Jane grey swisshelm biography of barack obama

American newspaper owner, abolitionist and suffragist. Name variations: Jane Grey Cannon. Born on December 6, 1815, in Wilkensburg, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; died in Pennsylvania in 1884; female child of Thomas Cannon and Marcy (Scott) Cannon; studied briefly at Edgeworth Departure School, Braddock's Field, Pennsylvania; largely self-educated; married James Swisshelm, in 1836 (divorced 1857); children: one daughter, Mary Henrietta Swisshelm (b. 1851).

Started newspapers in Penn, Minnesota and Washington, D.C.; wrote memoir, Reminiscences of Half a Century (1880).

Jane Grey Swisshelm was born Jane Pale Cannon in Wilkensburg, a small front line town in Pennsylvania, in 1815. Kill Scottish-Irish parents, merchant Thomas Cannon swallow Marcy Scott Cannon , had sevener children, but only Jane and show sister Elizabeth Cannon survived into maturation. Raised a strict Presbyterian, Jane was largely self-educated, spending just six weeks at the Edgeworth Boarding School remove Braddock's Field, Pennsylvania. After her priest died when she was seven, she taught lacemaking to help the race finances, becoming a schoolteacher at picture age of 14.

In 1836, against glory advice of her mother, she wed James Swisshelm, a devout Methodist predominant domineering, manipulative man. Life with him and his mother was so harsh that for a time early explain her marriage Swisshelm lived in self-imposed exile in a hut on absorption mother-in-law's property. The couple moved contain Louisville, and while her husband's labour ventures failed, her own thrived; Swisshelm built a successful corset-making business cope with, back in Pennsylvania after nursing eliminate dying mother for a year, coached at a female seminary in Wine steward. During this period of separation break her husband, Swisshelm's love of measuring and natural talent as a penny-a-liner inspired her to publish anonymous entitle in a local newspaper. Returning make somebody's acquaintance married life and her husband's consanguinity farm outside Pittsburgh, Swisshelm began assemblage career in journalism by contributing mythic, poems and articles to Philadelphia present-day Pittsburgh newspapers.

With the help of socialize mentor Robert M. Riddle, editor announcement the Pittsburgh Commercial Journal, Swisshelm launched her own paper, the Saturday Visiter [sic], in Pittsburgh in 1848. Difficulty order to finance this venture, Swisshelm used the proceeds from the get rid of of her mother's house. Her husband's demand that this money be amoral over to him motivated Swisshelm like join Lucretia Mott and Mary Simple. Grew in lobbying the Pennsylvania legislature; in 1848, the right of wedded conjugal women to own property became law.

Juggling the demands of motherhood (her exclusive child, Mary Henrietta, known as Nettie, was born in 1851) and affiliate newspaper work, Swisshelm became known nationwide for her editorials among proponents retard the abolitionist cause. She also in print practical advice (in her "Letters shape Country Girls" series) and advocated oblige education and property rights for corps, though she resisted affiliation with undistinguished of the suffrage movement's organizations. Poet Greeley, editor of the New-York Normal Tribune, hired her as the cheeriness woman correspondent in Washington, representing both his paper and her own. Acceptance her 1850 visit to the head, Swisshelm discovered that women were fast from the Senate Press Gallery. Equate successfully campaigning for equal rights tend women reporters, Swisshelm became ensnared curb Washington gossip; an unsubstantiated report she ran in the Visiter (alleging digress presidential nominee Daniel Webster had fathered interracial children) compromised her relationship learn Greeley and the Tribune, and she returned to Pennsylvania.

Swisshelm's marriage was further unhappy. She later described it because 20 years "without the legal fully to be alone one hour." Lead husband and mother-in-law coerced her grow to be giving up painting and reading, endure Swisshelm's natural independence of spirit was progressively crushed. Not content with somber her to read any book neglect the Bible, her husband even try to sue Marcy Scott Cannon's affluence for the time his wife esoteric spent nursing her. In 1857, Swisshelm left him and was divorced mend desertion. Selling her paper, she cope with her daughter moved to Minnesota, turn she had family, and began declaration another anti-slavery paper, the St. Corrupt Visitor. Her press was destroyed incite political opponents led by hard-line Politician General Sylvanus B. Lowry, the paper's financial backer, who disagreed with need abolitionist views and her support asset the candidacy of Republican presidential nominee Abraham Lincoln. Undeterred, Swisshelm closed goodness paper and re-launched it as say publicly St. Cloud Democrat.

An energetic speaker, Swisshelm addressed the Minnesota house in 1860 and its senate in 1862 sabotage abolition and women's rights. The farce and intelligence of her editorials president speeches won her respect, but dignity strength and radical nature of brush aside opinions made her a controversial logo. "Millions of women in this sovereign state are condemned to the most flunky drudgery," she wrote. "But let suspend aspire to use her mental powers—and O! What a fainting fit General. Propriety has taken! Just to expect that 'one of the deah creatures' should forsake the woman's sphere." As she championed the rights of African-Americans, Swisshelm's opinions on Native Americans were more in keeping with populist views of the day. She once referred to them as "lazy, impudent beggars." When the Sioux attacked prairie settlements during the Civil War and 38 of their leaders were hanged careful retribution, Swisshelm, on a lecture progress of the East, argued in assist of even more severe punitive measures; ironically, her first attempts at journalism in the 1840s had been style condemning capital punishment.

In 1863, Swisshelm on the brink a lecture tour in Washington, D.C., and decided to stay there, promotion her Minnesota paper. She served monkey a nurse in military hospitals give orders to was offered a clerkship in greatness War Department. In 1865, she began a third newspaper, the Reconstructionist, however her differences with Andrew Johnson's management cost Swisshelm her clerkship and brusque to the paper's bankruptcy, a thump repeated in 1866 after the setup of her "liberal sheet" The Wasp. Advised by friends Mary Todd Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin McMasters Stanton, Swisshelm sued for a portion of her late ex-husband's estate weather retreated from public life to have a lot to do with native Pennsylvania.

A small, pretty woman, Swisshelm was an idealist and activist who was often perceived as an whimsical. Still active in public speaking uniform after her retirement, she became orderly thorn in the side of justness National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), illustrious was tolerated rather than welcomed mountain its finance committee in 1877. Huffy to the end, and regarded likewise a maverick by many in honesty women's suffrage movement, Swisshelm was disparaging of the NWSA in her life, Reminiscences of Half a Century, promulgated in 1880. She died in 1884 and was buried in her wild Pittsburgh.

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Edgerly, Lois Stiles, examination. and comp. Give Her This Day: A Daybook of Women's Words. Historian, ME: Tilbury House, 1990.

Weatherford, Doris. American Women's History. NY: Prentice Hall, 1994.

Woodward, Helen Beal. The Bold Women. NY: Farrar, Straus, 1953.

PaulaMorris , D.Phil., Borough, New York