South Carolina’s history is full of women who refused to stay in the roles assigned to them. Pirates and abolitionists. Civil rights leaders and writers. Women who changed the state, the country, and in some cases the world — and whose names you may not know as well as you should.
Anne Bonny (c. 1700 – unknown)
Born near Charleston, raised in the Lowcountry, became one of the most feared pirates of the Golden Age. She left her husband for the pirate Calico Jack Rackham, sailed with his crew dressed as a man, and fought on deck when the rest of the crew was too drunk to stand. Her fate after her arrest in 1720 is unknown — she simply vanishes from the historical record, which is somehow the most fitting ending.
Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)
Born into a wealthy Charleston slaveholding family, Angelina Grimké became one of the most powerful abolitionist voices in America. She and her sister Sarah left South Carolina, converted to Quakerism, and began speaking publicly against slavery at a time when women were not supposed to speak publicly about anything. Her 1836 pamphlet ‘Appeal to the Christian Women of the South’ was burned in Charleston. She kept writing.
Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955)
Born in Mayesville, SC, the fifteenth of seventeen children of formerly enslaved parents, Mary McLeod Bethune became one of the most influential African American leaders of the 20th century. She founded a school in Daytona Beach that became Bethune-Cookman University. She advised four U.S. presidents. She founded the National Council of Negro Women. A statue of her stands in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C. — the first statue of a Black person or a woman in a prominent position on federal land in the capital.
Septima Poinsette Clark (1898–1987)
Born in Charleston, Septima Clark became the ‘Mother of the Movement’ — a title given to her by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She developed the Citizenship Schools that taught literacy and civic engagement to thousands of Black Southerners, enabling them to register to vote. She was fired from her teaching job in South Carolina for being a member of the NAACP. She kept teaching. Her work was foundational to the Civil Rights Movement.
Dori Sanders (b. 1934)
A peach farmer from York County who became a celebrated novelist. Her debut novel Clover (1990), about a Black girl whose father dies on his wedding day to a white woman, became a bestseller and a touchstone of Southern literature. She still sells peaches at her family’s farm stand.
Pat Conroy's Women
Pat Conroy’s novels are full of complicated, powerful women — drawn from his mother, his sisters, and the women of Beaufort. The women in The Prince of Tides and Beach Music are among the most fully realized female characters in Southern literature.