As the national debate for suffrage came to the fore, South Carolina women were increasingly drawn into the movement for social and educational reform. From the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) to the Equal Suffrage Leagues (ESL) to the burgeoning women's club movement, numerous groups - both Black and White - mobilized and took valiant stands as the fight for suffrage intensified. Susan Pringle Frost, Eulalie Salley, Marion Birnie Wilkinson and the Pollitzer Sisters - Mabel, Carrie, and Anita, daughters of a prominent Jewish family from Charleston - are among the oft-overlooked and forgotten rebels in the Palmetto State. Their tireless efforts contributed greatly to the women's rights movement and the fight for the female vote!
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South Carolina, a mostly rural state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was racially divided and impoverished after Reconstruction. Its economy was mainly agrarian, growing crops...
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Beginning in 1899, the Poppenheim sisters published a monthly magazine called The Keystone. The magazine pointed out the manner in which the Confederate “Lost Cause” movement celebrated the...
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Support for women’s right to vote was growing in South Carolina. A custody battle and scandal between two legendary SC families gave the women’s suffrage movement a boost in SC. Lucy Pickens Dugas was...
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In the early twentieth century, a trio of sisters from Charleston, SC, known as the Pollitzer sisters (Carrie, Mabel, and Anita) embraced the opportunities for social reform. The Pollitzers came from...
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Susan Pringle Frost, a mentor to the Pollitzer sisters, was the founder of the Charleston Equal Suffrage League. Anita Pollitzer went to work for that National American Women Suffrage Association...