Jane Swisshelm

Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm (1815 to 1884) was an American journalist, publisher, abolitionist and women's rights advocate, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She wrote against capital punishment and slavery for Pittsburgh papers, and in 1847 founded the newspaper Saturday Visiter, which reached a national circulation of 6,000 and argued for women's property rights. In 1850, working for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, she became the first woman admitted to the reporters gallery of the United States Senate. After moving to St. Cloud, Minnesota in 1857 she controlled a string of newspapers there and fought a long editorial campaign against the slaveholder and politician Sylvanus Lowry, whose supporters wrecked her press. She later nursed Union soldiers in the Civil War, founded the Reconstructionist in Washington, and published an autobiography, Half of a Century, in 1881.