Nature must change her plan
Ere you can be a man.”
Mrs. Swisshelm was scourged into the woman’s rights agitation as she had been into the anti-slavery struggle, by her own troubles, brought on her again by her husband.
The house left to her by her parents she wished to sell. Under the laws of Pennsylvania a wife could not alone give title, and her husband in this case refused to sign the deed unless the purchase money were given to him to be put into improvements on his mother’s estate, where all his wife’s earnings had so far been put out of her reach. Upon the death of her mother, whom she idolized and had nursed tenderly for some weeks against the opposition of her husband, the latter filed a claim against the mother’s estate for his wife’s wages as nurse. Of these applications of the law she writes:
I do not know why I should have been so utterly overwhelmed by this proposal to execute a law passed by Christian legislators for the government of a Christian people, a law which had never been questioned by any nation or state or church, and was in full force all over the world. Why should the discovery of its existence curdle my blood, stop my heart-beats, and send a flush of burning shame from forehead to finger-tips? Why blame him for acting in harmony with the canons of every Christian church? Was it any fault of his that “all that she (the wife) can acquire by her labor, service, or act during coverture belongs to the husband?” Certainly not!
It occurred to me that all the advances made by humanity had been through the pressure of injustice, and that the screws had been turned on me that I might do something to right the great wrong which forbade married women to own property. So, instead of spending my strength quarreling with the hand, I would strike for the heart of that great tyranny. I studied the laws under which I lived and began a series of letters on the subject of married women’s rights to hold property.
The result of the agitation thus begun was an amendment to the statute in 1848, securing to married women the right to hold property. The predictions of evils to follow from this introduction of “an apple of discord into every family,” made by sage and serious men then, sound marvellously like some of the warnings we hear from objectors to woman suffrage now. But Mrs. Swisshelm refused to join the organized suffrage movement, and had many hot debates with its organs as to method, not as to principles; she herself, curiously enough, predicted evils to flow from woman suffrage, similar to those her critics had predicted would flow from granting property rights.
She opposed the Washingtonian temperance movement, scornfully rejecting the plan of reforming drunkards by coddling them; waged warfare against the encroachments of the Church of Rome; and on more than one occasion successfully resisted the tyranny of trade unions. To defeat the latter she herself learned and taught other women the art typographic, and became independent. It is a notable fact that she was driven into this contention, also, by her own troubles with union printers. She seems to have been generally a conscript, not often a volunteer to fight, but the result always was to advance the interests of oppressed classes more than her own interests. It was to establish a precedent in behalf of other female correspondents that she applied for and secured a seat in the reporter’s gallery in the Capitol, Washington, being the first woman who ever sat there. She was then (1850), as for many years before and after, a correspondent of the New York Tribune.
In 1847, after twenty years of vain efforts to “live up to the lights” of her mother-in-law, Mrs. Swisshelm and her husband parted, she taking their only child and going to Minnesota to live with her sister.
Her Minnesota experience was almost tragic. Before reaching there she was informed that Governor Lowrie allowed no abolition sentiments in St. Cloud. “Then there is not room there for General Lowrie and me,” stoutly replied the little crusader. General Lowrie was the territorial governor under Buchanan’s administration; he was a Mississippian who kept slaves in Minnesota, and ruled the territory with so high a hand that he was called dictator. When Mrs. Swisshelm started the St. Cloud Visiter she invited the governor, among others, to subscribe, and received from him a letter promising it “a support second to that of no paper in the territory, if it will support Buchanan’s administration.” To the confusion of her friends, Mrs. Swisshelm accepted the terms, and frankly announced in the paper that General Lowrie owned everybody in Minnesota, and so she had sold herself and the paper to him and would support Buchanan’s administration—its object being, as she understood it, the subversion of all freedom in the United States, and the placing of a master over every northern “mud-sill” as over the Southern blacks; that Governor Lowrie had promised to support the paper in great power and glory for this, and she was determined to earn her money. It was simply the unconventional, blunt truth-telling of a child applied to a lying system of politics, and it cut like a knife.