Half a century

At the beginning of her autobiography, Jane Swisshelm announces that she intends to show the relationship of faith to the antislavery struggle, to record incidents characteristic of slavery, to provide an inside look at hospitals during the Civil War, to look at the conditions giving rise to the nineteenth-century struggle for women's rights, and to demonstrate, through her own life, the "mutability of human character." After her father's death in 1823, she helped support her family through hard work and teaching school. Her marriage in 1836 to James Swisshelm, a Methodist farmer's son,…