Scrapbooks kept by Elizabeth Wilkinson Wade -- better known as Bessie Bramble -- are in the collection of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania. Click photo for larger image. Related coverage Sampler of Bessie Bramble's writing

Bessie Bramble had sharpened her pen and was poised to strike.

"If it be indeed true, as the spiritualists claim, that the dead and gone are cognizant of all that happens here on earth, then we are sorry for Haydn."

So began her February 1880 review of the Gounod Club's performance of "Creation."

"It was spiritless, colorless, tame! Lacking force, fire and finish, it fell dead, and dull, and cold," she wrote.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, Bessie Bramble was the nom de plume of a force to be reckoned with in Pittsburgh. She began by writing music reviews for the Pittsburgh Leader, but soon her unwavering gaze and sardonic wit were being leveled on any number of local and national irritants: working women's wages, brutal husbands, dimwitted school directors, upper-crust social clubs and a clergy that propped up the patriarchy. As a columnist armed with both a sense of humor and a sense of social justice, Bessie took no prisoners.

But who was she?

English-born, she was "a thorough Pittsburgher, having resided in the city since she was but a few years old," wrote Adelaide Nevin in her 1888 book, "The Social Mirror." The city's welfare "is a matter that lies very near her heart and for which she battles untiringly with her caustic pen."

As a music critic, she made "penetrating stabs at careless or inefficient musicians [that] went to the spot with telling effect, and the whole town was stirred to its very depths. Conjecture ran rife as to whom the author of the articles could be. As with all bright, anonymous writings they had plenty of claimants, but it was not for some years that their rightful author threw aside the veil and revealed herself."

Bessie Bramble was a banker's wife, Mrs. Charles Isaac Wade, with two children and a listing in Pittsburgh's Blue Book. She could have lived a quiet, comfortable, dependent life, but it would not have been a happy one. Elizabeth Wilkinson Wade was a working woman, a schoolteacher and principal with a prolific journalism career on the side. In addition to her work for the Leader, she also wrote for the Dispatch and the Chronicle. She took a leadership role in her active social life, too, as founder of the Women's Club of Pittsburgh and co-founder of the Women's Press Club. She was a pioneering American feminist and suffragist, one who worked on the smaller stage of her adopted city.

And she seems to have done it all without alienating the old-boy network: In 1892, she became the first female member of the Pittsburgh Press Club.

Elizabeth Wade stands at right in this undated photograph. She was Pittsburgh's first salaried newswoman. Other women identified on the reverse are Miss McKay, Miss Frazier, Miss Ellwood and Miss Messer; nothing else is known about the image. Click photo for larger image.

Charting Bessie's course

Four scrapbooks that she kept have preserved many of her columns and other news clippings, providing insight into her thinking on political, social and cultural issues of the day. Her granddaughter, Elizabeth Wade Yewell, donated them in 1977 to the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.

In 1883, Bessie Bramble reported that men were seeking to reform divorce laws that had been liberalized to allow women to divorce men, because too many women were applying for divorces.

"No happy wife, whose husband treats her as he ought, ever applies for a divorce," she wrote. "Reform men, and the question is solved."

She also lambasted the church for teaching "that a woman must be subject to her husband in everything, and that nothing can justify her in applying for a divorce." She concludes "the pulpit lost its power by advocating and defending slavery before the war. And [undoubtedly] will follow its usual policy and insist upon the subjection of women until forced to move on by the spirit of the age. The church as a body always has to be hauled up to reform. It never leads."

On men as school principals, in 1883: "Our thick-headed school directors will take a young man so green the cows would eat him, and give him the highest position in a school, where he may or may not prove a success, usually not."

Yet her own experience with a male principal seems to have been a positive one. At the Pike Street School she was assistant principal under a kindred spirit, the dynamic reformer and labor activist Andrew Burtt, and when it closed in the 1870s, the two of them moved to the new Ralston Industrial School for boys at the corner of Penn Avenue and 15th Street in the Fifth Ward, today's Strip. After Burtt's death in the early 1880s, Wade became principal.

The Fifth Ward was familiar territory to Wade; her family lived there in 1850. Her father was a chair-maker with a shop on Spring Way, where the family also may have lived.

Bessie Bramble is born

Details about her early life and education, even her birth date, are sketchy, but the 1900 census reports she was born in May 1838. Immigration records show Elizabeth Wilkinson arrived in New York from Liverpool on the ship Gov. Troup on Aug. 3, 1840, with her mother, Jane Wailes Wilkinson; uncle, two sisters and brother. A scrapbook clipping indicates the family came from the village of Winlaton on the rural outskirts of Newcastle-on-Tyne in Northumberland. In America, they settled in a dense industrial neighborhood of mills, factories and narrow rowhouses.

Elizabeth Wilkinson and Charles Wade met in the church choir; he was the organist. They married in 1864; two years later their son Charles was born, followed by daughter Elizabeth in 1871.

The Wades, who lived on Webster Avenue in the Hill in 1880, moved to their newly built house on Swissvale Avenue in Edgewood, on a knoll above the Pennsylvania Railroad Station, in 1885.

By 1875, Bessie Bramble's identity was known at least to some; it appears offhandedly in a short newspaper story about a literary tea given in honor of Pittsburgh's first newswoman, Jane Grey Swisshelm, at the home of Helen Jenkins at 57 Arch St., Allegheny, now the North Side. It was later acknowledged as the first meeting of the Women's Club of Pittsburgh.

Wade's identity was discussed in a short profile of her that ran in the Leader on Nov. 7, 1886: "it is only of late years that the great reading public has discovered the woman who has done so much to interest, amuse and instruct them."

Wade's biting observations on education in Pittsburgh, a frequent topic, would have been impossible without the cover of a pen name, which she seems to have arrived at by combining her daughter Elizabeth's nickname with the name of a prickly shrub.

It is thought that only after Wade stopped teaching did she reveal her identity, in a column that ran Nov. 7, 1886. The Wades, who lived on Webster Avenue in the Hill in 1880, had moved to their big, newly built house on Swissvale Avenue in Edgewood the year before.

Bessie Wade graduated first in her high school class in 1888, but soon was stricken with one of Pittsburgh's most common and dreaded diseases, tuberculosis. In January 1889, Bessie Bramble wrote her first column from Aiken, S.C., where she had taken her daughter for relief from the oppressive Pittsburgh air.

"Whether all the stories of the marvelous powers of Aiken in the arrest and cure of lung diseases are true, we are yet inclined to doubt, but certainly there must be something in it," she wrote. "We left Pittsburg on a dark morning, 'mid dripping rain ... but here we have come into a new world" where spinach and carrots grow in January: "What a wonderful country is the Sunny South."

But a week later she was assailing the marriage laws in South Carolina, where married women couldn't petition for divorce, own property or claim their own earnings.

By June, Bessie Wade was in New York under the care of a Brooklyn doctor, and Bessie Bramble was praising the borough for planting street trees in front of vacant lots to attract developers and homeowners. This is the only column in the scrapbooks written from New York. Six weeks later, on July 20, 1889, Bessie Wade died.

Within a few months Bessie Bramble was writing again, praising in September the newly invented dishwashing machine: "Nothing will add more comfort to the housekeeper's lot."

Her scrapbook clippings span 17 years, from 1876 to 1892. In the 1900 census, Charles and Elizabeth are in Los Angeles, near their son; she died in California 10 years later.

Bringing Bessie back

More than a century on, Elizabeth Wade has sunk back into the anonymity she sought with her pseudonym.

But not entirely.

There she is in the 2004 book "Spider Dance," one of Carole Nelson Douglas' Irene Adler mysteries, told from the point of view of another crusading Pittsburgh journalist, Nellie Bly, who by then had moved to the New York World. Bly wants to "drive Bessie Bramble and Nell Nelson and all my rival sisters of the press from the front pages of this teeming city and the entire eastern seaboard."

Douglas, who lives in Fort Worth, said she discovered Bessie Bramble while researching Bly, the non de plume of Armstrong County native Elizabeth Cochran. Bessie also merits a mention in Douglas' 2003 book, "Castle Rouge."

"Even Bessie Bramble, the one woman columnist on the newspaper, uses a pseudonym," Bly says.

"I have never found anonymous indignation very satisfying," Adler responds.

For Elizabeth Wilkinson Wade, it seems to have worked out well enough.