers, and Louise Smith, who pioneered in the unlikely field of NASCAR racing.

Women in politics, especially those who wished to run for office, faced particular challenges in South Carolina, where many equated leadership with maleness, saw the aggressiveness and confidence politics called for and a willingness to be in the limelight as unladylike, and expected women to remain in a supporting role. Mary Gordon Ellis, the first female state senator, received little recognition during her lifetime. Since the 1970s, women who broke barriers have received a bit more support and appreciation, though throughout the twentieth century not enough to encourage large numbers to seek political leadership in the state. South Carolina continues to trail the other fifty states in the numbers of women who win statewide elective office. Yet there are distinct signs that this pattern is about to change. And the appointment of Jean Toal as the chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court is for women of the state a point of considerable pride.

The essays in this three-volume collection help us to understand the ways that South Carolina women have been similar to and different from other women in the South, and indeed, the nation. They allow us to understand the complex roles that gender played in the lives of women from many different backgrounds and ethnicities as well as the varying contributions and experiences of women in the history of the Palmetto State.

Marjorie Julian Spruill

Valinda W. Littlefield

Joan Marie Johnson

NOTES

1. Walter B. Edgar, ed. The South Carolina Encyclopedia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006).

2. This phrase was coined by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in a scholarly essay and then began to appear on countless T-shirts, bumper stickers, mugs, and so forth. As a result Ulrich decided to write a book about the phrase and its meaning (Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History [New York: Knopf, 2007]).

3. Julia Cherry Spruill, Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938; New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).

4. Mary Elizabeth Massey, The Bonnet Brigade: American Women and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 1966).

5. Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (1970; rpt., Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995).

6. Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery (1967; rpt., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

7. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981); Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981). See also Mary Boykin Chesnut, The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries, ed. C. Vann Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), and Thavolia Glymph, African American Women in the Literary Imagination of Mary Boykin Chesnut, in Slavery, Secession, and Southern History, ed. Louis Ferleger and Robert Paquette (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).

8. A. Elizabeth Taylor, South Carolina and the Enfranchisement of Women: The Early Years, South Carolina Historical Society Magazine 77, no. 2 (1976): 115–26; A. Elizabeth Taylor, South Carolina and the Enfranchisement of Women: The Later Years, South Carolina Historical Magazine 80, no. 4 (1979): 298–309; Barbara (Ulmer) Bellows, Virginia Durant Young: New South Suffragist (master’s thesis, University of South Carolina, 1979); Sidney R. Bland, Fighting the Odds: Militant Suffragists in South Carolina, South Carolina Historical Magazine 82, no. 1 (1981): 32–43; Sidney R. Bland, Preserving Charleston’s Past, Shaping its Future: The Life and Times of Susan Pringle Frost (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999).

9. Cara Anzilotti, In the Affairs of the World: Women, Patriarchy and Power in Colonial South Carolina (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002); Barbara Bellows, Benevolence among Slaveholders: Assisting the Poor in Charleston (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, Ladies, Women, and Wenches: Choice and Constraint in Antebellum Charleston and Boston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1990); Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

10. Marli F. Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830–1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Cynthia M. Kennedy, Braided Relations, Entwined Lives: The Women of Charleston’s Urban Slavery Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina 1860–1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

11. Joan Marie Johnson, ‘How Would I Live without Loulie?’: Mary and Louisa Poppenheim, Activist Sisters in Turn-of-the-Century South Carolina, Journal of Family History 28, no. 4 (2003): 561–77; Joan Marie Johnson, Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890–1930 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); Voloria Kibibi Mack, Parlor Ladies and Ebony Drudges: African American Women, Class, and Work in a South Carolina Community (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999).

12. Darlene Clark Hine, The Corporeal and Ocular Veil: Dr. Matilda A. Evans (1872–1935) and the Complexity of Southern History, Journal of Southern History 70, no. 1 (2004): 3–34.

Acknowledgments

No book, but especially a three-volume anthology like this, is possible without a great deal of support. We would like to thank several people who were particularly helpful in selecting the subjects and essayists, including Walter Edgar, director of the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina and editor of the South Carolina Encyclopedia, and Amy Thompson McCandless, dean of the Graduate School and associate provost for research at the College of Charleston and an associate editor for the section on women in the Encyclopedia of South Carolina. Robin Copp, Henry Fulmer, and Allen Stokes of the South Caroliniana Library, and Bobby Donaldson, History Department, also provided valuable suggestions, as did Beth Bilderback, who helped us locate illustrations.

We would like to thank several administrators at the University of South Carolina who have been generous with support at crucial junctures: Lacy Ford, chair of the History Department; Mary Anne Fitzpatrick, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; and Harris Pastides, president, who made it possible for us to include the colorful illustrations for Martha Severens’s essay on Alice Ravenel Huger Smith and Elizabeth O’Neill Verner that enrich volume 2.

It has been a pleasure working with the University of Georgia Press. We are especially grateful to Nancy Grayson, associate director and editor-in-chief, whose support for this anthology and the series of which it is a part has made this project possible. We are also thankful for the help provided by others at the press: Nicole Mitchell, Courtney Denney, Regan Huff, Derek Krissoff, John McLeod, David E. Des Jardines, Pat Allen, Jon Davies, Beth Snead, and Samantha Knoll. Finally, we thank Larry Lepianka for his editing, MJ Devaney for her meticulous copyediting, and Robert Ellis for his skillful indexing.

The authors of the essays have been a pleasure to work with and we appreciate their talents, diligence, and patience as this anthology has become a reality.

Marjorie Julian Spruill

Valinda W. Littlefield

Joan Marie Johnson

South Carolina Women

Introduction

MARJORIE JULIAN SPRUILL, VALINDA W. LITTLEFIELD, AND JOAN MARIE JOHNSON

Historians have long debated the nature and extent of change that the Civil War brought to southern women, including the amount of change that women desired. Yet there is little doubt that it propelled many of them into more public, activist roles. The war ushered in an era notable for great hardships and new opportunities, for drastic change and the persistence of tradition. During Reconstruction, throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth century, women were actively engaged in the struggle to define the New South. The women profiled in volume 2 of South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times elucidate the experiences of South Carolina women from diverse backgrounds in this period of social, economic, and political transformation. As old rules—including gender conventions that severely constrained southern women—were dramatically bent if not broken, these women created new roles for themselves and others.

Immediately after the Civil War, women, including the daughters of ex-slaves, responded to the crucial need to educate the newly freed men and women in South Carolina. During Reconstruction some women actively engaged in public debates and pressed for more rights and opportunities for women. As the century progressed, a growing number of women sought employment and/or sought to improve their communities by involvement in voluntary associations. This volume makes it clear that such activism was possible because a number of South Carolina women, including many of the women discussed in these essays, attained levels of education not possible before the opening of many women’s colleges in the postbellum period. Notably, many of them, white and black, had the chance to attend northern institutions of higher education, which at the time offered the most rigorous programs for women. Meeting women from other regions and being exposed to women’s social reform movements, including the woman suffrage movement, that were already burgeoning in the North expanded their horizons. Inspired by the unaccustomed sense of independence gleaned from their college experiences and the example of their teachers, they opened new schools and formed women’s clubs and civic organizations.

In the early twentieth century, women played an integral role in the Progressive Movement, a wave of reform that was sweeping the nation and increasingly affecting South Carolina. In the Palmetto State as in the rest of the country, women worked to improve their communities, paying special attention to education and public health and focusing particularly on the needs of women and children. Many began to doubt the idea much celebrated in the South that women should rely on the chivalry of southern men to represent their interests in business and government. Some became dissatisfied with only being able to influence men indirectly. They concluded that effective lobbying for their own rights as well as progressive reforms on behalf of women and children would require political power and took up the cause of woman suffrage.

The essays in this volume provide new insights into the various ways South Carolina women asserted themselves in their state while illuminating the tension between tradition and progress that defined the South from the Civil War through the Progressive Era. In the period of increased female activism that preceded the enfranchisement of women in 1920, even those working for more direct influence through woman suffrage still had to rely on the power of persuasion to realize their goals because most avenues to prosperity and power were controlled by men. The stories herein reveal how some women were quite successful in wielding indirect and sometimes direct influence on South Carolina’s social, political, and economic terrains. Many succeeded in large measure by exhibiting traditional feminine qualities and mannerisms that disarmed their critics. As reformers of both sexes in the New South recognized, promoting change was easier when one paid deference to tradition and avoided any hint of radicalism. For some white women, exhibiting loyalty to the southern past enabled them to better shape the future; for some black women, adherence to certain conventions of gender and race won them a measure of support and cooperation from whites.

These women exhibited creativity and daring alongside adherence to tradition. Most displayed a love of and loyalty to their state as well as a desire to reform it. Their reform efforts stemmed from a heritage of privilege accompanied by a tradition of noblesse oblige, from a heritage of suffering that led to a commitment to eradicating injustice, or, in some cases, from a combination thereof. They left their mark on many aspects of society. In this dynamic period, these South Carolina women, black and white, from privilege and poverty, helped to shape their society through many different avenues, including education, religion, politics, community organizing, history, the arts, science, and medicine.

There were, of course, major disparities in the experiences and therefore the attitudes of white and black women in South Carolina in these years. In an era in which African Americans, most newly freed from slavery, struggled to retain new rights and privileges against considerable odds and with limited success, an era in which violence dominated state politics, these differences were unsurprising. White women sought to cope with the losses of relatives, friends, prosperity, and privilege resulting from the Civil War. Many of them shared the reverence for the region’s heritage that was widely embraced within their race and class as well as a belief in white supremacy. Many of these essays show how their participation in efforts as varied as prohibition, woman suffrage, education reform, and historic preservation reflected a pride in the past and the need to honor that past while improving the South’s present conditions.

African American women were less focused on the past, dedicating themselves to building a better future for blacks in the state. Immediately after the war, African American women took advantage of the window of opportunity that Reconstruction provided to become involved in politics during the brief years of Republican rule. Despite the violent suppression of black political rights that took place, black women continued to press for better opportunities for their race. In the early decades of the twentieth century, African American women in South Carolina were often able to accomplish much by challenging white oppression indirectly; they made white allies, spoke politely, and negotiated behind the scenes.

There were also important commonalities between the attitudes and experiences of black and white women in the state. Both groups shared the reform impulse. Visions of progress led women of both races to get involved in a variety of projects, such as building libraries, playgrounds, kindergartens, and better schools, particularly projects that focused on children. At the end of the nineteenth century and during the first decades of the twentieth century most black and white reformers followed parallel but separate paths. A few individuals were able to bridge the interracial divide; some white women gave considerable support for improving conditions for African Americans, although such support fell short of calling for black enfranchisement or for desegregation. A number of black women profiled in this volume were able to garner white support for their efforts on behalf of the black community. These instances of cooperation planted seeds for the interracial efforts of many women whose stories are told in the third volume of South Carolina: Their Lives and Times, women who were active in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

The first South Carolina women whose lives and times are recounted in this volume, Laura Towne and Ellen Murray, were northern-born white women who came to the state to work on behalf of newly freed African Americans. Their dedication to the education of former slaves led them to establish the Penn School on St. Helena Island, where they remained for the rest of their lives. Because so few white South Carolinians were interested in teaching freedmen, and so few African American South Carolinians had enough education to do so, an influx of black and white northern teachers was crucial to developing schools for blacks after the Civil War, according to historian Ronald Butchart. Towne, a Unitarian, and Murray, a Baptist, arrived in 1862, as the war still raged, with the goal of helping African Americans develop self-reliance through education. They converted the Penn School into a high school and instituted teacher training so that black teachers could pass along the benefits of their education to others in need. Towne and Murray worked at the Penn School for over forty years. Afterward, without their influence, the school ultimately lost its focus on academic excellence and began to promote industrial training instead.

South Carolina African Americans also benefited from the schools and colleges established by Martha Schofield and Elizabeth Evelyn Wright. Schofield, a white Quaker from Pennsylvania, came from a family with a history of strong antislavery and reform activism. After moving to South Carolina, she dedicated the rest of her life to teaching, administering, and fund-raising for the Schofield school. Elizabeth Wright, the daughter of former slaves, came to South Carolina after graduating from Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and founded her own school on the model of Tuskegee. After struggling mightily to raise funds for the school, she ultimately received a significant gift from a New Jersey philanthropist that enabled her to establish Voorhees College. As described by historian Larry Watson, these visionaries, supported by the Quaker community and the Tuskegee network, respectively, dedicated their lives and resources to their schools out of a strong belief in the power of education for African Americans.

Many of the women profiled in this volume found support in their own families. It is striking how many of them were parts of groups of sisters who drew inspiration and strength from one another. The five Rollin sisters, whose story is told by historian Willard Gatewood, were members of the free black elite in Charleston before the Civil War and the new African American political elite prominent in South Carolina during Reconstruction. Frances married William Whipper, a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives. In their home, Frances and her sisters hosted a nationally famous political salon where well-connected Republicans, black and white, socialized, networked, and lobbied. The Rollin sisters were also known for their staunch support for women’s rights: they were the first woman suffragists in South Carolina. In an era during which it was virtually unheard of for women to address state legislators, Charlotte Rollin gave a passionate address in the South Carolina statehouse, arguing that as human beings, women had as much right to the ballot as men. She later chaired a women’s rights convention in Columbia, founded a state branch of the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), and attended the national AWSA meeting as a delegate from South Carolina. With the collapse of Reconstruction the sisters were driven from the state. Their experiences reveal much about the long history of Charleston’s elite African American community and the difficulties black women encountered in the decades following the Civil War and Reconstruction that had engendered hopes for change.

Sarah Morgan Dawson was one of thousands of white women from slaveholding families whose lives were also turned upside down by the war. She grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she was reared to be a southern belle. Her father died from asthma rather than military service, but Sarah and the women of her family—like many other women in the aftermath of the Civil War—were left homeless and fortuneless. Sarah and her mother sought shelter in various places, ultimately with Sarah’s younger brother in South Carolina. Chafing at her dependent state, Sarah embarked on a new career in journalism after she met Francis Dawson, the editor of the Charleston News and Courier. As an editorialist she gained the financial independence she lacked while living in her brother’s household. In time she married Dawson. Sarah used her columns to argue for a new southern woman—an educated and financially independent woman—to replace the dependent gender ideal of the antebellum era. Historian Giselle Roberts argues that Dawson encouraged women to abandon the self-sacrificial ideal that based a woman’s worth on her service to others and to embrace new relationships—companionate marriage, for example—and new opportunities for work in factories, shops, and offices.

Sallie Chapin’s life also went in new and unexpected directions after the Civil War. She faced financial insecurity compounded by her husband’s alcoholism and his death not long after the war. Grieving and unsure of her future, she attended a temperance meeting while on a trip to New Jersey and found her calling in this rapidly expanding movement that was then inspiring thousands of women around the world. In an era in which alcohol consumption was unrestricted and alcoholism a major social problem and in which women had few economic opportunities, women and children suffered greatly when the men in their families fell victim to this disease. With her own personal history, Sallie Chapin was strongly attracted to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). She traveled thousands of miles exhorting southerners to take the abstinence pledge, to join temperance organizations, and to vote for temperance laws to protect the home and family. In so doing, she introduced hundreds of South Carolina women to a social activism beyond the boundaries of their church. Devoted as she was to temperance, Chapin was also loyal to the Confederacy; she insisted that southern women did not need to abandon their Confederate identities if they joined this northern-born organization and urged them to unite with northern women around the temperance mission. Joan Marie Johnson concludes that Chapin made it possible for southern clubwomen, woman suffragists, and other reformers to support reconciliation between South and North without renouncing their southern heritage.

Clubwomen Louisa B. Poppenheim and Marion Birnie Wilkinson also worked to integrate South Carolina women into national organizations through the women’s club movement. Louisa Poppenheim, a white woman from an elite Charleston family, was comfortable in the national General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), perhaps owing to her education in the North at Vassar College. Supported by her three sisters, who were also Vassar alumnae and members of women’s clubs, she exhorted her fellow white clubwomen in the state to follow the GFWC’s lead and create a more activist agenda and to attend national meetings, hold office, and otherwise demonstrate South Carolina’s progress to the nation. Marion Wilkinson, an African American woman married to a college president, used her connections with friends across the region and nation (including many educators or wives of college presidents) to inspire black South Carolina clubwomen to take on bigger projects including a home for delinquent black girls. According to Joan Marie Johnson, Poppenheim and Wilkinson shared a desire to draw South Carolina women into a larger movement and a similar interest in social reform focused on women, children, and education. Yet the two women worked separately, as did the white and the black state federations of women’s clubs. Wilkinson did eventually forge relationships with whites in the state Commission on Interracial Cooperation during the 1920s, but that organization’s white membership barely overlapped with that of white women’s clubs, and clubwomen in the state followed separate but parallel paths.

As activists, South Carolina women such as Chapin, Poppenheim, and Wilkinson were gradually expanding the accepted limits of woman’s sphere; however, theirs was still a society in which married women had few legal rights. As Lucy Dugas Tillman, descendant of one prominent South Carolina political family who married into another, discovered to her dismay, women in the state did not even have the right to maintain custody of their own children. When her marriage to the son of then-senator Benjamin Tillman faltered, her husband legally deeded their children to his parents. Women around the state, and indeed, the nation, were incensed that a mother’s children could legally be taken from her. This sensational case, Michele Coffey argues, motivated many South Carolina women to join the woman suffrage movement. Lucy was reared in a tradition of female deference and propriety, but to protect her rights and her daughters she proved willing to speak publicly and in a court of law about the family’s private matters. The case, which highlighted the excesses of the South’s paternalistic social structure, helped create a shift within the judicial system away from an emphasis on the rights of parents and toward the best interests of children in child custody cases.

This extraordinary episode, according to historian James Farmer, led one of South Carolina’s most eminent suffragists, Eulalie Salley, to take up the cause—despite the opposition of her husband and the hostility of many South Carolinians to female enfranchisement. Salley developed a highly productive partnership with Emma Dunovant, a woman with complementary skills and personal traits, and did much to promote woman suffrage in the state. Emma Dunovant was educated in South Carolina at Reidville Female College and Greenville Women’s Seminary. After a short stint working in the post office of which her father was postmaster, she married and quit wage work for housekeeping and social activism. Pious and domestic by nature, she was active in church work and the WCTU before becoming involved in the woman suffrage movement; even then she influenced the movement more through her writings than through public appearances.