In 1970, Victoria Eslinger, a first-year law student at the University of South Carolina, approached a Senate clerk with her application to serve as a page. “He leaned down and looked at me and said, ‘Well, you’re a girl,’ and I said, ‘Yes sir,’” Eslinger said. “He said, ‘Well, we don’t hire girls. If you were your brother, we would be happy to have you.’ I said, ‘I don’t think you can do that. I think that’s a violation of the 14th Amendment.’

“He leaned down and patted me on the head and he said, ‘So sue me.’ So, I did.”

As a first-year law student, Eslinger brought a lawsuit against the governor and the South Carolina Senate for discrimination. Her lawyers included Jean Toal, who later became the Justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, former associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

“It took three years,” Eslinger said. “And now there are women in South Carolina’s Senate as pages. Now we have women senators, I’m happy to see. This was sort of the beginning.”

Eslinger graduated from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1973 as one of five women in her class. She went on to form the South Carolina Women’s Lawyers Association, and is now a senior counsel at Nexsen Pruet, and a faculty member at Harvard University School of Law.

Eslinger’s is among the generation of women that paved the way for female attorneys across the Carolinas, and nationally.

“When I started practicing law, only 3% of the nation’s lawyers...

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