Women

She embraced community activism with the same zeal she had demonstrated in teaching, continuing to show former students and others that supporting and improving one’s community is essential for progress and success

In 1896 Adams entered the junior class at South Carolina College (later the University of South Carolina), after graduating from Leesville College in 1892. She was awarded a bachelor of arts degree in 1898, the first woman to graduate from South Carolina College.

Following her graduation in 1894 from the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1891, Allan returned to Charleston and participated in the first sitting of the South Carolina Medical Board, the only woman to do so.

Allison received mainstream recognition with her first novel, Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), which in 1996 was adapted to a film directed by Anjelica Huston.

Bacot kept a diary but recorded little about her hospital work. Published many years after her death, the diary provides insight into the social life of a single, young, upper-class southern woman during the Civil War.

During her accomplished career as a children’s librarian with the New York Public Library, Baker received the first Dutton-Macrae Award in 1953 for advanced study of library work with children. In 1980 Baker joined the University of South Carolina (USC) and became “Storyteller-in-Residence.” This position was created for Baker, and her goals were to teach others how to create enthusiasm in children about stories and reading.

By 1898 Banks was named the first head nurse at Charleston Hospital and Training School, and she dedicated her life to nursing and seeking more equitable health care for African Americans. Promoted to superintendent of nurses, Banks devoted more than thirty-two years to this hospital and the training of nurses.

The school opened in 1828 as the South Carolina Female Institute, but in 1835 it added “Collegiate” to its name, reflecting the institution’s provision of a rigorous four-year classical curriculum.

When captured, she refused to reveal the position of her husband’s company, and some accounts reported that the British beat her in retaliation.

South Carolina has beauty pageants to celebrate almost every possible age, special interest, location, and agricultural product. The most famous of these is the Miss South Carolina pageant. Among the more well known of local contests are the Miss Sun Fun and Miss Bikini Wahine pageants, held during Myrtle Beach’s Sun Fun Festival.

Bernardin was a popular bishop, renowned for administrative skill and respected for his work to benefit children, the elderly, the poor, and the sick.

An expert fundraiser and eloquent speaker among the wealthy northerners who visited Daytona Beach, Bethune developed her small school into a major institution.

Born in Fort Mill on October 16, 1947, she was the first of eight children of H. William Close and Anne Kingsley Springs. A direct descendent of the textile manufacturing pioneers Samuel Elliott White and Leroy Springs, Bowles is the fifth generation to run Springs Industries. As a CEO, Bowles is regularly ranked among the top women executives in the country.

Boyd has published four novels: Nerves (1973), Mourning the Death of Magic (1977), The Revolution of Little Girls (1991), and Terminal Velocity (1997). The last two are part of a trilogy telling the story of Ellen Burns, a Charleston native who experiences an unsatisfying marriage, experiments with heavy drinking and drugs, and loses herself through various affairs and lifestyle changes. In 1988 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship. Four years later she received the Lambda Literary Award for her novel The Revolution of Little Girls, and in 1993–1994 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In October 1920 Bragg was named director of the Charleston Museum and became the first woman in the country to hold such a position at a publicly supported museum. Soon thereafter she opened the museum to black patrons one afternoon a week. She continued the educational focus of the museum and added a children’s library and a reading room that lent books. These efforts were the forerunners of the Charleston Free Library, which opened in January 1931. She was both its trustee and its first librarian.

Bristow’s natural storytelling ability, neatly devised and detailed plots, sharply drawn characters, telling eye for landscape and its detail, use of common sense, gift for dramatic effect, and emotional sincerity were the characteristics of her work that critics and reviewers singled out for praise. Margaret Wallace spoke of her “solid and versatile talent as a novelist.” The critic Susan Quinn Berneis claimed that Bristow’s greatest skill was reserved for “the unfolding of American history as displayed around the lives of the people who created it.” And Eugene Armfield remarked that she belonged “among those Southern novelists who [were] trying to interpret the South and its past in critical terms.”

While Brodie was at Winthrop College during the late 1920s, her biology professor noticed her interest and called her to the attention of Howard K. Gloyd, a well-known herpetologist. Gloyd helped Brodie get a position at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, where there was an excellent program in herpetology under the direction of Alexander G. Ruthven. During her first year there she stayed with Frank N. Blanchard and his wife, and Blanchard taught her many of the procedures used by professional herpetologists. On trips back to her Leesville home she collected many specimens for the University of Michigan collection.

After practicing medicine in North Carolina for two years, Brown moved to Charleston and became the first black female physician to practice in South Carolina. With several other African Americans, she contributed to the establishment of the Cannon Hospital and Training School for Nurses in 1897, which was later renamed McClennan-Banks Hospital.

Despite Flemming’s loss at trial, her case had a significant effect on desegregation of buses and civil rights law across the country. Her incident occurred seventeen months before the famous Rosa Parks case that sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Known as Sallie F. Chapin, she became one of South Carolina’s most visible nineteenth-century women leaders...A powerful lecturer, she drew the attention of women and men, and her lectures became the first exposure to women’s public leadership for many of her audiences and followers.