Women's Suffrage in South Carolina

Women's suffrage in South Carolina began as a movement in 1898, nearly 50 years after the women's suffrage movement began in Seneca Falls, New York. A woman from Fairfax, Virginia, named Durant Young, was the first to try. In 1892 she organized the South Carolina Equal Rights Association. It had members in Frogmore (Beaufort County), Columbia, and Charleston. In 1895, Cora S. Lott addressed the South Carolina constitutional convention, asking for women's suffrage. She was denied, but women in South Carolina did win the right to control their own property during the convention.

Not until 1912, when the New Era Club was created in Spartanburg, was there an association in South Carolina whose only goal was to win the right to vote for women. A few years later, Abbeville, Charleston, Greenville, and Columbia all had their own suffrage organizations. The separate groups merged in 1915 to form the South Carolina Equal Suffrage League, led by Eulalie Chaffee Salley of Aiken and Susan Pring Frost of Charleston.

After four years of action, twenty-five communities had leagues of their own. Aiken's suffrage league, in 1917, held the first ever women's suffrage march in South Carolina. Only two years later, in 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment and sent it to the individual states to be ratified. The South Carolina General Assembly rejected the amendment 93-21 in the House and 32-3 in the Senate. The amendment was not officially passed until 1969 when governor Robert McNair signed a bill making the amendment "law".

There are many arguments as to why South Carolina was so far behind the rest of the nation in organizing suffrage organizations. One of these arguments is that the women of South Carolina still believed in the ideal of the "Southern Lady." This ideal encouraged women to be subservient to their husbands and to take pride in their place in the home as mother and homemaker. This ideal did not allow for women to take the time to fight for their right to vote. Another idea is that the evangelical Protestant church did not support female members in fighting for their right to vote. Since the church was such a big part of the lives of South Carolinians (91% of church-goers in South Carolina in 1888 were either Methodist or Baptist), they were discouraged from joining the suffrage movement.