Anne Elizabeth McDowell died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, closing a career as a pioneering newspaper founder, editor, and advocate for working women.
Anne Elizabeth McDowell died on September 30, 1901, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the city that had been the center of her decades-long career as a journalist, editor, and advocate for working women.
By the time of her death at age 75, McDowell had compiled a career of quiet but persistent barrier-breaking: she had founded and published Woman's Advocate in 1855, the first American weekly newspaper completely run by women; she had gone on to edit the women's department of the Sunday Dispatch for eleven years; she later became editor of the Sunday Republic, another major Philadelphia paper — an extraordinarily unusual position of authority for a woman in nineteenth-century American publishing.
In her later years, she also established the McDowell Free Library for women employees at Wanamaker's, Philadelphia's landmark department store, providing working women with access to books and educational resources they might otherwise never have had.
Her death marked the end of a life that spanned the entire arc of the nineteenth century's transformation in women's roles — from a young woman born in Delaware in the 1820s with virtually no path to professional public life, to a recognized journalist and institution-builder who had spent over four decades advocating for the economic and educational advancement of women workers. Her legacy endures in histories of American women's journalism and labor advocacy.