Abstract
As 1885 dawned, 20-year-old Elizabeth Jane Cochrane was at the end of her rope. For the past four years, she had been living with her family in Allegheny City near Pittsburgh, miles from her hometown of Apollo, Pa. She desperately wanted to find a job but it seemed nearly impossible in the city. As she watched her two older brothers, Albert and Charles, find respectable careers in the area, her only hope of making money was housecleaning, babysitting, and tutoring the occasional boarder at their modest row house. Biographer Brooke Kroeger noted, "Her sense of the injustice awaiting any woman who needed a good job and tried to get one in fast-industrializing Pittsburgh no doubt grew with every disappointment."
One morning while reading The Pittsburg Dispatch, Cochrane became livid. Erasmus Wilson, who penned the "Quiet Observer" column, had written a spicy series called the "Women's Sphere" in which he derided the notion of women entering the workforce. He claimed women should stay put in their sphere, or in other words, their home.
Cochrane sat down and fired off an acrimonious letter to George Madden, editor of The Dispatch. Not mincing words, she described how difficult it was for young, single women to find work, let alone make a living. Cochrane shared her own frustrations about her futile job search. She finished the letter and anonymously signed it, "Lonely Orphan Girl."
Cochrane's enthusiasm and passion for social justice, expressed in this letter and later in her writing as a journalist, gave a voice to young women's experiences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and would lead to changes in the perceptions of women's roles in the field of journalism and in broader society.