15 Pioneering Female Journalists

Jane Swisshelm (Image via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

15. Jane Swisshelm

Jane Swisshelm’s early life was exceedingly difficult. When she was only eight, her sister and father both died of consumption (what we now call tuberculosis). Her mother, now in dire financial straits, had to fend for her family practically alone. Jane eventually helped to support her family by becoming a local teacher. When she married James Swisshelm, Jane moved from Pennsylvania to Louisville, Kentucky, where James intended to go into business with his brother. Strong-willed Jane often clashed with her husband.

However, she was unwilling to let gender conventions fully limit her. She moved away for two years, first caring for her ill mother and then, after her mother’s death, heading a girls’ school. Jane eventually moved back with her husband, where she began writing articles advocating against capital punishment and slavery. Her often shocking encounters with the everyday brutality and injustices of slavery in Kentucky had left a deep impression on her. Her work was published in the Spirit of Liberty, an abolitionist newspaper, as her own newspaper, Saturday Visiter [sic]. The Visiter eventually merged with Pittsburgh’s Commercial Journal in 1854.

In 1857, Jane divorced her husband, moved to Minnesota, and began controlling numerous publications and writing to promote the abolition of slavery and the promotion of women’s suffrage. Swisshelm was so vocal in her opposition of Sylvanus Lowry, a Southern slave owner, that he established The Union (later called the St. Cloud Times) to oppose her.

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That did little to slow Swisshelm, however. She continued writing and publishing throughout the Civil War and beyond. Her final newspaper, the Reconstructionist, published such vehement attacks on President Andrew Johnson that she lost both the paper and a steady government position.