Jane Grey Swisshelm published newspapers in Pittsburgh, Minnesota, and Washington, DC. New York Public Library 499531

Jane Grey Swisshelm's husband was so domineering that he once forbade her to read, but she ended up publishing newspapers in three different cities. The first was in Pittsburgh , where Pennsylvania law granted the income of a married woman to her husband. When Swisshelm's husband discovered that he could make money from her writing, he allowed her to launch her own paper, the Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter [sic]. Her passionate editorials on slavery gained a national audience among abolitionists, and in 1850 she became the first woman to sit in the press gallery of the United States Senate.

After leaving her husband in 1857, she moved to St. Cloud , Minnesota , where other abolitionists lived, and published the St.Cloud Visiter [sic] until local pro-slavery men destroyed her press. Undeterred, Swisshelm revived the paper as the St. Cloud Democrat . She supported Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and spent the next two years urging him to make slavery the key point of the Civil War.

After an 1863 lecture tour in the East, Swisshelm sold the Minnesota paper and settled in Washington , D.C. , where she founded The Reconstructionist in 1865 and The Wasp in 1866. The nation's capital proved too difficult a place to compete, and both papers went bankrupt. Swisshelm finally successfully sued for a share of her late husband's estate and retired to Pittsburgh , where she died in 1884.