Jane Swisshelm founded the antislavery, women’s rights newspaper Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter in 1848.
On January 1, 1848, Jane Swisshelm founded the Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter, an antislavery and women’s rights newspaper that she owned and edited herself. This launch is widely recognized as a barrier-breaking act: a woman creating and running her own political paper.
Sources describe how Swisshelm, frustrated with male-controlled newspapers, established the Visiter to speak directly on abolition, married women’s property rights, and broader legal reforms.[3][7][19] Operating from Pittsburgh, she wrote fiery editorials against slavery, the fugitive slave law, and the legal doctrine that made wives’ property solely their husbands’.[7][19] The paper quickly gained a regional readership and was reprinted by other abolitionist presses.
Historians and heritage organizations emphasize that Swisshelm’s founding of this newspaper represented a rare level of economic and editorial autonomy for a woman in the 1840s.[2][3][19] She controlled content, managed the business side, and used the platform to challenge both slaveholders and conservative clergy. Her work provoked hostility, including threats and attempts to silence her, but she persisted.
In women’s history and press history, the 1848 founding of the Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter is a genuine "first": one of the earliest instances of a woman in the United States creating and sustaining her own reform newspaper. It showed that women could be not only contributors but founders and editors in the political press, and it helped pave the way for later feminist publications.