This curriculum resource was developed by the South Carolina Department of Archives and History as part of a series of eight Document Packets to enhance the teaching of South Carolina history by making copies of significant documents available for classroom use. This resource, revised in 1997, presents four women pioneers of different ethnic background – Judith Lawson, an African American; Mary Musgrove Matthews Bosomworth of Creek and European descent; and Mary Gloud and Elizabeth Haig, both Europeans. The lives each of these women led in colonial South Carolina reflect the challenges posed by a fluid society and by cultures in transition. They also illustrate some of the tensions felt as European, African, and Native American cultures interacted on the Carolina “frontier”- a term used loosely to denote the process of European and African settlement in a Native American environment.
