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  • Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815-1884
  • Nancy Isenberg (bio)
Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815-1884. By Sylvia D. Hoffert. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Pp. 255. Illustrations. Cloth, $39.95.)

Jane Swisshelm was one of the most important journalists of the nineteenth century. She wrote for the New York Tribune and the New York Times and edited several papers on her own: the Pittsburgh Saturday Visitor, the St. Cloud [Minnesota] Visitor, and The Reconstructionist, in Washington, DC. She is best known as an abolitionist and women's rights reformer, but her "unconventional life" included an unusual marriage, most of which she spent living apart from her husband while pursuing a career. Her Scottish Covenanter religious upbringing gave her a critical view of American society and politics, making her an uncompromising opponent of slavery and a vocal advocate for women's political and economic rights. Whether living in the nation's capital, or publishing a paper on the Minnesota frontier, she saw herself as a radical reformer and critic.

Swisshelm remained deeply conscious of the need to preserve her respectability as she challenged social norms. She was not only a journalist, but a working woman as well. She charted new ground by entering a trade dominated by men: newspaper publishing. Sylvia D. Hoffert focuses on how Swisshelm developed a professional code of behavior for women that allowed them to work alongside men. As an editor, a Civil War nurse, and a government clerk, she had enough variety of experience to enable her to conceive of a way for women to succeed: they should be [End Page 513] careful to separate their professional identities from their feminine roles. For women to achieve recognition, they had to appear less like sexual beings. According to Swisshelm's understanding of the workplace, Hoffert writes, women had to leave their feminine ways at home and "separate their identities as workers from their identities as women" (88).

Swisshelm was never afraid of entering the contentious world of partisan politics. She endorsed the Free Soil Party in 1848, advocating what she called "Free Democracy," and finally committed herself to the Republican Party. When she moved to St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1857, to start the St. Cloud Visitor, she left her husband behind. Unable to steer clear of politics, she battled the Democratic Party boss, contributing to his electoral defeat. During the Civil War, she moved to Washington, where she received a patronage position in the federal government. There, in 1865, she started The Reconstructionist, which openly attacked President Andrew Johnson's policies.

Hoffert does not sugarcoat Swisshelm's political career. While she remained an ardent abolitionist, supported equal educational opportunities for blacks, and defended the nascent women's rights movement, Swisshelm always saw herself first and foremost as a public critic. So she did not shy even from criticizing the very reformers she endorsed. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton remarked, "she is forever saying something we wish unsaid" (148). Living on the Minnesota frontier as the Civil War opened, Swisshelm developed views of Native Americans that were drastically changed by the Dakota wars of 1862. Initially espousing a kind of romantic racism, idealizing the proud Indian, she quickly took up a virulent kind of fear-mongering, seeking revenge for the murders of white settlers. She supported vigilantism and even the extermination of certain tribes. She wrote that Minnesotans should make sure that "three red skins shall die" for "every white person killed" and that hunting parties should collect scalps to intimidate Indian leaders (153). Her language was harsh, hyperbolic, and racist. Yet Swisshelm never recognized any similarity between her brand of racism and that of the white supremacists whom she ridiculed in antislavery editorials.

Swisshelm's life was riddled with contradictions. She claimed that she was defending the institution of marriage, and yet she spent most of her own marriage living apart from her husband. She defended the right of southerners to secede from the Union in terms comparable to the ending of a business partnership or marriage: a state could leave if it "wants to get out," and a contract should be easily "dissolved by mutual consent" [End Page...

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