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The New Moral World

IN 1831 THE intrepid twenty-one-year-old Ernestine Potowska sailed alone to England to continue “her studies on men and laws.”¹ As she traveled westward, she not only stayed in increasingly larger cities, from Berlin to Paris to London, but she also experienced increasingly liberal societies. Political life in Eastern and Central Europe remained frozen under absolute regimes, which outlawed political organizing and labor unions, censored speech and the press, and used their armies to crush uprisings and block change throughout the continent. France repelled a renewal of absolute monarchy while she was there, but England had limited its monarchy for over a century. By the time Potowska arrived, British ultraconservatism of the 1820s had thawed. Parliament had legalized trade unions, lowered taxes on newspapers and journals, and “emancipated” Roman Catholics so that they could vote and run for office. All English Jews were citizens, unlike in the rest of Europe except for France. Allowing more men voting rights became the dominant political issue of the day. The possibility of reform, both conceiving of progressive change and making it a reality, was in the air. In London especially, a wide variety of reformers—radical aristocrats, Quaker philanthropists, socialist artisans, working-class democrats, and Unitarian ministers as well as utilitarian philosphers who advocated “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”—explored how to improve society.

Potowska’s entry to England would have been easy, since the nation did not require passports then and welcomed political refugees from all over Europe. In moving to London, she became part of a city of immigrants—more than one-third of its inhabitants had not been born there. Irish, German, Italian, French, and Jewish groups created their own neighborhood communities. On her arrival, Potowska joined about 500 other Poles fleeing Russian repression as well as a small but steady stream of Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe seeking a better life among London’s 20,000 Jews. But whether she contacted her fellow immigrants or lived among them remains unknown.²

With more than 1,655,000 inhabitants, London was by far the largest city in the Western world, over twice as populous as Paris, more than five times larger than Berlin. “What an enormous city London is!” Potowska’s contemporary, the French feminist Flora Tristan, wrote when she visited there, cataloging “the ships of every size and denomination, too numerous to count, which fill every inch of the river, … the docks, the huge wharves and warehouses, … the monumental chimneys belching their black smoke to the heavens.” Great Britain pioneered the Industrial Revolution and led the world in shipping goods, many of them produced in its new factories. Contemporaries acknowledged it as the most advanced commercial nation on the planet. “London is the real capital of the world,” a German visitor proclaimed in 1835, “not Paris… . Paris is more pre-eminently the Town, Germany the Country, but London alone is entitled to talk of being the World… . [T]‌he quantity, which surpasses that of all other cities in Europe, or indeed in the world, is itself in the highest degree remarkable and imposing.”³

This new economic system increased wealth for a few manufacturers and impoverished many who toiled in their establishments. Ernestine Rose and others continually emphasized London’s extreme contrasts between rich and poor. “What can I say on this subject … so teeming with glory and degradation, splendor and wretchedness, the highest cultivation and refinement, and the almost barbarian ignorance and rudeness, the immense wealth with all its pride, and the lowest depth of poverty with all its abjectness?” she wrote when she returned in 1856. Shortly after she first arrived in the city twenty-five years earlier, a London correspondent to a US newspaper highlighted these same disparities. A visitor “will see here in England … a long street of magnificent palaces … coaches-and-four graced with coronets and golden and crimson liveries rolling in lordly state along its centre … and the way side crowded with beggars so thick and so importunate, that the pedestrian at times can scarcely tread his way through the heart-sickening maze.”⁴ When she came to live in London and needed to earn a living, Potowska herself experienced these extremes of wealth and poverty firsthand.

Unable to speak English on her arrival, she carried a dictionary with her. She visited a series of pharmacies to persuade their managers to sell her perfumed room deodorizers on consignment. Although she later became eloquent in English and spoke the language for the rest of her life, she never lost her accent. “I am a foreigner,” she declared to an 1869 convention in New York City when she had lived there for over thirty years; “I had great difficulty in acquiring the English language, and I shall never acquire it.” Still, at twenty-one in London, Potowska parlayed her linguistic skills to supplement her income. She rapidly mastered enough English to be able to give lessons in German and Hebrew. These, plus her sales of perfumed paper, allowed her to live modestly—“from hand to mouth,” as she later put it.⁵ She and others deplored the weather in London, especially when comparing it to Paris or Berlin. “The thick fog which generally prevails is thoroughly impregnated with water and this, blended with the air, is chilling and penetrating to a degree, of which we, in Berlin, have no idea,” a German visitor complained in 1835. Increasing use of coal in this period intensified London’s “pea-soup” fogs, further dirtying its buildings and darkening its air. Ernestine Potowska never detailed her work experiences there, but this account by another female immigrant twenty years later might have captured some of her daily life:

What it means, especially when it’s rainy and foggy, when you can hardly see a step ahead, and you are always surrounded by a thick, yellowish, damp, fetid atmosphere, through which the sun shines like a paper lantern … where it is often so dark inside at mid-day that you have to light lamps in order to work—what it means on such a day to go from one lesson to another, from warm rooms into the damp cold, to wait on street corners for the omnibuses, to be packed in wet and dripping with other wet and dripping creatures, and often to be satisfied with only a meager lunch hastily taken in a bakery between two lessons until late afternoon—you can only know this if you have gone through it yourself.⁶

Potowska’s language pupils included four daughters of the aristocratic Grosvenor family. Richard, Earl Grosvenor, later the second Marquess of Westminster, and his wife, a duke’s daughter, possessed tremendous wealth and belonged to the highest echelons of British nobility. Grosvenor, a liberal member of Parliament during these years, and his wife had eleven children when Potowska went to work for them. How she came to be employed by this family remains unknown, but she would have taught the Ladies Evelyn, Elizabeth, Mary, and Eleanor, who ranged in age from six to twelve in 1832. The family planned to tour Germany and Italy a few years later, which might explain the German lessons. Lord Grosvenor was very religious and may have wanted his daughters to learn Hebrew so they could read the Hebrew Bible in its original language.⁷

Potowska’s instruction took place in Grosvenor House, one of London’s grandest mansions, located in the exclusive Mayfair district near Hyde Park. The contrast between this palatial home and her own “modest existence” could hardly have been greater. Architects and craftsmen renovated Grosvenor House during her time there, adding a new east wing, an extensive carriage drive, and expanded private stables. A newly enlarged picture gallery displayed four Rubens paintings; other old masters hung throughout the building, which also featured a large, ceremonial central staircase and cut-glass gas chandeliers. Despite his wealth, Lord Grosvenor was a liberal interested in reform. Ernestine Potowska may have made her other contacts with London reformers through her connection with this family.⁸

She later told an interviewer that at this time she “became acquainted … with many prominent members of the Society of Friends, among them Joseph Gurney and his sister Elizabeth Fry.” By then, a number of English Quaker families had become socially accepted and immensely wealthy: The Gurneys dominated banking. Both brother and sister became ministers and embraced philanthropy and improving society. Joseph Gurney supported early childhood education, opened soup kitchens for the poor, and backed his sister’s efforts to improve prison life. He participated in political reform circles, concentrating on the abolition of slavery, both in the British Empire (slavery no longer existed in England) and the United States. An extremely religious man, he opposed women’s rights because of New Testament pronouncements that women should be subordinated to men. “I do not approve of ladies speaking in public,” he declared in 1839, “even in the anti-slavery cause, except under the immediate influence of the Holy Spirit. Then and then only, all is safe.”⁹

Elizabeth Fry had to battle such strictures to work outside her home to improve society. “It is only within a short time that the prejudice against women appearing alone in public has begun to pass away,” a Dutch feminist wrote almost fifty years later. “How was this change brought about? By women simply doing, while strictly adhering to propriety and decorum, what society had been pleased to call improper.” Fry focused on Newgate, the women’s prison in London. Before her efforts there, visitors came to gawk at cells crowded with filthy, half-naked, drunken women cursing and begging for pennies. Fry reformed their situation, bringing in clothing, cleaning supplies, food, and water. She organized a prison school, teaching inmates to read, knit, and sew. The goods they made in their new workshop were sold at a prison store; the women received the profits. Treating the prisoners as fellow Christians, Fry mandated twice-daily Bible readings and allowed no gambling, card-playing, quarreling, or “immoral conversations.”¹⁰

Fry’s efforts succeeded and inspired others to reform society. “Having heard from various quarters what highly beneficial effects had been produced by Mrs. Fry,” the industrialist Robert Owen came to see for himself in 1817:

In passing from room to room we were met in every instance (there was not one exception) with kind looks and the most evident feelings of affection in every prisoner towards Mrs. Fry… . She spoke in manner and voice the language of confidence, kindness, and commiseration to each; and she was replied to in such accordant feelings as are, and ever will be, produced in human beings, whenever they shall be spoken to and treated thus rationally.¹¹

Ernestine Potowska visited Newgate with Elizabeth Fry. The older woman’s determination to make her own way against social opposition, her passion to improve existing conditions, and her ability to bring about positive change may have inspired Potowska to work for reform herself. But she was repelled by Fry’s religiosity. Visiting a Prison Reform Society in New York a few years later, she rejected the group’s Bible readings and prayers. Let those who want to “pray and read at home,” she later declared, “but the moment we cross the threshold … to do something for the relief of the poor convict, from that moment the time is not ours, even to pray, but to work.” Instead of taking the ardently Christian Elizabeth Fry as her model, Potowska instead “warmly espoused” the principles of Robert Owen, “which she has faithfully advocated ever since.”¹²

By the time Ernestine Potowska met Robert Owen in 1832, he was one of the most famous men in the Western world. His early life constituted a great success story of the Industrial Revolution. Born into a lower-middle-class Welsh family in 1771, he went to work full-time in a clothing store when he was ten years old. By twenty, he successfully managed a spinning mill employing 500 people. At twenty-nine, in 1800, he became head of the largest textile plant in Great Britain, supervising 2,000 workers at the isolated factory town of New Lanark, Scotland.

New Lanark’s brutality, typical of British manufacturing establishments then, appalled Owen. His poorly paid labor force included almost 500 pauper apprentices, sent out for employment from age five. Both children and adults worked fourteen-hour days tending fast-moving, repetitive machinery in unhealthy conditions. Foremen routinely beat, whipped, cursed, and fired workers—more could always be found to replace them. Living in squalid houses, having no sanitation or schools, forced to shop at expensive company stores, adult workers retaliated by being “idle, intemperate, dishonest,” Owen later wrote. His solution to these problems was both unique and amazingly effective. Reversing his era’s truism that poverty resulted from workers’ bad behavior, Owen decided that preventing poverty would transform the way workers acted: “I had to change these evil conditions for good ones.”¹³

To this end, Owen immediately stopped bringing impoverished orphans to New Lanark and refused to employ any child under ten. He built decent houses to attract new families to the town, upgraded the village shops so they sold quality items at low prices, and made liquor difficult to buy. He erected new mills, replaced old machinery, and continued paying wages during a long trade stoppage in 1806. He introduced an individual monitoring system, which he personally supervised, to replace threats, beatings, and firings. Winning over his labor force, he reaped soaring profits. Thousands visited New Lanark to observe Owen’s spectacular success. This factory is “conducted in a manner superior to any other … ever witnessed, dispensing more happiness than perhaps any other institution in the kingdom where so many poor persons are employed,” the Leeds Guardians of the Poor reported in 1819. “They appear like one regulated family, united by ties of the strongest affection.” When Ernestine Rose later paid tribute to Robert Owen, she focused on the importance and effectiveness of his benevolence. He worked “to infuse the benign spirit of charity and kindness into every heart,” she declared at a celebration of his eighty-third birthday in 1853, “to teach mankind that the law of kindness is the most effective law in the well training of man; that if we want to have man rational, consistent, virtuous, and happy, we must remove the causes that have a tendency to make him irrational, inconsistent, vicious, and consequently miserable.”¹⁴

Owen concentrated on the children, believing that by providing them with an improved environment, he could reshape their lives for the better. He opened new schools for all village children a year or older and replaced the then popular model of strict discipline and rote learning with humane treatment, innovative teaching methods, and group activities. “The first instruction which I gave” the new teachers, he wrote later, “was that they were on no account ever to beat any one of the children, or to threaten them in any manner of word or action, or to use abusive terms; but were always to speak to them with a pleasant countenance and in a kind manner and tone of voice.” Paintings, maps, and local produce sparked class discussions; singing, dancing, and gymnastics enlivened the day. Owen virtually invented modern early childhood education, with impressively positive results; observers marveled at his schools’ success. “I visited our infant-school almost daily for years; and I have never, either before or since, seen such a collection of bright, clean, good-tempered, happy little faces,” wrote his son, Robert Dale Owen, who did not hesitate to criticize other aspects of his father’s life. Potowska came to share Owen’s conviction about the importance of education: one of the first meetings she attended in New York City concerned improving public schools.¹⁵

In 1815, Owen attempted to reform the nation the way he had New Lanark. He campaigned for labor laws preventing children under ten from working in factories and limiting the workday for those under eighteen to ten and a half hours. He met with universal opposition. His parliamentary bill received no votes at all and Owen concluded that “in this and all other cases between the tyranny of the masters and the sufferings of their white slaves, the error is in reality in the system of society, which created the necessity for tyrants and slaves, neither of which could exist in a true and rational state of society.” This experience radicalized him. For the rest of his long life, Owen maintained, as Rose later declared, that “the character of man was made for him and not by him.” To this end, he attempted to restructure society by reproducing the community he created at New Lanark. People should live in groups of about 1,500, manufacturing and farming in common, under the supervision of qualified leaders like himself. He believed that the success of these communes would inspire others to copy them and eventually they would expand throughout the world.¹⁶

Owenite communes then began to form in both Britain and the United States. Later, Ernestine and William Rose flirted twice with living in one of these experimental communities but decided against it each time. Meanwhile, Robert Owen toured the United States from 1824 to 1829, intermittently overseeing the villages founded on his principles, none of which lasted long. On July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence, he issued his own provocative Declaration of Mental Independence. He proclaimed man to be “a slave to a TRINITY of the most monstrous evils,” defined as private property, religion, and contemporary marriages, founded on property and religion.¹⁷

Robert Owen’s conviction that character was formed “for him” by society directly opposed his culture’s Christian belief in “original sin,” which held that people were innately evil, were individually responsible for their own bad behavior, and should be punished accordingly. He came to believe that all religions contained “gross errors” that have made man “a weak, imbecile animal; a furious bigot and fanatic; or a miserable hypocrite.” “I am not of your religion,” he concluded, “nor of any religion yet taught in the world! To me they all appear united with much—yes, with very much error!”¹⁸ When Potowska met Owen a few years later, this rejection of religion provided an important bond between them. Although he became a deist and sought to create a “rational religion,” while she remained a committed atheist, she admired his rejection of “the fashionable superstition called religion” throughout her life.

Owen’s rejection of private property came from his conviction that individual ownership led to pernicious extremes of wealth and poverty. He believed that workers should prevent “the products of their toil from going out of the circle of the productive classes into that of the unproductive classes.” His rejection of marriage as it then existed followed from the rigid policies of the state-supported Church of England. Until 1837, marriages of all Christians, from Catholics to non-Anglican Protestants, had to be performed in the Church of England to be legal. Divorce was virtually nonexistent, as each one took a separate and expensive Act of Parliament. Owen opposed these “marriages of the priesthood” for leading to both domestic misery and prostitution. Instead, he advocated “marriages of nature,” which would be based on attraction and could be ended if both parties agreed and provided for their children.¹⁹

These beliefs shocked and outraged most of Owen’s contemporaries. Lucretia and James Mott were nearly expelled from their Philadelphia Quaker meeting just for supporting the right to listen to the “Infidel Owenites”; others called Owen’s followers “whoremongers,” immoral libertines, and free lovers. Owen’s lifelong fidelity to his wife and benevolent personality largely protected him from such criticism. Hearing him speak in America, the writer Frances Trollope recalled that his “gentle tone … his kind smile—the mild expression of his eyes—in short, his whole manner, disarmed zeal, and produced a degree of tolerance that those who did not hear would hardly believe possible.” Ernestine Rose consistently praised his vision. “We have been told that Robert Owen was a dreamer—and what glorious dreams he dreamt!” she proclaimed at his centenary celebration in 1871.

It has been said that he was a fanatic! Who ever did anything good without being a fanatic? That he was an enthusiast! Who ever accomplished anything great without enthusiasm? It is said that he did not succeed. But where he did not succeed in the past, he will in the future. He shook the foundation of the old system, and left it to time to do the rest.²⁰

Before she met Owen, he had become the leader of an important new working-class movement. Reform of the House of Commons—transferring unpopulated voting districts controlled by a single landowner to new, growing cities, reducing property requirements for voting so that more men became eligible—agitated the nation from the time of Owen’s return from the United States in 1829 onward. As the House of Lords, which had equal power with Commons then, continuously rejected all measures for improvement, riots broke out in many English cities. When “the Great Reform Act” finally passed in 1832, it enfranchised one out of five adult men, hardly any of them from the working class. It also deliberately excluded all women, adding the word “male” to voting qualifications for the first time in English history. In later years, Ernestine Rose often argued that winning the vote was all-important. “The ballot-box is the focus of all other rights, it is the pivot upon which all others hang,” she frequently asserted. Her lifelong dedication to enfranchisement almost certainly stemmed from her experience of these years of tumult in England over the suffrage issue.²¹

Meanwhile, a growing radical working-class movement, which created its own artisanal trade groups and cooperative associations, heralded Robert Owen as its natural leader. “Loud applause” followed his declaration at the second meeting of its Co-operative Congress in 1831 that “We have now before us a plan for improving society … [and] we are now in a position to command it from the hands of Government; and why? Because they do not know how to relieve the community from a state of wretchedness and poverty, and we will show them the means of creating a Paradise.” Members scoffed at others’ disapproval. “I have been called an infidel,” one stated, “but if Co-operation is infidelity, I don’t believe there is such a thing as infidelity in the world.” Co-operators also sought to enlist women to their cause. “I rejoice to see so many females present, for in Co-operation they have everything to gain,” a male delegate proclaimed.²²

Ernestine Potowska met Robert Owen in 1832, at the height of this political activism. Owen was sixty-one, almost forty years older than Potowska, but he still possessed amazing energy. Under his leadership, Owenite groups grew rapidly at this time. The Co-operative Congresses met twice yearly in various English cities with Owen presiding, while more than 200 Owenite unions created bazaars where co-operators could sell articles they made in exchange for “Labour Notes.” Owen’s National Equitable Labour Exchange, established in London in 1832, soon became the largest and best known of these markets. That same year, Owen also began to publish a weekly newspaper, The Crisis, or the Change from Error and Misery, to Truth and Happiness, given the name of the US radical Thomas Paine’s book calling for an American revolution in homage. Costing only a penny and circulating widely, The Crisis provided Owen and the Owenites with a popular forum through which to promulgate their plans for reforming society. In 1833, a national trade union movement coalesced under Owen’s auspices. Within a few months it claimed half a million members and became the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, an umbrella organization of workers.

Meeting Owen during these tumultuous years, Potowska seems to have been immediately attracted to this “celebrated communist,” as one of her interviewers wrote—the words “communist” and “socialist” were often used interchangeably in this period. “It has been my great happiness to know Robert Owen for over twenty-five years,” she declared;

I have known him under difficulties and great trials; under a variety of circumstances which would have tried the patience and perseverance, energy and good feeling, of ninety-nine out of a hundred ordinary men. But he was the same at all times—the great apostle of humanity; the man of one idea, and that idea the happiness of the human race. … He bestowed charity and kindness on all sides. He softened harsh judgments.²³

Many commented that Owen saw the world paternally, often treating other adults like children. This trait appealed to Potowska, who had recently lost the company and approval of her own father. She addressed Robert Owen as “my dear and respected Father” and called herself his “Daughter.” Like Rabbi Potowsky, Owen had absolute faith in his belief system and wanted to pass it on to younger followers. Unlike her father, Owen preached views she could wholeheartedly embrace, from belief in reform to scorn for religion. Owen’s son wrote that his father was “a most affectionate, even indulgent, parent,” but that he wanted “a believer in his specific plans for regenerating the world—or to use his own favorite phrase, his ‘disciple.’ ” Ernestine Potowska “became a disciple of the good philanthropist” and embraced his ideals for the rest of her life. For his part, Owen rapidly welcomed Potowska to his movement. He lost two daughters and his wife during these years, and the young Polish radical may have provided a welcome female presence.²⁴

Potowska and Owen both based their goals and methods on the Enlightenment; both prized reason. Both believed if they presented rational arguments, they would soon convince others. Both assumed that religion would disappear shortly and be replaced with humane values informed by social science. “The old erroneous idea of the depravity of human nature is daily giving way to philosophical inquiries into the nature of the causes that produce depravity, vice, and misery,” Ernestine Rose declared in 1853, “and just in proportion as this truth is perceived, and the corresponding remedies applied, so is moral reform successful.” Both believed that what Owen called “The New Moral World” would soon arrive. “The religion of the New Moral World consists in the unceasing practice of promoting the happiness of every man, woman, and child … without regard to their class, sect, party, or color,” Owen wrote. In this new state of society

there will be no worship—no forms and ceremonies—no temples—no prayers—no gloom—no mortification of the flesh or spirit—no anger on account of religious differences—no persecutions. But friendship, and kindness, and charity for the Jew and Gentile.²⁵

In addition to ratifying Potowska’s previous convictions, Owenism also introduced her to new concepts and experiences. Owen’s Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (GNCTU) championed socialism in its labor exchanges and cooperative groups, presenting an alternative to capitalism. Union members would buy and sell only to each other and refuse to supply the government, army, or police. Owen pledged to “support the Union to the utmost of my power” and argued, as he had about his communes, that “its example will be speedily followed by all nations.”²⁶ But this optimistic vision collapsed abruptly as the British government moved vigorously to quash the GNCTU, exiling six members to harsh Australian prison camps just for taking the oath to join it. Although petitions and marches resulted, the union possessed few funds and it collapsed as swiftly as it had formed. By the end of 1834, the Owenite movement had shrunk dramatically. Owen replaced the GNCTU with a second short-lived group. He closed The Crisis and began publishing The New Moral World, another low-priced weekly. He then created the Association of All Classes of All Nations, with himself as “Social Father” and only a few hundred official members. Present at its founding, Potowska played a prominent role in this small organization, which sought to effect “an entire change in the character and condition of mankind, by establishing … the religion of charity for … all individuals, without distinction of sex, class, sect, party, country, or colour, combined with a … system of united property.” The most expansive part of this successor group was its name. But Potowska cited its doctrines all her life.²⁷

Owenism’s most important contribution to Ernestine Potowska’s development lay in its attempts to do away with the “distinction of sex.” From its inception, the movement encouraged women to join. “It has hitherto … been the object of certain persons to keep females in the back-ground, but such is not the case with the members of our body,” a male Owenite proudly declared at the 1832 Co-operative Congress in London. “Some call women cyphers, but a cypher with the addition of one, as you all know, makes ten—and it would take hundreds of London men to make one good co-operative woman.” Owenites drank a toast to women’s emancipation at each Co-operative Congress and made efforts “to ensure that female voices would be heard.” In 1833, a visiting socialist Frenchman reported seeing many women at all Owenite meetings, adding “I have seldom seen faces so animated as theirs, they felt their equality with men.” Most Owenite branches offered special “female classes” for their women members and charged them only a penny to attend lectures while the men paid three pence. Women “are not recognized as human beings, except in a company of Co-operators,” a male Owenite asserted.²⁸

With some exaggeration, this assertion reflected contemporary reality. Outside of these radical circles, most early Victorians believed men and women to be each others’ opposites. By the 1830s, the relatively new ideal of domesticity for women, who were supposed to limit themselves to their homes, families, and churches, had taken hold. “The ‘rights of women,’ what are they?” went a widely reprinted poem of the era,

The right to labor and to pray;

--------------------------------------------

The path of meekness and of love,

The path of faith that leads above;

The path of patience under wrong,

The path in which the weak grow strong:

Such women’s rights, and GOD will bless,

And crown their champions with success.

This division into “separate spheres” for males and females would be “highly congenial to the feelings and habits of Englishmen,” argued a public letter of 1825, “as conducive to domestic comfort and kindly affections as tending to establish the authority of fathers, and as making each man responsible for the comfort, respectability, and the education of his family.” While some women felt safe and protected within this framework, others were cowed. “Like a bird whose wings have been early clipped … she [woman] has imbibed an indistinct feeling of awe and dread—an inward acknowledgment of man’s superiority,” a female Owenite wrote. This ideal of womanly dependence originated in the middle class but spread rapidly to other groups. Connecting female domesticity to respectability, it presented an appealing way to “Live Happy Together,” as a contemporary English song put it:

Woman was formed to please man

And man to love and protect them,

And shield them from the frowns of the world,

Through the smooth paths of life to direct them.²⁹

In contrast, Owenites sought to attract women to their movement with the goal of liberating them from such debilitating beliefs. When a male speaker at a Co-operative Congress declared that Owenites “claimed for woman full, free, and equal enjoyment of all those privileges which belonged to her as a human being,” a woman agreed wholeheartedly, saying she had found “none to sympathize with her” until “a new sun broke upon her, and that was Robert Owen.” The only solution to women’s oppression, she continued, was “the remedy of Socialism.” Thousands of women joined the GNCTU, which included a woman on its governing board. “Nothing short of a total revolution … will be productive of the great change so loudly called for by her [women’s] miserable state,” a female Owenite wrote to The New Moral World. “Indeed, I am confident that if women really understood the principles and practice of Socialism, there would not be one who would not become a devoted Socialist.” Later, Ernestine Rose asserted that she had “no doubt that he [Owen] would have advocated the Woman’s Rights Bill had he lived.”³⁰

Owenite journals frequently published pieces by women, almost all of which expressed feminist ideas. “In China, they cramp the feet of the ladies, by bandaging them from childhood,” the female “E. N.” wrote in 1832; “in England they do the same, by means of the iron fetters of custom and etiquette.” The following year, The Crisis printed a translation of a French feminist “Call to Women,” which urged them to organize into “one solid union. Let us no longer form two camps—that of the women of the people and that of the women of the privileged class. Let our common interest unite us to obtain this great end” defined as “liberty and equality … the free and equal chance of developing all our faculties.”³¹

Ernestine Potowska almost certainly read both The Crisis and The New Moral World, which helped develop her feminist perspective. Several articles seem to have influenced her later behavior. In 1833, a female writer asserted that “women have been too long considered as playthings or as slaves” and denounced the “mock chivalry” which held that “no man could ever contradict a lady.” Four years later, Potowska, by then Ernestine Rose, met the identical situation in New York, where a man who publicly opposed her said he had been taught “never to fight with a lady.” She faced him “with a look that seemed to pierce the soul and to say in terms stronger than language can use, ‘While I pity your degeneration and ignorance, I am not intimidated by your brutality,’ ” a sympathetic observer reported. An 1835 piece extolling Elizabeth Fry’s work may have encouraged Potowska to visit Newgate prison. This same article went on to argue that women should become members of Parliament, an argument Rose later transposed to the US Congress:

If nature has endowed her with eloquence, and study possessed her with knowledge to serve the cause of her country, should she be declared incompetent because she were wrapped in a silken shawl instead of a senator’s robe? Because she spoke with a voice of silver instead of brass?

Another article maintained, “While human society is compounded of the two sexes, so also should be human legislation,” a proposition Rose often asserted in later decades. On a more personal level, this same feminist writer questioned why “grey hairs bring no honour to women? I may say, why do they bring dishonour? For an old woman is the ne plus ultra of contempt?” She answered her own question: “Because women are taught to think the carriage of the head of more consequence than its contents.” This might have contributed to Ernestine Rose never dyeing her own hair, which won a French feminist’s admiration in 1856.³²

Owenism did not just provide Potowska with feminist readings; it also introduced her to the radical feminist practice of women speaking in public. A number of women lectured regularly to Owenite audiences. “She felt it her duty to address and excite her own sex,” The Crisis wrote about the Irish feminist Anna Wheeler; “she said that … female exertion was now wanting. She enlarged very eloquently on this subject and met with great approbation.” Outside of Owenite circles, however, female lecturing received almost universal condemnation throughout the Western world. An English newspaper denigrated a female Owenite orator as “a weak and misguided woman who degrades the very name and form of woman.” Female speakers were routinely stigmatized as “witches,” “she-devils,” and “whores,” and a standard tactic of the opposition in both Great Britain and the United States was for men to shout out Bible verses mandating women’s silence during female lectures. American anti-slavery women’s speeches in these years provoked a torrent of abuse. New England ministers issued a public letter declaring that such actions would cause women to “not only cease to bear fruit, but to fall in shame and dishonor into the dust,” while the prestigious American Quarterly Review thanked Heaven it knew of no woman who would “get up at a public meeting and make a … speech.”³³

In contrast, Owenism encouraged women to lecture and Ernestine Potowska gave her first public talks in this friendly milieu. “In the old days, when Robert Owen was filling all England with his socialist ideas,” a friend of hers wrote later,

a young and remarkably beautiful girl, just from Poland, was introduced to him. Discovering that she was a precocious Radical, and possessed of considerable ability, he invited her to speak in his huge hall, on an occasion when several thousands of people had gathered there. Notwithstanding her slight knowledge of the English language, the good looks and enthusiasm of the girl made a good impression on the audience. She was thenceforth encouraged to appear in public again.

Ernestine Potowska began to take “part in the weekly meetings” on Sundays where Owen “discussed his doctrine.” She helped organize these gatherings of “1500 to 1800 people” where they could listen to speeches about Owenite principles. Potowska often spoke at these events, championing Owen’s doctrine and debating “many times with Protestant ministers.” She also confided to an interviewer that she lectured only after she “had washed and put away with her own hands all the dishes used to make and serve tea” at these meetings. Even within Co-operation, women remained responsible for housework. But the movement still treated them more equally than anywhere else in England.³⁴

Owenism gave Potowska a social life. Sunday gatherings provided a pleasant alternative to either going to church or drinking in a pub. Members not only met and had tea, they also usually held a dance party. Dancing—which Potowska enjoyed all her life—also occurred on some nights during the week and at the Co-operative Congresses. “At the conclusion of the lecture the company formed themselves into groups for dancing,” went one report, “in the long corridor, ‘the gay Quadrille’ was performed, while in the saloon the waltz was the prevailing dance … and during the evening several songs were sung to musical accompaniments.” The Owenites also offered numerous evening classes, providing basic instruction in many subjects. They opened bookstores, cooperative groceries, and Halls of Science. In addition, the group developed secular alternatives for holidays, weddings, and funerals. Part of their goal was to create fellowship as well as to provide education and entertainment.³⁵

At some point during these years, Ernestine Potowska met William Rose, a fellow Owenite. He was born in England in 1813, making him three years younger than she was, but hardly any documentation about his life exists. In this period, British censuses only recorded the numbers of people born, not where they came from nor who their parents were. He had the unusual middle name of “Ella,” but there is no information about its origin. He was not Jewish; although “Rose” became a relatively common Jewish name in twentieth-century England, in the nineteenth century it denoted a Christian. Like Potowska, he was a freethinker and did not believe in God. They both enjoyed singing as well as dancing and sang solos at events. William had probably apprenticed as a silversmith; he later made an elaborate silver pitcher for Robert Owen’s son and worked all his adult life as a jeweler. He did not receive much schooling. His only surviving letter is poorly written, with weak grammar and phonetic spelling: “wat” for “what,” “effectsionately” for “affectionately.” But he adored “My Dear Ernestine,” as he called her twice in this brief note to Owen. He consistently supported all her endeavors, both emotionally and financially. For her part, Ernestine Rose hardly ever referred to her personal life, but she did tell an interviewer that she had “a husband whom she loves tenderly and is tenderly loved by.” In her only public mention of her marriage, made at an 1858 convention, she declared that “my husband is a law-unto-himself” in being happy to have her do as she wished. She quickly added that his individuality did not mean there should be no laws limiting other husbands’ behavior.³⁶

The couple married in 1836. They probably knew that when Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, married Mary Robinson a few years earlier, he had publicly repudiated “the unjust rights, which, in virtue of this ceremony, an iniquitous law tacitly gives me over the person of another.” But Dale Owen had married in New York City, where civil ceremonies existed. Since that was not a possibility in London, the freethinking couple chose a different method. They hired a notary public who came to Ernestine’s rented room and witnessed a statement attesting to their mutual vows. Although this document did not strictly have the force of law, it did register their union.³⁷

Shortly thereafter, the Roses decided to emigrate to the United States with an Owenite colony of thirty-six people. Although none of these communes survived for more than a few years, they continued to be founded into the 1840s. Owen’s journals published enthusiastic support for these outposts. “We’re like a hive of busy bees,” went a verse invoking a common image for the co-operators:

Who want an opportunity

To place ourselves and all mankind

In a bless’d community.

Before we heard of Owen’s plan

Of serving one another

We tried to outwit everyone

And all kind feelings smother.³⁸

Ernestine Rose “was full of faith in the ideas of Robert Owen” and “resolved to act on them” by joining this new US commune. Both Owen himself and many Owenites traveled frequently back and forth across the ocean in these years, helping to create a transatlantic radical community. These connections made leaving England for the United States relatively easy. Co-operative journals on both sides of the Atlantic championed the United States of America as a better place to build a new society. “Land of the West! we fly to thee,” went a song published in a US Owenite newspaper:

Sick of the old world’s sophistry;

Haste then along the dark blue sea,

Ebor Nova [New York]

Home of the brave, soil of the free!

Huzza! she rises o’er the sea —

Ebor Nova.

Later, in New York, Ernestine Rose explained that “I chose to make this country my home, in preference to any other, because if you carried out the theories you profess, it would indeed be the noblest country on earth.” Referring to other Poles like Kosciusko, who fought for the American Revolution, she added that just as “my countrymen so nobly aided in the physical struggle for Freedom and Independence, I felt, and still feel it equally my duty to use my humble abilities to the utmost in my power, to aid in the great moral struggle for human rights and human freedom.”³⁹

The exact settlement the Roses planned to be part of cannot be identified. During the spring of 1836, a few months before they left England, The New Moral World published excerpts from a guide on Practical Emigration to the United States. This treatise strongly recommended that “foreigners” not waste their capital wandering “about from state to state in search of lands, suitable to their idea of settlement,” but instead dwell “prosperously and happily within the precincts of civilized life, where alone, from previous habits, customs, religion, and associations, they were fitted to reside.” A few weeks later, the journal wrote, “We have great hope that the detachment of Sisters and Brothers who have emigrated to America, to put our principles into practice, will be attended with great and good results, and prove the utility of our Association.” However, during the weeks spent crossing the Atlantic, Ernestine Rose realized that “every kind of life demands preparation, especially that of communal life. She became convinced that her companions were far from being prepared.” This is all she wrote about the voyage. So instead of continuing westward with this group, the Roses left them in New York City. Arriving on the auspicious date of Robert Owen’s birthday, May 14, 1836, they decided to make their home there. They stayed for the next thirty-three years.⁴⁰