Women

Born in Charleston, Carrie, Mabel, and Anita Pollitzer were artists, activists, and social reformers.

The Poppenheims helped bring the burgeoning women’s club movement to Charleston, as founding members and officers of the Century Club, the Civic Club, the Intercollegiate Club, and the Charleston City Federation of Clubs.

Originally known as Clinton College, the institution became the Presbyterian College of South Carolina in 1890, when oversight of the college was increased to include all presbyteries in the Synod of South Carolina.

Pringle’s best-selling book eased her financial worries. By 1920 she began writing another book to tell about her childhood and how women fared during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Ravenel is possibly the best example of the influence of the Poetry Society of South Carolina on local writers; its founding in the year of her husband’s death brought her into a poetry-conscious environment.

Though she wrote poetry, brief essays, and stories on other subjects, Ravenel’s major works focused on southern history and manners.

Using flattery and promises of wealth and promotion, they tried to persuade Dorcas to convince her husband to change to the British side. She defiantly refused their advances, however, “and refused to be made instrumental to their purposes.”

Popular as a teacher, Richardson named the literary societies that played a significant part of campus life. She also became noted for her promotion of women’s suffrage, with her stated goal at the Greenville Woman’s College being to educate “girls who are staunch advocates of women’s rights.”

In 1986 Ripley was chosen to write a sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize–winning classic, Gone With the Wind (1936), by Mitchell’s estate. In 1988 Warner Books successfully bid $4,940,000 for the publishing rights.

In 1961 Robinson was chosen by Highlander and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to set up voter-registration workshops across the racially charged South. These workshops helped transform the political and economic status of thousands of disenfranchised blacks.

The political and social influence and activism of Frances, Lottie, and Louisa within the Reconstruction state government made them the three most notable Rollin sisters.

Salley soon immersed herself in the woman suffrage movement. Claiming that it was “the best dollar I ever spent,” she responded to a newspaper advertisement to join the South Carolina Equal Suffrage League (SCESL).

Sayers’s fiction is wholeheartedly unsentimental. Its narrative force is carried by the author’s strong display of comic irony.

When the Freedmen’s Bureau School was closed in 1871, a small inheritance enabled Schofield to purchase land and construct a larger private residential school, which was later known as the Schofield Normal and Industrial School.

In a few months Seigler had created the Aiken County Girls’ Tomato Club, the first such group in the nation, and was attracting favorable attention from government and philanthropic groups.

Sheriff’s efforts to train and license lay midwives in South Carolina during the postwar decades reveal the pragmatism that guided her public health policies.

Simkins’s life embodied many of the ideals set forth by her parents. She proved herself as an independent leader and advocate for the black community.

Interested in literary pursuits since girlhood, Simons began writing seriously while in college. Her primary love was poetry, with a focus on lyrical verse, sonnets, and nature poems.

The Catholic bishop John England founded the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy in Charleston in 1829, using…

Artist. Smith was born in Charleston on July 14, 1876, the daughter of Daniel Elliott Huger Smith and Caroline Ravenel.…