Jane Grey Swisshelm was a pioneering figure in journalism, abolitionism, and women's rights in the Steel City, and much of her work took shape as Pittsburgh took on that industrial reputation.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1815, she began her career as a journalist here in the late 1840s when she wrote a series of letters to the editor of the Pittsburgh Commercial Journal about how husbands assumed legal authority over their wives’ assets. She wrote, “All they both have and all they can acquire are his, and only his, to dispense as he sees fit.” She eventually became one of the first female newspaper editors in the United States and said journalism was “as good a living as a man can get.”
Swisshelm was also an outspoken advocate for the abolition of slavery, using her platform to promote anti-slavery sentiments. She reportedly worked briefly for the Underground Railroad while living in Kentucky.
She started her first abolitionist paper, The Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter, in 1848, and her last, The Reconstructionist, in 1861. In 1850, while working for the New York Tribune, she became the first woman to enter the press gallery of the U.S. Senate.
Swisshelm moved across the nation many times, living in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, as well as Minnesota, Illinois, and Washington, D.C. But she always returned to Pittsburgh, where she wrote about and advocated for property rights, inheritance, divorce, custody of children, and the right to vote.
Today the Swissvale and Swisshelm Park neighborhoods bear the name of her farm and family, respectively.
Learn more about Swisshelm and more groundbreaking Western Pa. women in the Heinz History Center exhibition, A Woman’s Place: How Women Shaped Pittsburgh.
