Launch of Woman's Advocate

Around January 1855, Anne Elizabeth McDowell launched the weekly journal Woman's Advocate in Philadelphia, a newspaper with the explicit mission of advancing what she called "the elevation of the female industrial class."

The publication addressed the working conditions, wages, and social standing of women laborers at a time when industrial employment for women was expanding rapidly but pay and treatment remained grossly unequal to that of men. McDowell used the paper as a platform to advocate for equal pay, better working conditions, and greater respect for women's labor.

What made Woman's Advocate especially notable was its production model: the paper was staffed entirely by women, from writers and editors to typesetters and pressworkers — an almost unheard-of arrangement in mid-nineteenth-century American publishing, an industry dominated by men at every level, including the physically demanding and technically skilled trade of typesetting.

The exact launch date is documented only to the month of January 1855, but the venture quickly established itself as a serious voice in the era's growing discourse on labor rights and women's economic independence. It predated the more famous women's rights conventions' publications and stood alongside early labor reform newspapers as a rare example of a periodical designed by, for, and about working women.

Though short-lived, folding after roughly two years due to financial pressures common to reform-minded periodicals of the era, its founding remains a landmark moment in the history of American women's journalism.