History: Raising the Bar

At a time when women were still fighting for the right to vote and Greenville was undertaking a downtown building boom, one woman was paving the way for future generations of female attorneys. About 1895, James M. Perry, a professor at the Greenville Women’s College, welcomed his third daughter to the world, and, determined that one of his children would bear his name, she was called James Margrave Perry.

Because of illness in her early years, Perry attended only three years of public school, learning primarily at home. She entered Greenville’s Women’s College at about age fourteen, and, after graduating in 1913, “Miss Jim”—as she was later called, enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley. She emerged from Berkeley’s law school with a doctorate of jurisprudence in 1917 and, after passing the California bar, began practicing law. Just months after the South Carolina bar opened examinations to women in 1918, Miss Jim returned to Greenville and became the first female attorney in the state.

A Spartanburg Herald article reported on August 2, 1918, that when Miss Jim was introduced to the bar, every member “extended to her the glad hand of fellowship by rising and applauding.” Now able to practice law in her home state, Perry took a position with Greenville’s Haynsworth and Haynsworth law firm and rose in the ranks.

Perry blazed a trail for all of South Carolina’s female attorneys, but saw immediate change after her history-making career choice when two women—Julia D. Charles and Pinkney Lee Estes—joined the bar in 1919. Since then, she has made way for 2,910 female attorneys in the state; more than three hundred work right here in Greenville County, where Miss Jim got her start.