This August, as our nation celebrates the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment,
giving women the right to vote, we wanted to share how the contributions of one South
Carolina Law graduate, Ida Salley Reamer, helped the movement gain traction in the
Palmetto State.
But as we dove into the research, we came across the stories of other alumnae who
also made tremendous strides in the fight for the rights of others. And while this
fact by itself isn’t surprising, it is remarkable how interconnected their stories
are, with each generation building upon the successes of the last.
We acknowledge that there is still work to do, and many more stories to tell. And
we hope to be able to share them in the future. But as we approach the century mark
of the 19th Amendment, we begin by celebrating five female legal pioneers who have
brought us this far on the long march towards equality.
Ida Salley Reamer
1884-1958
Ida Salley Reamer. Courtesy Nela Edgar.
On October 17, 2019, a group of distinguished guests gathered in the Coleman Karesh
Reading Room of the law library for a special ceremony in which the law diploma and
South Carolina Bar license of 1922 alumna Ida Salley Reamer were donated to the School of Law. During the ceremony, Nela Edgar, Reamer’s granddaughter, spoke eloquently of her grandmother and the mark her grandmother
made on women’s suffrage and children’s rights in her decades-long advocacy career.
Reamer burst into South Carolina history on Christmas day in 1884, and grew up on
a farm in Salley, South Carolina, near Aiken. She married her brother’s college roommate
but was not content to spend her days as a homemaker in Columbia or idly playing bridge
with society women, Edgar says.
With her two children in tow, she traveled door-to-door around the city to drum up
support for women’s voting rights as a member of the Equal Suffrage League of Columbia.
After the 19th amendment passed in 1920, she began educating women about voting registration
requirements. Reamer was elected president of the League of Women Voters of Columbia
and Richland County and became one of the first women in the state to register to
vote, according to Historic Columbia.
Her interest in exploring her rights as an enfranchised citizen inspired her to attend
law school at South Carolina where she created the first women’s citizenship course
and enlisted her daughter to act in moot court divorce cases. She graduated in 1922
as the top student in her class.
Reamer was one of the first 10 women to join the South Carolina bar. Although her
husband discouraged her from opening a law practice, she used her law degree in everything
she did, Edgar says. For instance, her training helped her craft compelling arguments
in her testimony before legislative committees on behalf of advocacy groups. Reamer
also worked pro bono for African-American sharecroppers and bailed numerous bootleggers
out of jail.
She was unabashed about using her talents, according to Historic Columbia saying,
“God gave me a brain to use and a heart to love, and I should use them both.”
Sarah Leverette
1919 - 2018
Left to right are Mrs. Keller Bumgardner, second vice president; Mrs. Harriet King,
first vice president; and Sarah Leverette, president of the League of Women Voters
of South Carolina in the law library at the University of South Carolina in 1958.
Courtesy of Richland Library, Columbia, S.C.
Like Reamer before her, Sarah Leverette ’43 played an active role in advancing women’s civic rights in South Carolina and
also shaped many of the state’s well-known legal minds.
She was the only woman to enlist in the South Carolina Wing of the Civil Air Patrol
during World War II, but after the war ended, she found the only legal work available
to her involved non-attorney work, such as document preparation.
The final straw came when she was asked to clean the office. She promptly resigned.
“I knew the door was closed for women, but I didn’t know it was locked,” she recalled.
In 1947 Leverette was recruited to work as a law librarian at the law school, where
she became its first female faculty member.
For 25 years, she mentored hundreds of students including I.S. Leevy Johnson ’68 (the first African-American president of the South Carolina bar), Fritz Hollings ’47 (former U.S. senator who thanked her in his book Making Government Work,) and Jean Toal ’68 (former chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court).
Toal, who considered Leverette a mentor and friend, was fond of saying, “I tell her,
‘I want to grow up and be just like you.’”
Outside of the law school, Leverette continued to advance women’s rights in Columbia
and across the state. During the 1950s, she helped revitalize the local chapter of
the League of Women Voters, serving as its president from 1958-1961. She also joined
the group’s charge for women to serve on state juries, which finally became law in
1967.
Jean H. Toal
1943-Present
Jean Toal, with husband William and daughter Lilla, react as Toal is elected by the
General Assembly as the first woman to serve on the South Carolina Supreme Court in
1988. Courtesy of Richland Library, Columbia, S.C.
One of the first beneficiaries of this legislation was a young Jean H. Toal. The future first-female justice and chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme
Court, Toal graduated from the School of Law in 1968, becoming one of only three women
trying cases in the state—and now doing so before a mixed-gender jury.
Over her career, Toal also served 13 years as a state representative, staunchly advocating
for the Equal Rights Amendment and pressing for laws that addressed sex crimes and
created a victim’s compensation program, according to the State. She also pushed for
women to be hired as legal staff for the General Assembly and to be elected to the
state bench.
A trailblazer throughout her life, the seeds of Toal’s activism were planted in her
high school years, where she joined the South Carolina Christian Action Council, “an
interfaith, biracial group opposed to segregation,” according to Historic Columbia.
She and other members watched the famed attorney Matthew J. Perry Jr. defend young demonstrators, laying the groundwork for the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling
in Edwards v. South Carolina (1963).
She decided to attend law school after taking a constitutional law class in college,
but like Reamer and Leverette before her, was still only one of a handful of female
students in her class.
Early in her career, she was mentored by Jean Galloway Bissell '58, who went on to become South Carolina’s first female federal judge. And while
successfully representing law student Vickie Eslinger in a sex discrimination case against the South Carolina Senate, she consulted with
the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU and its co-founder, then-law professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
It is arguably because of her experiences with these women that Toal espouses the
importance of mentoring to advance the next generation of female attorneys. Her lesson,
coined the ladder principle, follows:
“As you climb the ladder of success, do not stop to bask in the spotlight of your
own success alone; do not ‘pull up the ladder’ once you are aboard. Instead, leave
it down for those who come behind you and offer them a hand in achieving the same
success that you enjoy.”
Edna Smith Primus
1944-2019
Edna Primus, 1973. Photo Courtesy of Richland Library, Columbia, S.C.
The year after an outspoken Toal graduated from law school, a quiet but resolved Edna Smith Primus '72 entered. Born in Yemasee to sharecroppers, she wanted to use her law degree to
serve the poor. Along the way, she ended up as the school’ first black female alumna
and helped establish the U.S. Supreme court precedent for legal advocacy.
After graduation, she began working with the South Carolina Council on Human Rights
and was sent to meet with a small group of pregnant women on welfare in Aiken. Because
the women already had two or more children, their physician was refusing to deliver
their babies unless they consented to sterilization.
Primus, in her role as vice president of the S.C. chapter of the American Civil Liberties
Union, followed up with the women via letters offering legal counsel. The first lawsuit
against the physician was filed in spring of 1974.
That fall, however, Primus was charged with soliciting clients on behalf of the ACLU
for personal financial gain, which violated the state’s canon of ethics for attorneys.
A grievance board found her guilty of solicitation, and Primus lost on appeal to the
state supreme court, prompting a public reprimand in 1977.
“We were scarce then, black women lawyers,” she later told The State newspaper. “A
public reprimand splashed all over the papers, that was totally demoralizing.”
In May 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that ruling, finding the state had
violated the First and 14th amendments in the use of its disciplinary rules and concluded
that Primus’s client outreach was “undertaken to express personal political beliefs
and to advance the civil liberties objectives of the ACLU rather than to derive financial
gain.”
Primus noted the significance of the case, which continues to be taught today in professional
responsibility courses.
“It was…important that as an organization we could inform people of their rights,
especially people who would have no way of knowing about their rights,” she said.
Primus represented low-income clients throughout her career with Palmetto Legal Services,
where she mentored other attorneys to advocate for their clients by not only resolving
their legal issues but also by connecting them to services that could help in other
ways, such as food vouchers or childcare, according to Historic Columbia.
One of those attorneys was Vickie Eslinger, who worked with Primus at Legal Aid shortly after graduation.
“She was phenomenally strong and phenomenally gifted,” Eslinger said of Primus. “She
knew what was right and moved forward…even when people were coming after her with
everything they had.”
Vickie Eslinger
University of South Carolina law students Darra Williamson, left, and Vickie Eslinger
at the law library. The two female students were denied appointments to serve as pages
in the South Carolina Senate. Courtesy of Richland Library, Columbia, S.C.
Eslinger graduated from South Carolina Law in 1973, but she was busy advocating for
women’s rights throughout her time in school, working to create a rape crisis center
and starting the Columbia chapter of the National Organization of Women. She also
convinced then-university president Thomas Jones in 1971 to launch a volunteer-based telephone hotline that female students could
call for resources and accurate information about birth control and abortion services.
He agreed, and the service fielded more than 1,500 calls in the pre-Roe v. Wade era.
In 1972 she attended the 2nd National Conference of Women in Law at Berkley California.
At the end of the conference, she convinced the attendees to vote to hold the 3rd
National Conference of Women in Law at South Carolina Law.
Eslinger again stood up for equal rights when her application to serve as a page was
rejected because of her gender. She enlisted legal help from the ACLU and Toal to
sue the then-governor and individual state senators. She battled against general stereotypes
and such claims as that the legislators would fill the positions with their “girlfriends”
or that it would be unsafe for female pages to work alone at night. The duo won on
appeal just a few weeks before Eslinger’s graduation. While she never served as a
page, her victory ushered in a new era for women to participate in the South Carolina
legislature.
Now a partner with Nexsen Pruet, Eslinger has continued to take on cases involving
timely civil rights issues, including gay marriage and migrant worker detention.
“I think, and have always thought, that everybody should have equal access to justice
and not be treated differently because of the color of your skin, the religion you
practice or your gender.”
While the law school's gender barrier was broken back in 1918 when Minna Layton Holman and Claudia James Sullivan became the first two women to graduate, it may be surprising to know that when Eslinger
entered South Carolina Law a half century later, she was still one of only five women
in her class. But thanks to the accomplishments of these women--and many others--today
women compose almost half of the full-time faculty and more than 40 percent of the
student population.
"My presence at the law school, as a woman and a person of color, would not be possible
without their bravery, and in fact, the work I do as associate dean builds on their
example," said Susan Kuo, associate dean for diversity and inclusion.
"We have more work to do, but the law school’s commitment to social justice is reflected
in scholarship produced by faculty and students, in clinics that give law students
the chance to learn legal skills while helping underserved populations, the strength
of its Pro Bono Program and Children's Law Center, as well as a wide range of doctrinal
courses," she added. "These illustrious graduates did so much to help us get to where
we are now, and I’m excited to see where today's female students will take us in the
future."
This story was updated on June 1, 2022 to include Minna Layton Holman as a 1918 graduate
of this school. The story is also available via Adobe Spark.
