Petticoat Press # 3 Pathfinder for Jane Cannon Swisshelm

 

Petticoat Press # 3: Pathfinder for Jane Cannon Swisshelm by Elsie Ridgley

Minnesota Historical Society

Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm (1815-1884)

Jane was born in western Pennsylvania into a family of strict Scottish Presbyterians. She met her future husband James Swisshelm (a Methodist) at a quilting party.

"He was handsomely dressed...a man of giant strength," she recalled. He decided she would be his wife and they married in 1836. Religion, James's mother and two difficult temperaments were obstacles to happiness. If the traditional woman's novel relied on the "Marriage Plot" at the time, these tales of female writers rely upon the "Divorce Plot." Jane's story is no exception. She remembered her marriage as twenty years "without the legal right to be alone one hour."

She left her husband, taking their daughter Mary Henrietta. James divorced her for desertion in 1857. Our divorce plot here requires the talented woman to make a living for her family with her writing. Jane was drawn to newspaper editing, giving herself a platform for her strong opinions, which were primarily antislavery and pro-woman's rights. She moved to Minnesota and started a few newspapers in the fifties.

Pathfinder by Becky Collis

Jane's St. Cloud, Minnesota Democrat offices

Before the Democrat she edited the St. Cloud Visiter, which she insisted on spelling in odd fashion. The woman was stubborn.

Head of the household in Stearns, Minnesota, 1860

Pathfinder by Becky Brown

Woman listening to Congressional debate, later in the century

We might term all these female reporters pathfinders but who was first and who was significant are always debatable. We recall Jane Swisshelm, however, as a true pathfinder in the history of women reporters and columnists because it is well documented that she was the first female admitted to Congress's all-male Press Gallery.

Getting the news out of the Capitol

In 1850 she'd been listening and analyzing the rhetoric from the Ladies Section but there she had no access to telegraph lines and noisy chatter made hearing debate difficult. She asked editor Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune who had recently hired her to use his influence with the Taylor/Fillmore administration.

Just another day of violence in the Senate in 1850

As she recalled, she obtained a personal interview with Vice-President Millard Fillmore to successfully request entrance.

Greeley's clout must have been important.

With that important coup Jane played true to herself. She was, we have to say, her own worst enemy. She decided that in this new position of power she would further the antislavery cause by attacking revered Senator Daniel Webster, who'd betrayed the abolitionists and was well known to have mixed race children of mistresses he supported.

She published it. Greeley fired her as a regular columnist, she lost her pass after one day and a woman in the press gallery continued to be a rarity.

1915

Petticoat Press # 3 by Denniele Bohannon

During the Civil War she continued to write for Greeley, moved to Washington City where the action centered and obtained a clerkship in the quartermaster general's office while volunteering as a nurse in local hospitals.  After Appomattox she began another newspaper there The Reconstructionist. Never able to weigh her idea of right versus popular response Jane charged ahead with very few skills in reading the public mind.

Fired in 1866

After the war she moved to Chicago

Jane and Mary Henrietta (Zo) living on Vernon Avenue in Chicago, 1880

She wrote daughter Zo when a late-life visit was proposed that she would not be coming. Mother and daughter would just argue, she worried, and she took the blame: "You never know when I am going to hurt someone’s feelings or do something to make myself ridiculous."

Jane was an accomplished needlewoman, embroidering 

 Zo's 1881 wedding dress, now in the Minnesota Historical 

Society Collection.

But the woman seemed able to get into an argument at the drop of a needle. In 1956 a story about Jane recalled her anger when people wondered whether the hand embroidery was "self-trim" (purchased machine embroidered insertions.)

Jane was a talented writer and editor but she seems to have suffered from---shall we say today---a neurodivergent personality style. She really had a hard time reading other people and the consequences of her actions with them. A bit on the autism scale?

The Block

Pathfinder (BlockBase #2317) was published by the Chicago Tribune's Nancy Cabot column in 1935. The fictional Nancy told us it was from Southern Missouri but she is not a reliable source. Pathfinder is a good name for Jane Swisshelm who is remembered as the first woman writer given access to the Congress's press gallery, a "first" that may indeed be accurate.

Petticoat Press # 3 by Jeanne Arnieri

Further Reading

Hoffert, Sylvia D. Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815–1884. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

McCarthy, Abigail. "Jane Grey Swisshelm: Marriage and Slavery." In Women of Minnesota: Selected Biographical Essays, edited by Barbara Stuhler and Gretchen Kreuter, 55–76. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1998.

Swisshelm, Jane Grey. Half a Century. Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, and Company, 1880.
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=lbViAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP1