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We have twelve Trustees on the Board of Greenville Hospital System, each Trustee serves a six year term. Last week the Upstate Delegation chose four nominees submitted by the Hospital Board. The selection process is not really big news, we have been nominating board members to the delegation to select for decades. What is more interesting news is that all four selected by the Delegation are women – a first for us. The following individuals have been selected to serve six year terms as members of the GHS Board of Trustees: Ruth Richburg, Michelle Seaver, Lisa Stevens, and Marguerite Wyche.

So, what does that have to do with Converse College? It is just a matter of timing! A week or so before the decision was made for our Trustees, I had the opportunity to hear Betsy Fleming speak at a dinner about “Gender Gaps & Opportunities” and I have attached a copy of her talk. I think the diversity we have on the Board is a tremendous asset.

Gender Gaps & Opportunities
I grew up here in South Carolina. It is where I first developed my passion for the arts. I left in 1984 and returned—18 years later—first to Charleston for art and to share my passion and enthusiasm for the visual arts with the Lowcountry community as director of the Gibbes Museum of Art. My aspiration was to expand the value that Charlestonians and South Carolinians placed on creativity and the arts, and to connect people through creative expression.

It is my belief that Art provides a means to communicate and understand across cultural, social, economic, and language barriers. It is an important tool for building community capital.

However, with my return, I became painfully aware that the State of South Carolina was lacking in its support for women. We today rank at the bottom of all states in terms of women’s earnings, educational attainment, access to health insurance and political representation. We are at the top of the list in terms of women and children living in poverty.

There are currently no female senators in the South Carolina General Assembly and no elected woman representing our state on the national level—in Congress or Senate.

These gender gaps are especially surprising considering our state has such strong female legacies, which include:
-in the arts, Henrietta Johnston (born 1674 and passed 1729), America’s first pastel artist and earliest known female painter;
-Julia Mood Peterkin, only South Carolinian and the first woman to win Pulitzer Prize (Converse alumna);
-in entrepreneurship, Eliza Pinckney who was first to discover how to grow indigo;
-and in law and politics, Bessie Wesley Alderman, another Converse alumna who was graduated in 1904, a former Women’s Suffrage Movement leader; and one of the first two women ever elected as a delegate to the National Democratic Convention in 1920 just after women got the right to vote.