| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Sylvia D. Hoffert. Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815–1884. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. 255. $39.95.
More than fifteen years ago I had a bracing lunch with the redoubtable Gerda Lerner. I told her I wanted to write a legal history of marriage, with an emphasis on separation and its consequences. She told me to read Jane Grey Swisshelm's memoir, Half a Century (1880). Ever obedient, I did. And it made all the difference.	1
Swisshelm is not part of the conventional pantheon of woman's rights heroines of the mid-nineteenth-century United States, although she was their contemporary. Elizabeth Cady Stanton described her as a "genius." One imagines Stanton was pointing to the peculiarities of Swisshelm's disposition (in nineteenth-century usage): to her singularity. She was not, shall we say, a team player. Still, she was an early newspaper editor, first in Pittsburgh and later in Minnesota, a writer on innumerable topics connected to questions of woman's rights, a woman who led a distinctively independent existence as a married woman, a life lived right at the edge of respectability and nonconformity. In Half a Century, she also left an extraordinary record of marital struggle and conflict. Reading it taught me much about how an unhappy marriage was actually experienced and litigated in nineteenth-century America. And her story of a more than twenty-year-long marriage lived for the most part in degrees of separation, a marriage that ended with her husband's prosecution of a divorce for her "desertion," confirmed me in my intentions for my own book.	. . .

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