A man’s world in SC’s State House? Not if Katrina Shealy has anything to say about it (she does)

Katrina Shealy had something to say.

But it was 2 a.m. and everyone, as she was moments before, was asleep.

Gnawing at her was the impending South Carolina Senate debate over a near-total abortion ban, a proposal that would stop the procedure almost entirely and offer few exceptions. The debate in the Legislature was years in the making, but had hit a pivotal turn in June 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, overruling Roe v. Wade and empowering states to ban abortions.

The self-described “pro-life” Lexington County Republican, who the year before had backed a six-week abortion ban, had something to say — or in this case, at 2 a.m., write.

“I’m going to say something tomorrow,” Shealy said, before penning her remarks in a bedside notebook the night before her Sept. 7, 2022, floor speech. “I don’t know what I’m going to say. But I started writing.”

Years earlier, in Shealy’s second run for the Senate against veteran state Sen. Jake Knotts in 2012, an editorial in The State newspaper described the 5-foot-3, blonde, donkey-owning former Lexington County Republican Party chairwoman as a “frustratingly mixed bag.”

“She would present a better public image” than Knotts, the editorial assured, but noted her answers felt like “memorized talking points.” The writer, wrestling with who to endorse (the editorial did not make an endorsement), said they couldn’t help but wonder whether Shealy had an “over-eager desire to be liked.”

Shealy will admit she was nervous in her race to oust an incumbent — or in her frank way of speaking, Shealy says she was “scared as poop.” Hoping to gain votes, she wanted to be liked. All these years later, Shealy says she still wants to be liked.

What’s evident now is that desire isn’t going to stop what the 68-year-old grandmother has to say. It surely won’t stop her serious stare, often visible as she’s confronted Cabinet directors, state agency chiefs and oftentimes her own colleagues.

“If you ask me a question, I’m gonna tell you the truth, and then I don’t have to think about it later,” Shealy said on a muggy day from her home’s sunroom, where she can look out at her backyard and her nine donkeys.

“I’ve watched other senators, they will say things I know they don’t believe, and I think that’s just wrong. ... It may not be what my constituency thought I was gonna say, but it’s the truth, and most of them agree with me — they’re just afraid to say it.”

Today, Shealy, one of five women in the Senate, is the chairwoman of the Family and Veterans’ Services Committee.

In that role, Shealy says she is committed to prioritizing the state’s most vulnerable, especially children, ensuring their needs don’t get lost in the legislative grind. She says she’s committed to making sure the General Assembly spends the $30 million that will help build a center to, in part, study Alzheimer’s disease through the University of South Carolina on the BullStreet District campus.

It’s a disease that Shealy understands intimately. Her husband, Jimmy, has it.

“I’m fighting for that,” she said. “I’m going to get that $30 million, if that’s the last thing I do in the Legislature.”

She says she’s also considered pushing the Legislature’s women caucus, which hands out scholarships every year, to expand their influence and get more active in passing legislation focused on children, families and women’s issues.

After Shealy lost her first 2008 Senate bid, she was told to find something else to do because “women don’t run for elected office.” As it was then, it is still an absurd remark, Shealy says, considering a woman has held the governor’s office, a South Carolina woman serves in Congress, and women have held prominent leadership positions in the General Assembly.

But there’s no getting around the fact that in the last year, the number of women in the State House has gotten smaller.

Four women, all Black legislators, lost their House seats in November, and at least two were knocked out in the primary.

“Women don’t run for a lot of reasons,” Shealy said. “Women don’t run because of the financial part. It’s hard to raise money. Women don’t run because of their family. ... You know, they’re the ones who know what a budget is, buy the groceries, teach the kids. Why don’t you (men) go home and do that, and let your wife come up here?”

Beating expectations

Attached to the wall in Shealy’s Senate office are a pair of Wonder Woman tennis shoes, inside a frame with a picture of the superhero herself. Nearby sits a Wonder Woman mug, a book and an actual red cape, with blue and white stars inside — all part of an alter ego, perhaps, or entirely symbolic of her rise to the male-dominated upper chamber and her desire to break stereotypes.

“Politics was not like some burning desire I had,” said Shealy, wearing shoes with Wonder Woman charms on them.

But by the time she had remarried and was in her 50s, Shealy said the “good ole boys system” was rampant, motivating her to join the ranks of the Lexington County Republican Party and then join the candidate pool herself in hopes of ousting incumbents.

“I kept asking people, somebody needs to run, because we just need better representation in Lexington. Lexington’s growing, we’re getting more business, we’re getting more attention, (but) we’re embarrassed about our leadership,” Shealy said. “And nobody would run. I said, ‘You know what, y’all won’t do it. I’m gonna do it.’”

When Shealy ran against Knotts for a second time in 2012, friends thought she was crazy to try to oust him.

“I said, ‘What’s the worst he’s going to do to me? Kill me?” Shealy said.

Shealy beat the incumbent, and expectations.

She won a Senate seat represented by a veteran legislator, whose campaign stumbles included a racist remark directed at then-Gov. Nikki Haley and who had helped redraw his own district, leaving thousands of new doors to knock on. The election that year also presented Shealy an unprecedented campaign obstacle, a “ballot bomb,” after she and about 200 others were removed from GOP primary ballots across South Carolina for not filing the proper paperwork, forcing Shealy to run as a petition candidate in a state where straight-ticket voting reigns.

“I wore out two pairs of Wonder Woman tennis shoes” during the campaign, Shealy said. “Nobody worked harder than me. People can say they work hard. They can call (former South Carolina Lt. Gov.) Andre Bauer the hardest campaigner they’d ever seen and all that. But I can tell you, nobody worked harder than I did.”

Knotts never conceded defeat that election night, Shealy said. Any campaign feud, however, is gone. They remain friends — they’ve known each other for some 50 years — and Knotts sometimes will stop by her home to visit her husband. Shealy holds no grudges.

“She did something for me that I didn’t realize needed to be done,” Knotts told The State. “I had made a full-time job out of a part-time position all of 18, 19 years I was up there. The night of the election, my family started clapping. I said, ‘What the hell y’all clapping for?’”

Working in a male-dominated field in her private life, the forestry insurance business, Shealy said she didn’t see much change stepping into the Senate chamber in 2013 as the sole woman legislator at the time.

The constant request of “gentlemen of the Senate, please rise,” however, made it clear to Shealy: More work needed to be done.

Serving inside, outside the Senate

State Sen. Dick Harpootlian, a Richland Democrat, knows the Shealy stare. At times, he’s been on the receiving end of it.

“I’ve dealt with serial killers, I’ve dealt with some really dangerous people, but she scares me sometimes,” said Harpootlian, a former solicitor and former chairman of the S.C. Democratic Party. “That stare will stop you, and at that point you’re reevaluating whether you want to continue on what you’re saying or slink off and get away from the stare.”

The stare comes directly from her father, who, Shealy said, didn’t have to say anything to get his point across — an inherited trait Shealy admits can make her intimidating. “I think I’m a product of having to be that way or not get attention,” she says.

That intensity matched with her commitment to children’s issues has made her the leader, multiple colleagues told The State, to help combat some of the state’s toughest problems related to children: Working conditions and past leadership problems at the state Department of Juvenile Justice — where she met with employees after they staged a walk-out — and at the state Department of Social Services, two Cabinet agencies, Shealy says, that are on the right track to improvement.

“You don’t want to be on the receiving end of Katrina Shealy’s stare,” Harpootlian said. “She’ll chew your ass out in about two nanoseconds.”

She wants to fix things. She wants children and families to succeed. That comes from her parents, especially her mother.

“We never lived by ourselves; we always took in everybody else’s children,” Shealy says of growing up. “If your house burned down, and you came to our door, my parents didn’t even have to know you. You could sleep upstairs in our bedroom. We always had somebody somebody else’s children. My mom and daddy raised a whole lot of other people’s children.”

Shealy’s work has expanded beyond her Senate duties.

After she joined the Senate, Shealy started her nonprofit, Katrina’s Kids, born out of frustration after hearing that children living in foster care and group homes couldn’t afford what other children in the state were afforded, such as dental care, summer camp and band instruments, none of it paid for by the state.

Shealy says she wanted to fill that gap.

Through private donations — Shealy said she avoids asking for money for the nonprofit from the state budget — children in foster care and group homes can get access to braces, sports camps, college tuition and gift cards.

“She’s not a show-boatist. She is one of the hardest workers in the Senate,” said Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield. “She is there every day, not just session days. She is sincere. She doesn’t play games with you. She’s very straightforward.”

“She’ll work with anyone. She gets along with everyone. But she also doesn’t take any crap from anyone. You’re not going to push her around.”

But work remains to be done at the state’s juvenile justice and social services departments, says Shealy, who credits directors Eden Hendrick and Michael Leach, respectively, for trying to turn around two agencies that have been neglected for decades. And while she’s been successful, she says, at getting colleagues to cosponsor and advance her legislation including kinship foster care, efforts to curb child abuse, ending subminimum wages for people with disabilities and increasing penalties for people who engage in prostitution, Shealy says sometimes getting colleagues to take her legislation more seriously can be challenging.

“If you’re getting people off poverty roles, getting people off DSS, WIC, all of these social service things, getting them out there and getting a job, you’re saving the state money,” she said. “It’s not just a social issue; it’s an economic issue. But people don’t see it like that. (They say) that’s left-leaning. It’s not.”

A woman in politics

Bedside notebook in hand, when Shealy returned to the Senate on Sept. 7, she knew what she was going to say.

She had drafted her remarks the night before, somewhat sleep deprived, and had only shown her remarks to her research director, Mason Thomas, for slight edits. The words were her own, Thomas said.

In 2021, Shealy voted to pass a “fetal heartbeat” six-week abortion ban. It wasn’t “perfect,” she said, but she thought it balanced the rights of the fetus and the mother, who, she said, should be aware by then that they’re pregnant. Critics say, however, most women don’t know that early.

The ban made exceptions, including for sexual assault — Shealy says she’s aware of cases where children have been sexually assaulted, then become pregnant — and the mother’s life, a decision she says legislators have no business determining, only doctors.

Now, in the fall of 2022, the Legislature was in a special session to debate an even stricter abortion bill.

“I’m definitely pro-life. I’m pro-woman, too,” Shealy told The State, defending her position. “We have so little representation (in the Legislature) that we’ve gotten to a point where we’re letting other people make decisions that need to be made by everybody, not this small group of people that monopolize the Legislature.”

In this case, the House bill was flawed and would further erode a woman’s right and say over her own body, Shealy said.

“To say it’s tough to be a woman in politics is an understatement,” Shealy said in part Sept. 7 on the Senate floor. “To say it’s really tough to be a woman in politics in South Carolina is hardly a statement at all. You can tell by looking around this room. You can tell by looking at the portraits on the wall of this room and in the House chamber, in the halls of the State House. You can tell how tough it is by some of the comments made by some of the people in the lobby. Things like, ‘Women aren’t fit to serve,’ that ‘God doesn’t want us here.’”

“Well, God’s pretty smart. If God didn’t want us here, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be here.”

Only one man in the Senate, Shealy continued that day, has a medical background as a pharmacist.

“But I don’t want you to be my OBGYN,” Shealy said.

Her speech made national news and went viral on social media.

It was the second time Shealy had that happen. The first time was after she castigated her male colleague for referring to women as a “lesser cut of meat.”

“You got more hits than the queen,” Shealy’s grandson told her after her abortion speech, “and she died today (Sept. 8).”

After the debate, Shealy handed out tea towels to each of her female Senate colleagues. They read, “A woman’s place is in the House ... and the Senate.”

In January of this year, the S.C. Supreme Court ruled the state’s existing six-week abortion ban unconstitutional. Republican leaders, in response, have said they plan to address the ruling during this legislative session and have eyed the judicial vetting system and the makeup of the court as a path forward.

Shealy has instead challenged her colleagues to prioritize bills that would address women, children and families, such as her proposal this year to make school lunch free, not their bodies.

“What I like is when stands up to the establishment and does what’s right,” said state Sen. Margie Bright Matthews, D-Colleton, who, like other female colleagues, described Shealy as a mentor. “She cares about being elected. But she cares more about the women, children and elderly.”

Shealy, who said she plans to run for reelection in 2024, has more to say.

She’s leaving more for her book, and, inevitably, the Senate chamber.

“The reason you’re talking to me now is because you want to know why I’m the way I am,” Shealy said. Well, from the time I was a little girl, everything in my life has made me what I am. From the time I was born, some crazy things have happened to me. And if nobody reads this book but my grandchildren, somebody needs to know why I’m the way I am.”