The outspoken author was born on October 23, 1824
It’s never easy to stand up against the conventions of one’s time and one’s city. While the Grimké sisters had to leave Charleston to follow their feminist and abolitionist leanings, one woman who stayed here and paid the price for her beliefs was Susan Petigru King Bowen, who was born on October 23, 1824.
Her father, James Louis Petigru, had been a model for her in his stand against the South, eventually winning universal respect for his support of the Union in a Confederate city. But his daughter faced a double standard as she focused on a different field of battle—objecting to how women in society were expected to think and act.
Forced into an unhappy marriage with Henry King, the son of her father’s law partner, to achieve financial security, King skewered Charleston society and its narrow limitations for smart women in her writings, including Busy Moments of an Idle Woman (1853), Lily (1854), Sylvia’s World: Crimes which the Law Does Not Reach (1859), and Gerald Gray’s Wife (1864). She acknowledged that she was their author (then considered taboo for women) and was criticized for such social heresies as wearing dresses that revealed her arms, flirting too openly, and borrowing a piece of jewelry associated with a prostitute for a fancy party.
When the celebrated English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray came to town, probably in 1853, King challenged him in a verbal match of wits, which won her some praise, but also earned her some enemies. Stories vary, with some assuming she appalled Thackeray by including herself as an artist in his category, while others report she bested him when he said the stories he had heard of her being “fast” must have been exaggerated, leading her to counter that tales she had heard of him being a gentleman must have been, too.
If King scored a triumph then, she could not relish it too long. Both her father and husband died during the Civil War, and her daughter disowned her when King began to be condemned for showing her Unionist sympathies. She went further than her father, not just by speaking in favor of the Union, but by taking a job with the federal government. She married Christopher Columbus Bowen, who had been accused of murder and bigamy and later served as a Reconstruction “carpetbagging” sheriff of Charleston County. (Yet, during the Civil War, one witness swore she had mischievously helped blockade running magnate Alfred Trenholm hide his gold in her bedroom.)
King died in Charleston on December 11, 1875, shunned and abandoned by friends and family, eventually resting almost literally in her father’s shadow—her tombstone sits near his in St. Michael’s graveyard.
