5

“Agitate, Agitate!”

IN 1860, WIVES in New York State finally achieved complete ownership of their property within marriage. “How has all this been achieved?” Ernestine Rose asked rhetorically, “The answer is, by agitation—conventions and public lectures to enlighten woman on the laws which oppressed her—to enlighten men on the injustice he perpetrated against her… . By forming public opinion in favor of our claims… . Agitate! agitate! Ought to be the motto of every reformer,” she concluded. “Agitation is the opposite of stagnation—the one is life, the other death.”¹ Throughout the 1850s, Rose had worked constantly for the women’s movement, organizing and attending national and local conventions, giving lectures both in New York City and on numerous tours, writing letters and circulating petitions. In 1856, she announced that she had already traveled to twenty-three of the existing thirty-one states—through many of them multiple times. She avoided only the Deep South, where she would not have been allowed to lecture, and the Far West, which was too difficult to reach in these years before the transcontinental railroad. She was “always on the go,” an interviewer wrote, “leaving the train to speak two or three hours from a stage, getting back on a rail car only to do the same in other places.”²

During one of her busiest years, 1855, Ernestine Rose began in January by lecturing at ten different Woman’s Rights gatherings throughout western New York State, a tour organized by the new “Napoleon” of the women’s movement, Susan B. Anthony. Rose returned to New York City for the Thomas Paine dinner on January 29, where she delivered the main speech, as she did throughout the decade. In early February, she gave a lecture at Taunton, Massachusetts, on women’s rights and in mid-month addressed a committee of the New York State Assembly in Albany to present petitions for laws granting women both the vote and “co-partnership” in marriage.³

In March, Rose gave two anti-slavery speeches in New York City, and in May she attended the American Anti-Slavery meeting there, where she asked questions but did not lecture. On May 30, she made a major address to the New England Anti-Slavery Convention in Boston and then held forth for two hours that evening on women’s rights. In July, she sent the Boston Investigator a letter about a new, progressive college in Kirtland, Ohio, and early in August spoke at an “Anti-Slavery Excursion and Pic-Nic” on Long Island. Later that month, she attended a Woman’s Rights Convention in Saratoga, New York, presenting one of the “longest and principal addresses.” A few days later, she went to the Convention of the Friends of Progress in Waverly, New York, where she gave “some concluding remarks” and was asked to name a baby girl. She called her “Ernestine Frances.”⁴

In September, Rose began a two-month lecture tour. She first went to Salem, Ohio, where she spoke at a second Convention of the Friends of Progress. She then gave speeches throughout Michigan on women’s rights, anti-slavery, and “the fundamental evils of society.” Without returning home, she proceeded on to the two-day Sixth National Woman’s Rights Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she spoke both about the progress of the movement and women’s right to equal education. While in Cincinnati, she sat in on a series of classes in the new field of anthropology. “I was exceedingly interested, and most truly regretted that I would not remain and attend the whole course,” she wrote the Boston Investigator. “The subject is of vast importance.” She also visited Frances Wright’s grave there with an English clergyman turned freethinker, Joseph Barker.

The Cleveland journalist Lemuel E. Barnard interviewed her at length that autumn, publishing his piece on her early in 1856. Rose went on to lecture numerous times in Indiana and Ohio, returning to New York City in early November. Next she published a lengthy letter to Barker praising Wright’s novel, A Few Days in Athens, and attempted to organize a World’s Bible Convention. Bible Conventions, held periodically in the United States, brought believers and freethinkers together to debate the validity of scripture. Rose then gave two anti-slavery talks in Bangor, Maine, in late December, followed by one in Portland.⁵

How was she able to accomplish all this? Her most important support, both emotional and financial, came from her husband, William, whom she “chose with her heart.” They had identical values. Both revered Robert Owen and his principles, free thought and Thomas Paine, anti-slavery and women’s rights. William helped organize the Paine banquets and often made toasts there, although he never gave speeches. In 1859, for the first and only time, he toasted his wife, “Ernestine L. Rose—The courageous opposer of a corrupt clergy and a corrupter religion, and the faithful and devoted advocate of universal mental freedom.” He clipped and saved newspaper articles about her. His jewelry store carried Women’s Rights Petitions and portraits of Frances Wright he had published, in addition to the “mounted canes” ornamented with gold and silver he manufactured. He also made “dressing cases, whips, smelling bottles, fancy ivory turning and metal gilding” to order, as well as repairing jewelry. “In this competitive State of ours, few have any money to throw away,” Ernestine remarked at a convention. “My husband is a mechanic who works for all he gets”—a mechanic being someone who worked with his hands. An accomplished silversmith, William Rose was commissioned by a group of Indiana women to make a pitcher honoring Robert Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, for his work to pass legislation giving married women property rights in their state. The 1851 presentation praised the pitcher as “the finest specimen of silver plate we have ever seen … chased in the richest and most beautiful manner” with vines, tendrils, and bunches of grapes, adding that “the workmanship reflects the highest credit on the artist.” Susan B. Anthony, Ernestine Rose’s closest friend in the women’s movement, wrote that Ernestine “was idolized by her husband,” who “gladly furnished her the means of making her extensive tours, so that through his sense of justice she was enabled to preach the Gospel of Woman’s Rights, Anti-Slavery and Free Religion without money and without price.”⁶

Rose confirmed Anthony’s account in her 1856 interviews with the French feminist Jenny d’Héricourt. Although others in the women’s movement were “paid and reimbursed for all the expenses of their lectures,” Rose never wanted to support her beliefs “except with her health and out of her own purse.” When she was not traveling for her causes, she did the housework, cleaning, and cooking so that she could forgo “the money she might pay a servant to finance her trips and rent the halls where she lectures.” This constituted a major sacrifice. Most middle-class families had at least one servant to do the dirtiest chores, from emptying and washing chamber pots, to heating water, carrying in wood or coal and hauling out ashes, in addition to cleaning up the resulting smoke and soot. Even with running water and indoor toilets, doing heavy cleaning and laundry and preparing food from scratch remained arduous tasks. “Mrs. Rose, aside from the obligations imposed by her mission … sees few people, and does not make social calls,” d’Héricourt wrote. “She doesn’t just take care of her housework, she enjoys hearing her kettle sing … with the same ears which just a few hours earlier were deafened by the clapping of four thousand hands. Yes, Mrs. Rose does not look down on cleaning her home or cooking and finds time to help her excellent husband with his work.” In turn, William almost certainly assisted with the housework, which he had to do by himself during Ernestine’s numerous tours. The Roses moved their home and business almost yearly during the 1840s, usually living in an apartment over the jewelry store. In the 1850s, they only changed residences twice, but this did not mean they liked their homes. “We live (I speak from experience) in uncomfortable houses for years, rather than move, though we have the privilege to do so,” Ernestine said in 1860.⁷

Overall, their egalitarian marriage provided the bedrock for Ernestine Rose’s feminism. Following Owenite precepts, Rose consistently argued that “a true and natural marriage” consisted of “an exclusive conjugal love based on perfect equality between one man and one woman.” Rephrasing Justice Blackstone’s oft-cited legal formula that “husband and wife are one; and that one is the husband,” she maintained that it should rather be interpreted to mean that the couple’s “interest ought to be one.” This “conveys to my mind the idea of perfect equality,” she told a women’s rights convention in 1853. “No jarring between them of mine and thine, all is ours, their interests, rights, privileges, enjoyment, happiness, are identical, the same, no more and no less but perfect equality.” William’s steadfast support enabled Ernestine to pursue her unconventional career, just as calling herself “Mrs. Rose” gave her respectability. Using both her married name and her title—unlike Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Lucretia Mott—also provided the women’s movement with credibility. Its adherents were often ridiculed as “old maids,” considered “entirely devoid of personal attractions” who sought “revenge upon the sex who have slighted them.”⁸

Well aware of how others perceived her unorthodox religious beliefs, which she downplayed at women’s rights events, and of her unique position as a foreigner among native-born Americans, Ernestine Rose always dressed conventionally. In an 1856 black-and-white lithograph of her by the well-known artist Leopold Grozelier, she wears a long skirt of moiré silk and a matching top banded with black velvet. This may be the “russet gown” mentioned in an article about the Worcester convention. In a photo from the same year, she wears a black satin dress with white lace at the bodice and sleeves. Unlike a number of her women’s rights colleagues, Rose never adopted the “bloomer costume” some began wearing in 1851. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, the Grimké sisters, Amelia Bloomer herself, and others discarded the cumbersome tight-waisted, full-skirted fashions of the day in favor of a modest knee-length dress worn over straight ankle-length pants. Far more comfortable and less restrictive than the long, heavy skirts which swept up dirt and needed to be lifted to go up or down stairs, “bloomers” occasioned such severe public scrutiny and criticism that the women who wore them all stopped doing so after a few years. Although Rose defended those women who switched to the costume, she never put it on herself, nor did she cut her hair short as some did. Not wearing a bonnet had distinguished Rose in the 1830s, but customs changed. An 1869 portrait of seven “Champions of Woman’s Suffrage” shows more than half—including Rose—drawn with bare heads. “Mrs. Rose appeared very much like other women,” a Maine newspaper wrote approvingly in 1855. “She is of medium size, dresses ‘neat but not gaudy,’ not en bloomer.”⁹

In this era, women wore dresses for many years and wardrobes remained small. Donning one of her outfits and perhaps carrying the other in a valise, Ernestine Rose set off on her numerous speaking tours. Travel arrangements took a great deal of effort. To set up a single lecture in Taunton, Massachusetts, in 1855, Rose wrote at least five letters to a Charles H. Plummer to fix the date and subject of her talk. She usually traveled on trains, which went about twenty miles an hour. Three railroad lines served New York City, connecting it to New England, the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic states. The system did not run on Sundays then, catering to Christians’ belief in the sanctity of the sabbath. Rose consistently argued that such interference violated the consitutional separation of church and state. For shorter journeys, she took slower horse-drawn coaches or carriages.¹⁰

Once Rose arrived at her destination, she did not know how she would be housed. On her upstate trip in January 1855, she stayed first in a home with “everything in beautiful order.” But the following evening, she and Anthony were given

a little room not 11 feet square, containing bed, Cooking Stove, beauro, table & three or 4 chairs—on the stove was a pot boiling some kind of fresh meat—the floor was strewn with papers, chips & straws—gave evidence of not having felt the impress of a broom for weeks.

“After learning of the state of things I went out & hired a carriage to take us to the Canandaigua Hotel,” Anthony wrote. But Ernestine Rose continued to tour. “She has travelled alone, for months together,” Joseph Barker wrote,

along rivers and lakes, through the towns and cities, the woods and swamps of that vast continent, under a burning sun, amid winter storms, exposed to the deadly vapours of unhealthy regions, lecturing in Legislative halls and rude log huts, to the highest and the lowest, the richest and the poorest, to the most refined and learned, and to the rudest and most neglected of her species.¹¹

During this time, Ernestine Rose established her reputation as an outstanding orator. An Ohio newspaper praised her 1852 Thomas Paine address as “an offhand, able, and spirited speech … the equal of which few men are competent to make.” Listeners most frequently praised Rose’s spontaneity as well as her “argumentative power” and called out for her when more tedious lecturers held forth. “I was infinitely relieved when Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose took the floor,” a female reporter wrote about the 1860 National Woman’s Rights Convention.

A good delivery, a forcible voice, the most uncommon good sense, a delightful terseness of style, and a rare talent for humor, are the qualifications which so well fit this lady for a public speaker. In about two minutes she managed to infect her two-thousand-fold audience with a spirit of interest—an audience which mere dry morals and reason had succeeded in reducing to a comatose state.¹²

Rose often began with the Owenite premise that women’s rights were human rights and she usually cited the Declaration of Independence to prove her case. By doing so, she expressed the views of a large majority of her colleagues, many of whom still disavowed the US Constitution for countenancing slavery. We claim our rights “upon the ground” that “our rights have already been conceded by the Declaration of Independence,” Rose argued repeatedly throughout the 1850s. “For is woman not included in that phrase, ‘all men are created free and equal?’… And if she is, what right has man to deprive her of her natural and inalienable rights? … Upon that just and eternal basis do we found our claims for our rights; political, civil, legal, social, religious, and every other.” Rose periodically challenged those who opposed women’s rights by asking, “Is woman alike human with man, or is she not? I would say to our opponents, choose your alternative: say yes or no, and we are willing to abide the consequences,” she argued at the Fourth National Convention at Cleveland in 1853. If woman is “equally a human being with man,” then she deserves the rights he has. If she is “not the same,” then how can man “rightfully legislate for a being entirely different from himself?”¹³

Of the many benefits of democracy, Rose valued suffrage the most. “The ballot is the focus of all other rights, it is the pivot upon which all others hang,” she declared in 1856. “The legal rights are embraced in it, for if once possessed of the right to the ballot box, to self-representation, she [woman] will see to it that the laws shall be just and protect her person and her property, as well as that of man.” Rose refused to predict how women would use their rights. The entire purpose of rights was the freedom to legally employ them—just as men did. She consistently maintained, as she stated at Worcester in 1851, that “humanity recognizes no sex,” that women and men come “involuntarily into existence” and both experience “life and death, pleasure and pain, happiness and misery.” Directly attacking the common argument that physical difference “in the organic structure of the sexes militates against the rights of woman,” she reasoned that “human rights and justice do not depend on the size or structure of the limbs, but on the simple yet all-sufficient authority of a human being, male or female.” Rose’s arguments for female equality mirrored those she made for black equality. “Like or unlike, he [“the colored man”] is a human being, and I will use the same argument with regard to him that I use when pleading—no, not when pleading—when claiming the rights of woman,” she declared in 1855.¹⁴

Ernestine Rose always rejected the argument that men were oppressors and women victims. As an Owenite, she held that social conditions determined human character. “I blame no one,” she affirmed at Cleveland in 1853. “My creed is, that man is precisely as good as all the laws, institutions, and influences allow him to be.” That is why current conditions must be changed, through education and agitation. When Susan B. Anthony declared at the Eighth National in 1858 that the meeting was “a woman’s rights convention,” “Mrs. Rose wanted to amend that suggestion, because this was a human rights convention too, and the men ought not be afraid to speak out also.” Applause followed her comment. Rose and many others believed that “woman must go hand in hand with man in every great and noble cause, if success would be insured.” It then followed that “the beneficial result” of giving women their rights “will not be for herself alone” but for men as well. Many abolitionists held that slavery harmed slave owners as well as slaves. Rose applied this argument to men and women. “Woman is a slave, from the cradle to the grave,” she asserted at Syracuse in 1852. “In claiming her rights, we claim the rights of humanity; it is not for the interest of woman only, but for the interest of all. The interest of the sexes cannot be separated—together they must enjoy or suffer—both are one in the race.”¹⁵

Ernestine Rose’s sympathy for men and her camaraderie with male allies did not prevent her from mocking those who did not give women their due. Early in 1852, she took on the eminent reformer Horace Mann, who in his “Hints to a Young Woman” maintained that since God created man and woman different in body, mind, and soul, woman “unsexes” herself by claiming equal rights. “He admits woman is oppressed and degraded by man, but to claim and vindicate her right to call conventions and appear on the forum where she would have a chance to be heard, then ‘she unsexes herself,’ etc.” Rose rebutted, “But what does the Hon. Lawgiver really mean by that term? I fear we will have to send to Washington for Congressional deliberation.” A few years later, she wrote Joseph Barker, who finally read the novel about ancient Athens by Frances Wright that Rose had recommended to him, but blamed his delay on Rose not telling him enough about it. She replied, “What a comfort it is, when we feel guilty, to lay the blame on someone else! … Was it the fact that the book was written by a woman, and recommended by a woman, that misled you so … ? (for how indeed could the mind of a WOMAN penetrate the mysteries of the Grecian schools and their philosophy?).”¹⁶

At the 1852 National Convention in Syracuse, Rose argued similarly against the Liberal British M.P., J. A. Roebuck. Asked if women should have the vote, Roebuck replied that although “there is no man who owes more than I do to woman,” he could not support female suffrage, since after a hard day at the House of Commons, he needed to find “a nook and shelter of quiet comfort” at home.

My head rests upon a bosom throbbing with emotion for me and our child; and I feel a more hearty man in the cause of my country, the next day, because of the perfect soothing, gentle peace which a mind sullied by politics cannot feel. Oh! I cannot rob myself of that inexpressible benefit, and therefore I say, NO.

“Well, this is certainly a nice, little, romantic bit of Parliamentary declamation,” Rose scoffed. “What a pity that he should give up all these enjoyments, to give woman a vote. Poor man! his happiness must be balanced on the very verge of a precipice, when the simple act of depositing a vote by the hand of a woman, would overthrow and destroy it forever.” Rose and her colleagues continually had to deal with this division into “separate spheres.”¹⁷

Often voicing majority views within the women’s rights movement, Rose joined with her colleagues in deciding not to form a permanent organization to promote their cause at the 1852 National Convention. “Organizations were like Chinese bandages [used to bind women’s feet],” Rose argued; “in Political, Moral, and Religious bodies, they had hindered the growth of man.” Recalling the bitter split in the anti-slavery movement that led to women being excluded as participants, others supported this position. “We are not the lifeless staves of a barrel, which can be held together only by the iron hoops of an Artificial Organization,” the anti-slavery activist Angelina Grimké Weld wrote in a long letter. When another participant argued that “organization and order” were necessary and cited Lucretia Mott’s presidency of the convention to prove her point, Rose replied, “We all acted freely and spontaneously in that matter, and, because she had our confidence, we elected her unanimously. We have been brought together by the magnetism of the cause. If you have a permanent organization, you cannot be free.” The convention upheld her and decided to urge women to hold meetings in individual states and counties to claim their rights rather than creating a national organization.¹⁸

But within the women’s movement, Rose remained both an outsider and an insider. After being introduced by Mott at the 1852 meeting as “a Polish Lady and educated in the Jewish faith,” she maintained that her origins testified to “the universality of our claims” and “asked for some charity on account of speaking in a foreign language.” A few sentences later, she mispronounced “hen-pecked” as “hen-picked,” which occasioned “great laughter” at her expense. In addition to being singled out as the lone foreigner, Rose could not completely avoid the topic of religion at the convention, since her co-worker Antoinette Brown introduced a motion that the Bible, especially the New Testament, endorsed female equality. Educated in theology at Oberlin College, Brown had preached at various Congregational churches and would become the first ordained female minister in the United States. Despite their religious differences, she and Rose had a cordial friendship. Calling Brown an “able Theologian,” Rose opposed her resolution on the grounds that the Bible “is so obscure and indefinite as to admit of different interpretations.” She then turned to US history and argued that if the rebellious American colonists had consulted scripture, it would have “answered them, ‘submit to the powers that be, for they are from God.’ ” “No!,” she concluded, “on Human Rights and Freedom—on a subject that is as self-evident as that two and two make four, there is no need of any written authority.” The convention supported her position.¹⁹

The topic of biblical authority for the women’s movement persisted. As radical Christians, most proponents of rights for women repeatedly cited scripture to support their views. They argued that the first Bible verses about creation—“male and female created he them”—took precedence over the more familiar but later account of Adam and Eve. They reasoned that Eve’s divinely sanctioned subordination to Adam—“thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee”—represented a fallen state rather than an ideal one. They repeatedly quoted the New Testament dictum that “there is neither Greek nor Jew, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, but all are one in Christ Jesus.” Most conventions opened with a prayer, and the Syracuse meeting ended with members singing the Christian hymn “Old Hundred”:

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;

Praise him, all creatures here below;

Praise him above, ye heavenly host;

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.

At the Fourth National in 1853, a great deal of time was spent arguing about biblical authority for women’s rights. William Lloyd Garrison, Stephen Foster, and Joseph Barker debated so heatedly with the clergyman Dr. Nevin that immediately following the meeting, Nevin “seized” Garrison “by the nose and shook him vehemently.” At the Fifth National in Philadelphia, where Ernestine Rose presided, Henry Grew, an abolitionist Baptist minister, cited Bible verses to support his view that women should not speak in public. After hours of debate, the convention passed resolutions declaring that “the most determined opposition” to our “sacred cause … is from the clergy” and that no matter “whatever any book may teach, the rights of no human being are dependent upon or edified thereby.”²⁰

Ernestine Rose herself easily cited scripture for her own purposes. She often referred to Solomon, saying “There is a time and a season for everything,” usually to dismiss discussion of the Bible at women’s rights meetings, and always adding “and it is a good saying, not because it comes from him, but because it is true.” At Syracuse, she quoted Genesis to argue that “ ’tis not well for man to remain alone,” going on to assert that woman must be with man “to keep him in his proper sphere”—a backhanded reference to the separate spheres ideology. “Do you doubt it?” Rose continued; “then look at exclusive assemblies of men, and even among the best you will perceive the rude, uncultivated nature of Adam, before mother Eve civilized him, by making him partake of the Tree of Knowledge.” During Bible Conventions, she quoted from the Gospels as easily as from the Hebrew Bible to prove her points. When the lights briefly went out at the Hartford Bible Convention in June 1853, Rose won “laughter and applause” from her largely hostile audience by remarking that “it reminded me of one of the true things that we find in the Bible, that some there are ‘who love darkness better than light,’ ” a phrase from the Book of John.²¹

Hartford was the first of two difficult conventions Ernestine Rose spoke at in 1853. “Bible Conventions” had been held in the United States since the 1820s and allowed freethinkers and believers to debate whether the Bible was true. At Hartford, a number of other women attended, but Rose was the only one who spoke. She of course defended free thought, which she called a movement “of the highest and greatest importance that has taken place in our age—of more importance even than … the rights of woman.” She began by using arguments aimed at women that she had made for years: since they especially had been “enslaved” by the Bible and “churches have been built upon your subjugated necks,” women “must trample the Bible, the church, and the priests under your feet.” Arguing that the “Good Book” had been written by man and for man, who “had made God in his own image,” Rose excoriated the figure of God portrayed in Genesis. Calling him a “bad father,” she said that “any earthly parent” would have corrected Adam and Eve for their disobedience in eating the “forbidden fruit,” rather than pronouncing “curses and heavy penalties … against them, and not only against them for life, but on the whole unborn race to come after them.” “This is Bible justice and Bible mercy,” she concluded.

Students from a nearby theological seminary disrupted the convention while Rose spoke, hissing, shouting, calling her “mother,” “old gal,” and telling her to “go home.” They finally extinguished the gas lights, throwing the hall into darkness. “Strange to say,” her fellow participant William Lloyd Garrison wrote later, “the worst and grossest of interruptions were directed against a woman, Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose.” But attacks on women freethinkers often exceeded those made on men. “We know of no object more deserving of contempt, loathing, and abhorrence than a female Atheist,” a Bangor clergyman wrote a local newspaper about Rose when she was scheduled to speak there in 1855. “We hold the vilest strumpet from the stews to be by comparison respectable.” Rose drew a sympathetic audience and gave a successful lecture despite this defamation. At Hartford, she did not lose her sangfroid. “During this melée … I stood upon the platform with my arms around Mrs. Rose,” another female participant remembered,

she saying to me, “This is nothing, I’m not frightened.” As the gas was lighted, I stepped back, and there stood the heroine, all alone, Bible in hand, in her fearless majesty! I shall never forget her terrible invective, in these words, as she held it up before the gallery students, and shook it in their faces, exclaiming, “Yes, you are fit representatives of your book, you illustrate your religion by your mobocracy!” She then proceeded with her discourse, which was a scathing one.

Susan B. Anthony later wrote on Rose’s copy of her Hartford speech, “Bravest and fearless of all women—Mrs. Rose.” Rose attempted to organize subsequent Bible Conventions, but none took place because believers refused to participate.²²

Further disruptions occurred at a women’s rights convention held three months later, in September 1853 in New York City. Timed to coincide with the first US World’s Fair, an anti-slavery meeting, and a World Temperance Convention, the women’s rights event took place in the large Broadway Tabernacle—the same venue where Rose had been shouted down in 1837. This time, a gang of male hooligans attended, making so much noise they eventually overwhelmed the convention’s speakers, earning the meeting the nickname “Mob Convention.” Faced with these rowdies as she gave her speech, Rose “preserved the utmost calmness during the uproar.” As hisses drowned her out at the end of the first evening, she declared, “As for hissing, what are hisses? It tells us that woman must assert her rights, unflinchingly, fearlessly. … [T]‌he beneficial result will not be for herself alone, but for such men as these!” The following day, the tumult increased. Sojourner Truth, the formerly enslaved New Yorker turned abolitionist, rebuked the audience for “hissing like snakes and geese” during her speech, but the noise grew even louder when Rose came onto the platform accompanied by a fellow immigrant, the German feminist Mathilde Franziska Anneke. “Horrible noises; everybody on his or her feet. Rapping of canes, clapping of hands, shrieks, and groans, and sneezes,” reported the hostile New York Express, “in the midst of which a very, very masculine and ‘strong-minded’ looking woman … went on to address the audience, in German!”²³

Rose’s attempt to translate Anneke’s speech—which proclaimed that “the women of my country look to this country for encouragement and sympathy”—brought the meeting to a flash point. Anneke represented the tens of thousands of foreigners who had poured into New York since 1848, giving rise to massive anti-immigrant sentiment. As Rose rendered Anneke’s words into English, the uproar became unmanageable and she called on the police to intervene. They did nothing. The Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips then attempted to calm the commotion, to no avail. Jeers drowned out the rest of the speakers and Rose adjourned the convention. “I surrendered with the courageous band of my comrades-in-arms,” Anneke remembered, and we “quickly left the tabernacle, still constantly in danger of being insulted by the threatening crowd on the streets.” Three years later, Ernestine Rose asserted that “with my well-known heresies on religion and society, I have never been disturbed in any of my meetings, except at the Hartford Bible Convention by some young clerical rowdies; at an Anti-Slavery Convention in Boston [in 1855] … and by a few silly boys at a Women’s Rights Convention in the city of New York. With these exceptions, I have always been treated by audiences with attention and respect.”²⁴

Anneke and Rose became close allies, united not only by feminism but also by free thought. In Germany, Anneke had written a treatise titled Woman in Conflict with Society in 1847 in which she proclaimed that “I believe neither in a personal God nor a universal spirit… . Why is such a confession from the mouth of a woman so strongly forbidden?” Anneke and her husband emigrated to the United States in 1849, following the defeat of the German revolution they had fought for. They initially settled in Milwaukee, where Anneke defied convention by giving a public lecture while pregnant. In 1852, she began publishing her monthly Deutsche Frauen=Zeitung [German Women’s Newspaper], in which she first praised Ernestine Rose. Translating and reprinting Rose’s 1851 Worcester speech in German, Anneke wrote that Rose was not only “one of the foremost battlers for women’s rights,” but also “one of the very few … to fight openly against … religious cant in this ‘land of freedom.’ ” Like Rose, Anneke believed that women “maintain the delusion” that they can fight for their rights “without fighting the bitterest enemies of their cause, the bitterest enemies of all freedom and independence … Religion, Priestcraft, and the Bible.” Anneke recalled that aside from herself, “only Ernestine Rose, who though Polish, but spoke here and there in German … agitated openly for our cause” among German-Americans. When the two re-met at a women’s rights convention years later, Anneke wrote that “Ernestine Rose was very happy to hold me in her arms again. She is still the same old wise and witty campaigner.”²⁵

A month after the 1853 Mob Convention in New York, the Fourth National Woman’s Rights Convention convened in Cleveland. Rose spoke frequently at this gathering, praising the Declaration of Independence and condemning the attempted use of the Bible. She commented on a remark Antoinette Brown had made about divorce—Brown advocated “legal separation,” in which the parties would not be allowed to remarry, for cases of “habitual drunkenness.” Rose deferred discussion of the issue, although “it is of vital importance,” since “this subject will encounter more prejudice and in consequence more difficulties than any subject hitherto brought before the public.” But she did raise the issue of “whether, what is wrong in one sex, can be right in the other?” Wording her statement very carefully, Rose asked if it were right that a woman who “is drawn down to sin … should be cast out of the pale of humanity—while he who led her into it … shall go free?” Never mentioning sex out of wedlock or prostitution, Rose argued that women’s “ignorance and dependence” produced this double standard of sexual morality. Being more specific would have tainted the convention with accusations of supporting “free love,” since, as Rose declared, “man, from the time of Adam to the present time, has had utmost license, while woman must not commit the slightest degree of ‘impropriety,’ as it is termed.” But she continued to refrain from blaming either men or women for this situation.²⁶

Through her work for women, Rose became accepted and liked by many. At a Women’s Rights Convention in Rochester, New York, held a few weeks after the Cleveland meeting, Rose met Sallie Holley, an ardently Christian abolitionist. Holley wrote a friend that “Ernestine L. Rose is a charming woman and at times playful.” Knowing that Rose did not believe in an after-life, Holley said that she thought they would meet in heaven. “Then you will say to me, ‘I told you so,’ and I shall reply, ‘How very stupid I was!’ ” Rose joked. Holley concluded, “She seems to me to be a candid, reverent, loving spirit.”²⁷ During these years, Rose also became acquainted with the poet Walt Whitman, who listed her in his address book from 1855 on and called her “a first rate lady friend.” At that time, Whitman associated with a number of female reformers who discussed women’s rights with him. In 1857, Ernestine Rose filled the poet in about Frances Wright’s later, unhappy years. Throughout his long life, Whitman repeatedly remembered Rose speaking about the French Revolution—“one of the very few things which ruffle[d]‌ her beautiful placidity.” Rose declared, “What!—to be trod down and not turn! Were the people mere playthings? blocks of wood or boulders of stone?” “I put” these words “in my notebook,” Whitman stated in 1890 and “have kept them all these years… . And today it applies as then.” “She was a splendid woman: big, richly gifted, brave, expansive,” he continued, explaining that she was “in body a poor sickly thing, a strong breath would blow her away—but with a head full of brains—the amplitude of a [Daniel] Webster… . I can see the flash in her eye now—the noble, containing eye!”²⁸

Although most of Ernestine and William Rose’s close friends came from free thought rather than feminism, Ernestine Rose did develop a lasting friendship with Susan B. Anthony, whom she first toured with in the spring of 1854. They met at the 1852 Syracuse Convention, shortly after Anthony joined the women’s rights movement. Ten years younger than Rose, raised in a liberal Quaker family, and never married, Anthony had been active in the anti-alcohol temperance movement until she attempted to speak at the organization’s meeting, only to be told that “the sisters were not invited there to speak, but to listen and learn.” Although Rose occasionally spoke in favor of temperance and believed that “healthful amusements” should be substituted for “alcoholic stimulus,” she never embraced the issue as a number of her feminist allies did. Rather, like Anneke and most new immigrants, Rose thought drunkenness an American problem, caused primarily by “puritanism.” The United States “prohibited enjoyments” while nations like France drank wine sparingly with daily meals. Rose thought this resulted in European sobriety and American inebriation.²⁹

Despite their disagreements on issues like temperance and the bloomer costume, the two feminists became staunch allies. Rose rarely toured with others, but she and Anthony linked up early in 1854 to address the New York State Legislature in Albany and then went on to the mid-South, with Rose lecturing and Anthony making arrangements. Beginning in Washington, DC, they had great difficulty finding a venue that would give Rose a platform. When Anthony asked the Speaker of the House to let Rose use the Capitol building, he referred them to the chaplain, who said he could not “allow her to speak there because she was not a member of some religious society.” Although Anthony remonstrated with him about religious freedom, he did not change his mind. Also denied access to the Smithsonian Hall, because “they had to be very careful whom they permitted to speak there,” Rose instead lectured three times to small audiences at the cramped Washington Theatre. Rose next spoke twice in Alexandria, Virginia. The two women then traveled to Baltimore, where they stayed in a boarding house staffed by slaves, whose lives they found “wretched.”³⁰

In Baltimore, Ernestine Rose and Susan B. Anthony had an intimate conversation, reported at length in Anthony’s diary. On Sunday, April 9, they attended a Universalist Church, hearing a sermon on “Woman’s Sphere.” Afterward they had a discussion about the Know-Nothings—the new nativist political party that sought to exclude immigrants and keep them from voting or holding office. Rose criticized two women’s rights stalwarts, the Boston brahmin Wendell Phillips and the popular speaker Lucy Stone “with regard to their feelings towards foreigners,” Anthony wrote in her diary. “Said she heard them both express themselves in terms of prejudice against granting to foreigners the rights of Citizenship.” Anthony remonstrated with Rose, expressing “disbelief as to either of them having that narrow, mean prejudice in their souls.” But Rose was correct. While calming the mob in New York the previous autumn, Phillips repeatedly contrasted “the illiterate Irishman” and other male “foreigners from Europe,” who could vote after five years in the United States, to “American women,” who could not. He also frequently opposed “the Saxon race,” which he argued “led the van” on women’s rights to “the Jewish—yes, the Jewish—ridicule which laughs at such a Convention as this.” Considering St. Paul “Jewish” despite his conversion to Christianity, Phillips concluded, “It is Paul versus the Saxon blood; it is a religious prejudice against the blood of the race.”³¹

Lucy Stone, also native-born, had spoken similarly in Rose’s presence, reviling “the foreigner, who can’t speak his mother tongue correctly” but who could vote when native women could not. Stone graduated from Oberlin College—the first co-ed and interracial institute of higher learning in the United States—and in these years embodied radical feminism by bobbing her hair and wearing bloomers. Beginning as an anti-slavery lecturer, she soon joined the women’s movement. By the early 1850s, she had become one of the most famous women in the nation.

Eight years younger than Rose, Stone was also a superb orator. Both women admired William Lloyd Garrison and adopted his position that the states should separate rather than remain in a union with slaveholders. But they differed deeply on religion, with Stone having a lifelong “deep and abiding faith in divine justice.” This belief, coupled with her appearance and voice, drew audiences to her. Stone was “a tiny creature with the prettiest pink color,” “the sweetest, modest manners,” and a voice “like a silver bell.” Invariably described as “sweet” and “little,” Stone not only won over audiences but she also made a great deal of money from her speaking, first as a paid lecturer for anti-slavery and women’s rights, then by charging for her lectures. Contemporaries invariably preferred her to the atheist and “exotic” Ernestine Rose. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a friend of both women, reported that Stone convinced his sisters to support women’s rights, because they found her “so lovely,” with “her winning voice … whose very look suggests a home and a husband and a baby,” even though Stone was single at that time. “The public mind instinctively fastens upon this little person … as being the heart and soul of this crusade,” the New York Tribune concluded.³²

In 1855, Lucy Stone sent Susan B. Anthony a long letter about the women’s movement in which she severely criticized Ernestine Rose. Although Rose “spoke well” at the Sixth National in Cincinnati, Stone began, “there are so many mean Jews” there “and her face is so essentially Jewish, that the people remarked the likeness and feared her.” Stone went on to paint a picture of Rose complaining about how much her travel, speaking, and clothing had cost her. She asserted that Rose gave “a tirade about the low fee, said it was shameful” and insisted she would never take on the responsibility of organizing a convention as Stone had done.

These charges are the only ones of this nature ever made against Ernestine Rose. Even in Stone’s letter, she wrote that it was only Joseph Barker who insisted that Rose be paid, while Rose herself consistently refused to take any money. “My advice to you is not to let Mrs. Rose do anything,” Stone concluded. A few years later, Stone again urged Anthony not to let Rose speak at a convention since she is “known” and “about 30 people will stay away, who see her name where 10 will be attracted by it.” Stone’s criticisms—that Rose looks Jewish, that she is avaricious and only out for herself—constitute antisemitism. Others consistently praised Rose’s self-sacrifice. In 1886, summing up Rose’s career, the Boston Investigator wrote that she was “one of the most prominent and ablest female lecturers in this country, and probably the most generous, for she lectured at her own expense.”³³

Most important, Susan B. Anthony paid no attention to these charges, consistently scheduling Rose as a speaker, praising her, and remaining her lifelong friend. In their 1854 conversation about nativists in the women’s movement, however, Anthony wrote about her disagreements with Rose:

I said Mrs. Rose “there is not one in the Reform ranks, whom you think true, not one but whom panders to the popular feeling—She answered I can’t help it, I take them by the words of their own mouths. I trust all until their words or acts declare them false to truth & right, & continued she, no one can tell the hours of anguish I have suffered as one after another I have seen those whom I had trusted, betray falsity of motive, as I have been compelled to place one after another on the list of panderers to public favor. Said I, do you know Mrs. Rose, that I can but feel that you place me too on that list. Said she, I will tell you when I see you untrue—

A silence ensued. To Rose, any denigration of “foreigners” meant her—the only foreigner within the movement. To Anthony, Rose was unduly suspicious, unable to “ascribe pure motives to any of our Reformers.” The women’s friendship survived and they toured amicably together again early the next year. But despite her heartfelt sympathy, Anthony could not help offending her freethinking companion. Hoping to make Rose feel better, Anthony copied out a verse from the liberal, not explicitly Christian hymn they heard earlier that morning, “All Equal before God,” and inscribed it “for her dear friend, Ernestine L. Rose.” But however egalitarian its lyrics, the hymn glorified God. Tears came to Rose’s eyes as Anthony gave it to her. “Said I, Mrs. Rose, have I been wicked and hurt your feelings?” Anthony wrote. “She answered, no, but I never expect to be understood in this lifetime. Her anguish was extreme.” The two women wept together. Anthony added, “Mrs. Rose is not appreciated nor cannot be by this age—She is too much in advance of the extreme ultraists even, to be understood by them.”³⁴

Ernestine Rose’s chief defense against her ultraist, outsider status was an intense desire to be correct at all times. Such moralism could easily shade into self-righteousness. At Worcester in 1851, for instance, Abby Kelley had argued that women must first fulfill their duties before they deserved their rights. Rose challenged her, asserting that “this is an error, a very prevalent error, and therefore the more necessary to be corrected … as it is, while man enjoys all the rights, he preaches all the duties to woman.” Give women our rights, and then we “will not fail in the performance of our duties.” At the Mob Convention, Rose spoke about women’s inability to write wills in New York. Lucy Stone intervened, stating that women could write wills in some other states. Rose replied, “I did not say this was the universal law; I said it was the law in the State of New York.” Rose may have been harsher because the speaker was Stone, but she saw her desire to always be right as a virtue. “If, in expressing my opinions, I have been severe alike on friend and foe,” she wrote in 1856, “it is because in principle I know no compromise.”³⁵

After Rose’s springtime tour with Anthony, she developed an “inflammation of the lungs,” which prevented her from participating in a women’s rights convention at Saratoga Springs, New York, that summer. In early October, she wrote the Boston Investigator that she might be too ill to attend the Fifth National Woman’s Rights Convention in Philadelphia. But she recovered, and with Anthony’s support, became president of the meeting. Some objected to an atheist presiding over a women’s rights event, but Anthony argued that “every religion—or none—should have an equal right on the platform.” As president, Ernestine Rose spoke only briefly at the convention, but she was praised in a resolution thanking her “for the courtesy, impartiality and dignity with which she has presided over the proceedings.”³⁶

At Philadelphia, Rose made one of her many references to foreigners. She reviewed “the relative political position of women in this country and Europe, illustrating her remarks by a description of the horror of a Hungarian lady on discovering that, in this country, in the State of New York, she had no legal right to her children.” As a “foreigner,” Rose had many more contacts with Europeans and also a wider and more international perspective than her co-workers. For one example, the Englishmen Joseph Barker and John Finch—an Owenite friend of hers from London—gave the freethinking German doctor Augustus Theodore Stamm letters of introduction to Rose. Stamm, Rose, and others then fruitlessly attempted to organize a “World’s Bible Convention.” Rose also came in contact with Ottilie Assing, a Berlin Jew who emigrated to the United States in 1852. Assing reported for a liberal German newspaper and, like Rose, believed in free thought, women’s rights, and anti-slavery. She praised Rose as an “elegant German-Polish lady with long greying hair and traces of bygone beauty” who “takes an active role in the conventions,” while “she tactfully avoids any appearance of eccentricity.” Although the two women met a number of times, they never became friends. In her articles, Assing complimented Rose’s “broadly educated, independent, and lucid mind,” asserting that “her knowledge of two continents has broadened her horizon; experience and understanding have matured her opinions.”³⁷

Ernestine Rose’s European background, her contacts, and her principles made her an internationalist. She believed that the causes she supported could only succeed if they crossed national boundaries and had universal appeal. She often quoted Thomas Paine’s motto, “The world is my country and to do good my religion.” Rose stressed internationalism at women’s rights meetings, joining a committee in 1853 to address “the women of Great Britain and the continent of Europe,” since “this great movement is intended to meet the wants, not of America only, but of the whole world.”³⁸ Throughout the early 1850s, she strenuously urged the United States to support the revolutionary European republics, arguing that the War of Independence against Great Britain would not have succeeded without French aid. “Non-intervention!—There is no thing as non-intervention,” she proclaimed at the 1852 Paine dinner. “What kind of aid does the Czar of Russia require to crush freedom in Europe? Precisely such as England and this country give him—a passive consent to his active intervention, in violation of the laws of nations as well as of humanity.” She continued to denounce both European despotism and American Know-Nothingism during the Crimean War of 1853–56, when Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire fought Russia. At the 1855 Paine dinner, she maintained that it would be easier for the allies to defeat the czar “than to conquer minds filled with Know-Nothingism. It requires far more true courage and persevering heroism to carry on a moral war than a physical one.”³⁹

After her hectic year of touring, Ernestine Rose’s health deteriorated and she and William decided to visit Europe for six months to “renovate a once exceedingly strong and enduring constitution, so as to enable me to perform my part in the great drama of life a few years longer.” The couple left New York for London in May 1856, almost twenty years to the day after they arrived in the United States. Using an uncharacteristic military metaphor, Ernestine Rose wrote the Boston Investigator that “as a volunteer soldier in the cause of Truth,” she looked forward to a “furlough” so she could “gather fresh strength for the glorious battle of freedom.”⁴⁰