ON A “SWELTERING” Friday morning in late June 1858, two years after she left to visit Europe, Ernestine Rose mounted the platform under a large tent at a new gathering—a “Free Convention” held in Rutland, Vermont. The invitation to this unique meeting asked “the Friends of Human Progress” to come together in “the unanimous movement of those who hail from every section of the great Army of Reform and who have no watchword save Humanity.” Especially concerned about female participation, the organizers urged “woman” to “vindicate by her own eloquence and zeal, the social position she is so nobly and rapidly winning for herself.” To further this end, they scheduled Rose to speak immediately after the reading of the convention’s diverse resolutions. Rose merged free thought and feminism in her brief opening speech, as she often did in these years. “This being a Free Convention, and as we hope, composed of Free Men and Women, and as we have no Pope to govern us, it is hoped that every question presented will be taken into consideration by all persons present,” she began. Then turning specifically to women, she encouraged them to speak out and vote on the issues they “have at heart.” “It is high time the ladies learned to say No,” she declared. “Therefore if you mean yes, say yes; and if you mean no, say no; though you find yourself in a minority of one.”1
The only “Free Convention” ever held, this gathering brought together a wide variety of reformers: freethinkers and anti-slavery activists, women’s rights workers and spiritualists, free love advocates and radical Christians. Yet even among this maverick group, Ernestine Rose herself constituted “a minority of one.” The only female freethinker among both the feminists and the abolitionists, she remained the sole foreigner in this host of native-born Americans. She was also the only participant to openly denounce the popular new belief in spirit communications between the living and the dead that dominated much of the convention’s proceedings. Yet even those participants who disagreed with her still respected her. “She [Rose] has spoken to this people the words of truth and freedom, and noble words of love of humanity,” asserted Mary Davis, a lecturer and wife of a leading spiritualist, Andrew Jackson Davis.2 This combination of esteem and isolation even within radical circles characterized Rose’s life in the late 1850s.
Mainstream US society of course denounced all the participants at Rutland as “a convention of moral lunatics.” “We do not remember to have read of a greater exhibition of mingled nonsense, indecency, insanity, and blasphemy,” wrote the Burlington Free Press, while the New York Times declared that “it was to be expected that various funny people would come together. The expectation was not disappointed.” Both the Times and other major newspapers specifically attacked the women present. The New York Tribune disparaged their looks: “If any one of them should ever be accused of being what people of carnal minds call ‘good-looking,’ not a jury in the land but would instantly acquit her of that unfounded charge.” The Times devoted the entire front page of its June 29 edition to Rutland, headlining the second and third days’ proceedings as “A Spicy Time on Free-Love” with the sub-head “A Small Bit of Abolitionism, Touches of Spiritualism, and a Great Deal of Woman’s Rights.” The article lambasted Rose as “a native of Poland. She speaks broken English, and labors under disadvantages as a public expounder of her speciality—Woman’s Rights.” After criticizing her as “very stout” and having short hair—descriptions that never appear in any other source—the paragraph concluded that “Mrs. Rose is a scoffing Infidel, is always a prominent actor at the anniversary of Tom Paine, and apparently delights in sarcasms upon the Bible and Christianity.”3
Between 1855 and 1861, Ernestine Rose remained much the same. She knew she held a unique position as “a minority of one” and perhaps used this phrase to refer to Thoreau’s dictum about abolitionists in Civil Disobedience: that “any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.” But whatever Rose’s confidence in the correctness of her beliefs, the nation changed around her. Both the women’s movement and free thought began to falter in the face of the growing pressures that led to the Civil War. Her views about that impending struggle increased her isolation. Not only did she ardently oppose slavery, but she also believed in “Disunion,” being willing to divide the nation if it meant liberating the free states from an immoral connection with the slave ones. This conviction separated her from most Americans and the majority of abolitionists. Mrs. Rose “said that there was no argument that could have a feather’s weight in the balance against human freedom,” Susan B. Anthony wrote William Lloyd Garrison—also a disunionist—in 1854, just after the two women had made a trip south. “If she were convinced that slavery could be abolished by a dissolution of the Union, she would rather see, not only the North separate from the South, but State from State, and city from city, than that the curse of slavery should longer continue.”4
This isolation, which led to “severe reproach, slander, and persecution” for her beliefs, as Rose wrote in her “Farewell Letter” to the Boston Investigator, added to her decision to visit Europe at the height of her career in 1856. Complaining that her health had been “greatly impaired by too long continued exertions and exposure,” Rose again adopted the male remedy of travel to cure illness. Journeying for one’s health legitimized what may have been simply a wish to leave the fray for a while. In addition, the Roses could easily finance both their sea voyage and their numerous and lengthy journeys throughout Europe. During these years, Ernestine Rose “had a portrait of Thomas Paine painted for her by Jarvis.” Buying, much less commissioning an oil painting, demonstrates that the couple had disposable income, perhaps from investments in real estate.5
Ernestine Rose had arranged to write public letters about her journey to the Boston Investigator. Before her first missive from Europe arrived—communications took about three weeks to cross the Atlantic—the Investigator reprinted a “Biographical Sketch of Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose,” written by the liberal journalist Lemuel E. Barnard. Barnard, a Vermonter who settled in Cleveland, had interviewed Rose during her visit there in the fall of 1855. He detailed her life until she came to the United States in 1836 and then briefly summarized her next twenty years here. Extolling her “active part in the great progressive movement which marks the present as the most glorious of historical epochs,” Barnard praised Rose’s accomplishments “for the elevation of her sex and the amelioration of social conditions, a work which can be ascribed to few women of our time.” He concluded by hoping she would share more of her biography with others. “The history of her life and experience, as disclosed to the limited circle of her friends, is said to be highly interesting and instructive; but hitherto she has uniformly resisted all their solicitations to give it to the world. They are not without hope, however, that she may, at some future day, consent to do so.”6
Ernestine Rose’s eleven letters from Europe, however, reveal little about her life. Most are travelogues, describing major sights for those who could not go abroad. Her first letter told of their month-long voyage across the Atlantic, but as Rose herself commented, she wrote “so much” while saying “so little.” She mused at length about the ocean, interpreting it politically. “The ocean in repose looks beautiful, but yet I like it not,” she wrote; it “looks to me like a nation which by long and unsuccessful attempts to free itself from the iron yoke of despotism, has subsided into apathy and inaction,” like her native Poland. Their freighter carried only four other passengers, “one nice bright young girl” and an English family of three, “as interesting as ignorance, bigotry, and intolerance could make them.” Ernestine and William Rose could not resist goading their co-voyagers. After the family praised the royal heads of Britain, France, and Russia, the Roses “nearly got ourselves into trouble by gently suggesting that these monarchs with all their religion, are not quite so virtuous and good but they might be a little bit better, which produced such an outburst of loyal indignation, that nearly threatened us with the fate of Jonah.”7
More sympathetic allies in England had been alerted to their arrival. The most important was George Jacob Holyoake, a fellow Owenite who had been convicted of blasphemy in 1842 for denying God’s existence and had served six months in prison. By the time the Roses arrived, he directed The Reasoner, a successful radical weekly with a circulation of 5,000 that coined the term “secularism” and advocated women’s rights. In early June, he announced Rose’s imminent arrival, praising her as “a lady with whose name the friends of American progress have long been familiar” and “one of the most courageous, honest, intelligent, and womanly of the woman’s-right agitators.” A few weeks later, he reprinted Barnard’s piece as well as her May Farewell Letter from the Investigator. One reader wanted a public meeting to welcome Ernestine Rose; Holyoake wrote it would happen only if she wanted it, which she did not.8
A few weeks after arriving, the Roses traveled to see the eighty-five-year-old Robert Owen, then living on an estate outside London. Owen “exclaimed with much energy, ‘Since I saw you, nine years ago, I have not spent an hour without laboring for the cause of humanity,’ ” a goal Rose tried to emulate. Owen wanted Rose to believe in spiritualism; she tried “to convince him out of it”—they “met with equal success.” Although Owen still rode, walked, and wrote, the Roses “could see quite a change in him.” But he had improved by the end of October, when he came to London to see the couple the day before they sailed back to New York. “I am happy to say that he was in excellent health and spirits,” Rose wrote the Investigator.
His hearing is much better than when we saw him in June; he looks well and is as active as ever; he has called another World’s Convention for next May, and has laid out work for me to do, enough to last me a lifetime, provided I live to as good an old age as he has reached, and then I fear I will have hardly begun my task.9
Owen died two years later at eighty-seven; Rose herself made it to eighty-two.
For the rest of the Roses’ five weeks in London, they combined sightseeing with contacting women’s rights allies. For her American readers, Rose described Mme. Tussaud’s waxworks, the British Museum, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and other tourist attractions. She was especially impressed by the Crystal Palace, a modern iron-and-glass exhibition space, built in 1851. To Rose it represented “all that is grand and beautiful in nature and in art, of ancient and modern times, of rude barbarity and the most refined civilizations.” She asserted herself during this sightseeing. She sat in Napoleon’s carriage at Mme. Tussaud’s, “but I could feel none of the glory!” and in the coronation chair at Westminster Abbey, which “is very much dilapidated and full of dust, but I was in duty bound to sit in it!” She went even further at the House of Commons. Discovering that men could be admitted to parliamentary debates relatively easily, while women had to apply in writing and then wait two weeks for permission to sit in the tiny grilled balcony enclosure allotted them, she acted successfully on her own. “As I had a desire to hear the debate … I went in, and that without any permit.” “Of the whole English policy it seems to me the strangest why woman should so entirely be excluded from the House of Commons,” she wrote, “but let silly men do all they can to keep woman out, she can always outwit them! If she only wished to enter into the Garden of Eden, not even the cherubims with fiery swords could keep her out.” Rose continually critiqued British society. “In reality, there is no middle class,” she wrote.
There are many castes and grades; each grade looks down with contempt on all those beneath, and with slavish subserviency on those above it. There is no more sympathy between any two of these grades than between the highest and the lowest. The people have not much energy or spirit… . Everything here is slow and heavy; it requires time, long, long time to move or change anything (except the weather).
“Reform movements are sound asleep,” she continued, adding that for any change to be successful, it had to be championed “by some one of the higher ranks.” She then mentioned going to “a fashionable dinner party” where she met both a member of Parliament and the well-known author Mary Howitt.10
A prolific writer and translator, Howitt and her husband William were ardent reformers. In December 1855, she helped form a committee to work for married women’s property rights. When Rose visited London, Howitt introduced her to at least three other committee members, the younger feminists Barbara Leigh Smith, Bessie Rayner Parkes, and Eliza Fox. Rose referred to them in her speech at the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, held in November 1856, shortly after her return from Europe. She announced that “English women … were very active in forwarding the Woman’s Rights movement throughout Great Britain,” even though they had to contend with the English class system and, unlike Americans, had “no Declaration of Independence” to refer to. She praised Smith, Parkes, and Fox, who were all in their twenties, as “young and noble English girls—girls, who were too timid to take part publicly in the movement, but who were untiring and indefatigable in making converts and enlisting aid.”11
Rose downplayed the achievements of these English feminists, perhaps because they did not lecture publicly as she did—she never explained her reasons. All became leaders of the 1860s English women’s rights movement. Barbara Leigh Smith had attended a co-ed Owenite school before studying art at the new, non-denominational Bedford College for Women. Receiving a 300£ per year endowment from her father, she founded her own progressive co-ed school in 1853. The next year, she published a pamphlet, A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws of England Concerning Women. Costing only a few pence, this work sold widely and caused a sensation, since it argued that women, but not men, were handicapped by bad laws which should be abolished. Leigh Smith challenged British statutes that gave child custody to fathers, transferred wives’ property to husbands, and made divorce almost impossible. Within a year, the committee for a Married Women’s Property Act had gathered 3,000 female signatures, many from prominent authors. It also allied with the powerful Law Amendment Society and enlisted male supporters to present its petitions to Parliament. Bessie Parkes, Leigh Smith’s close friend, published Remarks on the Education of Girls, with Reference to the Social, Legal, and Industrial Position of Women in the Present Day in 1854. Aimed at a middle-class audience, it held that “women should be able to study anything” so they could do any work “they deem themselves fitted for.” Eliza Fox’s father, praised by Rose as “the celebrated W. J. Fox, the eloquent lecturer and Member of Parliament,” aided his daughter and other budding English female artists by allowing them to sketch male models in his library once a week. The Royal Academy prevented women from drawing “undraped” men until 1893 and did not admit women as full members until 1922.12
In London, Ernestine Rose also visited the exiled French feminist Jeanne Deroin. Deroin and her associate, Pauline Roland, had written a letter of solidarity to the 1851 Worcester women’s rights convention that Rose responded to in her main speech there. Roland had died; Deroin “supports herself and her two daughters and son,” Rose told the 1856 Seventh National Convention. “She was educating them herself because she had no means to pay for their education. She filled their minds with noble thoughts and feelings, even to the very sacrifice of themselves for the benefit of the race, and more especially for the elevation of woman, without which she feels convinced that the elevation of man can never be accomplished.” After Rose spoke, the convention passed a resolution in favor of “the supporters of the cause of women in Paris, worthy successors of Pauline Roland and Jeanne Deroin, who, in the face of imperial despotism, dare to tell the truth.”13
Ernestine Rose herself experienced the censorship and surveillance of Emperor Napoleon III’s government permeating French life. Although she and William arrived in Paris in early July, she did not send anything to the Investigator again until late August, when they reached Berlin. “I was advised not to write any article from Paris, as such article not only would be destroyed, but it might be dangerous,” she told her readers, adding that although Holyoake had sent them copies of the Investigator and his Reasoner to Paris, “we received none.” “Paris, with all her beauties … is at present little less than one vast barrack,” she lamented. “The city is full of soldiers… . Nor is this the worst; for at any rate you see them, you know who is near you. But there is a much more formidable army, an espionage, against which you cannot guard except by a dead silence on all subjects connected with freedom.” However, while in Paris, the Roses also “had the pleaure to be introduced into a literary and reformatory circle” where they “spent several evenings together.” “The members are free from all the shackles that fetter humanity,” she explained, “they are universal in their ideas of freedom and rights, and of course perfectly divested from all the superstitions called religion.” In this group, the Roses met Charles Lemonnier, a socialist, freethinker, and feminist, as well as other congenial reformers. But the most important contact was with the Frenchwoman Jenny P. d’Héricourt, who shared Ernestine Rose’s core values of free thought, feminism, anti-slavery, and human rights. D’Héricourt published frequently, opposing “the masters, the nobles, the whites, the men, who have denied, deny, or will deny in the future, that slaves, bourgeois, blacks, and women are born for liberty and equality.”14
Rose described d’Héricourt as “a physician, a woman of noble character, great energy and talents; she is a thorough reformer, particularly for women’s rights and against priests and churches.” Having played an active part in the Revolution of 1848, she belonged to the Society for the Emancipation of Women until the government excluded all members of the female sex from voting, running for political office, and finally, from attending any meeting where politics was discussed. During the early 1850s, d’Héricourt became a certified midwife. By the time she and Rose met, d’Héricourt had become a well-known figure in the international radical community—the same year Rose visited her so did the Russian reformer M. L. Mikhailov. But d’Héricourt remained under government scrutiny: Rose wrote that although she “writes a great deal … no journal in Paris dare publish her articles, so she has them published … in an Italian monthly journal and brought to Paris.”15
For her part, d’Héricourt praised “Mrs. Rose, so justly famous in the United States of America,” as “this admirable woman, who, during her mission of more than twenty years, has braved incredible rigors and dangers of every kind to follow the dictates of her conscience illuminated by reason.” The two women spent time together during Rose’s three weeks in Paris. D’Héricourt then immediately produced her eleven-page “biography” of “Madame Rose,” which appeared in the September 1856 issue of the radical Parisian Revue Philosophique et Religieuse. D’Héricourt could publish pieces in this journal Lemonnier co-edited as long as they did not directly discuss French politics. In addition to her article on Rose, she wrote about the Bible’s discrimination against women.16
D’Héricourt’s portrait is the fullest contemporary account of Rose’s appearance, life, philosophy, and struggles. The piece begins with a detailed description of Rose that emphasizes her gentility and femininity, perhaps to counter the stereotype of the mannish, “strong-minded” feminist. “Mrs. Rose” has “eyes of an extraordinary sweetness,” her voice “never sounds a false or shrill note which might offend a musical ear,” her “small hands are gloved in kidskin and her long skirt barely permits a glimpse of delicate shoes encasing her dainty feet.” D’Héricourt then gives an admiring account of Rose’s beliefs, politics, and goals. “Mrs. Rose’s God is the Living Universe,” d’Héricourt explains, “She is convinced that the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas, and all other books reputed to be divinely inspired are a source of slavery, despotism, intolerance, injustice, and errors; that humanity will never truly advance on the path of the true and the good until it rids itself of this sacred baggage which the past places on its shoulders.” Rose’s politics are “radical”—she believes that “all members of the human race” should have “equal political and social rights.” Although d’Héricourt mentions Rose’s opposition to “black slavery,” she describes her work for female equality in much greater detail.17
The bulk of the article recounts Rose’s early years in Europe and only briefly mentions her time in the United States. D’Héricourt exaggerates the dangers Rose faced—from “the brutality of a people for whom an individual life is at the mercy of the first gun drawn,” which includes “the ferocious instincts of slaveholders who believe they have the right to kill those who speak in favor of blacks” and “ministers of all denominations, and all the believers who do not fail to arm themselves against impiety.” In concluding her article, d’Héricourt also overstates the success of the women’s rights movement in America. She claims that “one hundred thousand women” and “a hundred and fifty thousand men” support “the banner raised by Mrs. Rose,” among them “the intellectual, moral, and political leaders of the country.” She also asserts that “women doctors are now accepted,” that “soon there will be female lawyers,” and that Rose lectured successfully to “seventy-six members of Congress.” It is impossible to say what caused all these distortions. D’Héricourt may have wanted to herald US accomplishments to encourage her countrywomen; she and Rose may have misunderstood each other or had translation problems.18
After they left Paris, the Roses traveled extensively throughout Europe. They spent at least four weeks in Berlin, but Ernestine Rose wrote nothing about Germany. Although she initially hoped to visit Poland, she wrote that it could not “be much gratification to me, except I could find it in a happier condition, or could be instrumental in placing it in one.” There is no evidence that she traveled there, although at some point she did re-establish contact with her father’s family, since she left her estate to his descendants. Her final letter described Italy’s “miserable aspect of idleness, beggary, cruelty, and priests.” After a brief return to Paris, the Roses traveled back to New York from England. This voyage took only twelve days and when the passengers entertained each other on the final evening aboard, Ernestine “spoke on the rights of man as the basis of the rights of woman.”19
Less than two weeks after they returned, she played her usual active role at the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York City. Held at the end of November, the meeting might have been delayed to allow Rose to participate. She spoke frequently and eloquently, sounding familiar themes and displaying no fatigue from her travels. After praising the progress made since 1850—“no other reform ever agitated had gained so much ground in so short a time”—she informed her co-workers about the state of women’s rights in Europe. She then dealt with a seeming contradiction within feminism. A male supporter asserted that men backed women’s rights far more than women themselves did. Rose agreed, first remarking that men were more accustomed to thinking about rights than women. She then argued that “the subject, whenever presented to the mind of woman in its proper light, would not fail to find an echo in her heart.” Although a woman might initially “smile” or “sneer” when asked if she needed rights, if you “put to her a few common-sense questions” about property, child custody, self-government, and voting, “the smile disappeared” and most women would give “an immediate, hearty, and warm assent” to the movement’s demands.20
In her chief address, delivered on the convention’s final evening, Ernestine Rose argued strenuously for US women’s claims to better education, decent jobs, the vote, and legal equality. Comparing male and female development, she sketched how a boy went to college, which prepared him for many fields, “and if he finds one does not answer his purpose, he can change it for another.” In contrast, “the girl, even in the most favorable position,” whose education is finished at sixteen “with her mind undeveloped, her powers uncultivated, without a knowledge of herself or society, imbued with the erroneous idea that her whole and only aim and end in life is to please man” was limited to “the kitchen, the needle, and the school-room.” And “even here on this narrow and constricted platform,” men earned far more than women for the same work.
Urging her audience to give money to support female education rather than male missionary activity, Rose went on to champion women’s suffrage. “I know there is great prejudice against our claim to political rights,” she declared. “It requires a great moral courage … to say to those who believed themselves the only lords of creation, ‘Stand aside; give us space to grow.’ ” She then contrasted the relatively easy “heroism of the battlefield,” which was encouraged and rewarded, to “the amount of moral courage and true heroism” it took “to face the fire of an unjust and prejudiced public opinion, to attack the adamantine walls of long-usurped power, to brave not only the enemy abroad, but often that severest of all enemies, your own friends at home.” That effort demanded “a heroism that the world has never yet recognized, that the battle-field cannot supply, but which woman possesses.” Rose ended on an optimistic note, referring obliquely and modestly to both Frances Wright’s and her own efforts on behalf of women in the 1830s:
To see such an audience before us, listening with evident interest to what we have to say in support of our claims, you cannot realize what it was twenty-five and twenty years ago to call public attention to these wrongs, and prepare the way for such conventions, and such audiences; and yet woman had the moral courage to do it, and do it as fearlessly as now; for though she had nothing else to support her, she had the consciousness of possessing the might of right to sustain her.21
In the course of this speech, Rose felt compelled to raise the issue of prostitution. By the middle of the nineteenth century, respectable women were not supposed to even refer to any aspect of sexuality. But it proved impossible to discuss women’s rights adequately while avoiding all mentions of sexual behavior. Rose had raised the issue of the double standard of sexual morality at the 1853 National in Cleveland; now she argued that the limited number of poorly paid jobs available to women often produced “the last, sad alternative: to sell herself in marriage, or out of it.” Referring sarcastically to men’s supposed “protection” of women, Rose openly discussed prostitution. “Go into your streets at night—look at the wretched beings who wander them, in many cases the only home they possess—and you will have the practical evidence of this protection,” she declared before going on to denounce society’s hypocrisy. “What a bitter mockery it is, to make a being helpless—to tie hand, heart, and head, and tell him that it is from pure affection, so as to have the pleasure of protecting him! [Like most of her contemporaries, Rose used the masculine pronoun to refer to all.] When our opponents ridicule the Woman’s Rights movement—or even with their best feelings, tell us that if woman gets all her rights equal with man, particularly if she should come in contact with him in the forum, at the ballot-box, or in the legislative halls, that she might lose her modesty, innocence, and virtue; do they ever remember that these wretched victims of wrong are women too?”22
Such remarks instantly made the women’s movement notorious. Even though Ernestine Rose and the women’s movement attempted to avoid sexual topics, they were repeatedly charged with endorsing “free love” anyway. In its lead article on this convention, the New York Herald ran the sub-head “Speeches, Rich, Rare and Racy—Free Love Advocated and Endorsed.” Much public opinion conflated women’s rights with “free love” and the article itself stated, “We beg respectfully to inquire the precise difference between Woman’s Rights and Free Love, or where one commences and the other ends?” The charge of “free love”—that is, heedless, animalistic fornication—had been hurled at reformers since the 1820s and was used to discredit any sexual behavior outside of marriage or any mention of such behavior—premarital sex, cohabitation, adultery, prostitution, or divorce—as well as any reference to contraception or abortion. In the late 1850s, a number of women’s rights advocates and their allies felt it essential to raise these issues. This tainted the entire women’s movement to many and was a reason it failed to enlist new members and grow during these years.
Ernestine Rose’s views on sexuality and marriage came from Owenism. Like Owen, she believed that marriage should be a civil rather than a religious ceremony and that divorce should be allowed as long as the desire for it was mutual and any children were provided for. But she knew the “prejudice” and “difficulties” that any mention of divorce would provoke and so avoided the topic until others raised it. The same was true of birth control. Male freethinkers in both Britain and the United States had pioneered publishing contraceptive manuals, believing that it liberated women especially from unwanted pregnancies and from the Christian doctrine that sex within marriage should only be for procreation. Both Rose’s English acquaintance, Richard Carlile, and Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, published birth control guides, the first in 1826, the second in 1831. Gilbert Vale, Rose’s chief supporter when she first came to New York and editor of the free-thought Beacon newspaper, updated Dale Owen’s book in 1858. The Boston Investigator continually advertised these books and sold them very cheaply. By the late 1850s, many other treatises on contraception had been published, chiefly for “the preservation of the wife’s health.”23
It seems likely that Ernestine and William Rose used some form of birth control. They presumably continued to have sexual relations after the early deaths of their two children, but no other pregnancy is known to have resulted. The methods recommended in contemporary manuals—douching, sponges, partial or complete withdrawal, and expensive condoms made from animal intestines—although not completely reliable were better than nothing. But whether she used birth control or not, Rose avoided any public mention of this significant topic because of the avalanche of disapproval she knew would follow. After Robert Dale Owen published his contraceptive manual, the New York Times excoriated him as “A man who … would disgrace the gallows. It is the sentiments and precepts of Carlile … calculated to effect the same fiendish purpose, the destruction of the social compact, and the substitution of promiscuous concubinage.” Dale Owen probably wrote his book in response to his associate Frances Wright’s unwanted pregnancy in the spring of 1830. But Wright herself never spoke publicly about contraception—it was too controversial a subject even for her. When she criticized “ignorant codes of morals” that “condemn one portion of the female sex to vicious excess, and another to a vicious restraint,” she was denounced as “a voluptuous preacher of licentiousness,” a “harlot,” and a “procuress.”24
At the 1858 Free Convention in Rutland, Vermont, the medium Julia Branch made an impassioned speech declaring, “It is the binding marriage ceremony that keeps woman degraded in mental and moral slavery. She must demand her freedom; her right to receive the equal wages of man for her labor; her right to bear children when she will, and by whom she will.” In the ensuing debate, Rose took a strait-laced position, declaring that if Branch “meant to let loose the untamed passions either of men or women; if she meant that, I totally and utterly disagree.” Branch replied that “I did not mean it in that light” and Rose went on to argue that “I for one, have never introduced the question of marriage into our Conventions, because I want to combat in them the injustice of the laws.” Dealing with specific laws, like married women’s property rights, exposed women to far less criticism than any reference, no matter how guarded, to sexual behavior. Instead, Rose proposed adding the words “based on perfect equality” to the convention’s resolution on marriage so that it read “Resolved, That the only true and natural marriage is an exclusive conjugal love based on perfect equality between one man and one woman; the only true home is the isolated home based on this exclusive love.” This resolution passed and Rose asserted that if the laws applied equally to women and men, all inequities “would be righted.”25
Despite Ernestine Rose’s clear support of conventional marriage, the New York Times reported that both she and Branch “go for free love on principle.” Rose immediately wrote the newspaper that “I have never advocated these sentiments, from the simple reason that I do not believe in them.” But this libel persisted. In 1869, the clergyman L. P. Brockett published a book on women in which he wrote: “Mrs. Rose scoffs at marriage, though she herself has been married for thirty years, and declares that each woman is free to choose the father of her children.” The Boston Investigator instantly repudiated these charges on Rose’s behalf. Rose herself wrote from Europe accusing Brockett of “slander,” maintaining that she “never advocated any principles I need be ashamed of,” and asking the Investigator to reprint her 1858 letter to the Times. Brockett agreed to remove her name from his paragraph, but added that he had included her because Rose “had been repeatedly charged with advocacy of these views.”26
In the course of this skirmish, a longtime correspondent to the Investigator defended Rose by reminiscing about a visit they had paid to the Long Island community of Modern Times in the mid-1850s, “when Modern Times was supposed to represent the extreme point of practical Free Love.” At the community, in existence from 1851 to 1857, “the arrangements of marriage were left entirely to the individual men and women,” allowing couples to join up or separate at will. After their trip, her companion asked Ernestine Rose, “ ‘What are now your ideas of Free Love?’ ‘Free Love!’ she replied with ineffable scorn, ‘I see nothing here but animalism! It is quite near to blasphemy to call these disgusting exhibitions of lust by the sacred name of love!’ ” Mrs. Rose “left Modern Times with as deep disgust for that new conservator of Woman’s Rights, Free Love, as she ever manifested for chattel slavery or ecclesiastical despotism,” he reported.27
The commune of Modern Times had been founded by Stephen Pearl Andrews, an eccentric reformer. Before creating this model village, Andrews attempted to turn Texas into an abolitionist territory and then tried to promulgate “phonology,” a shorthand system he hoped might lead to a universal language. He instituted a non-profit, “cost the basis of price” economy at Modern Times and considered the free love principles enacted there to be “the antithesis of enslaved love.” In 1858, the year after the community closed, Andrews raised an equally taboo subject—contraception—at the Eighth National Women’s Rights Convention. He spoke during the opening session to urge that “the vital question of marriage be considered.” After apologizing for having “opinions more radical than those held by this convention,” using terms vague today but clear to his audience, he declared:
One of the dearest rights of woman was that of the maternity of the coming generation, and to change the conditions of that maternity, to experiment, as he would say, and to decide as to the best method of siring and generating the forthcoming population. (Sensation.) Until this radical question was touched the vital point of woman’s rights was not reached.28
That discussion never happened. Martha Wright, Lucretia Mott’s sister, wrote Susan B. Anthony, who had presided, that she was “sorry for all that had been said” because “it is a subject that no Conventional or Legislative action can reach.” Corresponding with a friend who was “full of wrath over Pearl Andrews, and our free platform,” Lucretia Mott asserted, “Never fear for our cause. We can ‘live down’ all the harm that ‘free-love’ or the ‘Maternity-question’ can do us, only let not our faith fail us.” When Ernestine Rose spoke shortly after Andrews at the convention, she made no reference to his remarks. But the issue of “free love” did not go away. In 1869, Rose unsuccessfully opposed a resolution at a women’s rights meeting that asserted that feminists did not support free love—which they had been accused of—on the grounds that it was “in effect a plea of guilty.” “If a man says to me he is not a thief, I would immediately look out for my pocket-book,” she argued. “The prominent workers in this movement have been before the nation a long time, and none dare assert that their moral characters are stained. It was not the thing now … for the women who desired simply equal political rights for their sex to come out and voluntarily declare that they were not prostitutes.”29
Just as any reference to preventing pregnancy provoked the charge of “free love,” so too did the subject of divorce, which is why Ernestine Rose and other US feminists avoided the topic throughout the 1850s. But in Great Britain, the issues of married women’s property rights and divorce became intertwined. When Parliament received the petitions for property rights amassed by the feminists Rose met in London, its members refused to act on them. Instead they amended Britain’s stringent divorce law in 1857. It had mandated that each divorce required a separate act of Parliament, restricting divorce to a few wealthy men. The new law allowed men to divorce their wives for adultery; women who wanted a divorce had to prove adultery plus another crime, like incest, bigamy, or bestiality. The all-male legislature reasoned that since wives could now extricate themselves from the worst situations, they no longer needed property rights within marriage. Rose responded furiously to this maneuver. “The vitiated taste, the unblushing shamelessness exhibited by these civil and ecclesiastical law-givers in thus shielding and fencing around the depravity and corruption of their own sex, to the detriment of ours,” she wrote the Boston Investigator, “far outdoes in impudence the Mormons themselves, and is a disgrace alike to the age, the country, and the sex.”30
In the United States, individual states determined divorce laws, which varied widely. Indiana had very liberal statutes; New England allowed divorce on many grounds; New Yorkers could divorce only for adultery. After passing a strengthened Married Women’s Property Act in the spring of 1860, the Albany legislature considered adding desertion and cruelty as justifications for ending a marriage. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, vehemently opposed this measure, arguing that “my one ground of Divorce [adultery] is that expressly affirmed to be such by Jesus Christ, to the exclusion and negation of all others.” He then denounced Indiana as “the Paradise of free-lovers, where the lax principles of Robert Dale Owen” prevailed. A few months later, at the Tenth National Woman’s Rights Convention in May 1860—the first national woman’s rights meeting she attended—Elizabeth Cady Stanton decided to throw “a bombshell into the center of woman’s degradation” by presenting a series of resolutions advocating divorce. Using terms similar to Greeley’s, but championing the other side, Stanton invoked both gender stereotypes and Christian imagery to support her case. “If in marriage, either party claims the right to stand supreme,” she argued, “to woman, the mother of the race, belongs the sceptre and the crown… . Willingly do we drink the cup in the holy sacrament of marriage in the same faith that the Son of Mary died on Calvary, knowing that from our suffering comes forth a new and more glorious resurrection of thought and life.” The minister Antoinette Brown Blackwell followed Stanton and opposed her, maintaining that since marriage law came from God, it was “sacred and inviolable.” She concluded that couples might separate, but had to live chastely, since anything else would weaken “the true ideal of marriage.”31
Ernestine Rose spoke after Blackwell and finally gave voice to the principles of Robert Owen she had adopted thirty years earlier. Calling Blackwell’s speech “a sermon,” she asserted that marriage is “a human institution, called out by the needs of social, affectional human nature, for human purposes, its objects are, first the happiness of the parties immediately concerned, and secondly, the welfare of society.” This secular, utilitarian approach demanded divorce if a marriage failed to meet these goals. Rose argued that cruelty, desertion, drunkenness, “or any other vice which makes the husband or wife intolerable and abhorrent to the other, ought to be sufficient cause for divorce. I ask for a law of Divorce,” she continued,
so as to secure the real objects and blessings of married life, to prevent the crimes and immoralities now practiced, to prevent “Free Love,” in its most hideous form, such is now carried on but too often under the very name of marriage, where hypocrisy is added to the crime of legalized prostitution. “Free Love,” in its degraded sense, asks for no Divorce law… . I believe in true marriages, and therefore I ask for a law to free men and women from false ones.
Rose concluded by urging society to “educate woman, to enable her to promote her independence, and she will not be obliged to marry for a home and a subsistence.” “Loud applause” greeted her speech.32
But by 1860, the women’s movement itself had begun to subside. In part, charges of “free love” weakened women’s rights. Its advocates also divided over the new spiritualist movement, which grew explosively in these years. Spiritualism provided a powerful feminist alternative to male-dominated churches, giving women an important new role as mediums who could contact dead loved ones. It appealed especially to progressives, since it both rejected traditional religions and supported women’s rights. After Rose and Anthony’s speaking tour south in 1854, they went on to Philadelphia, where they attended a dinner party at Lucretia and James Mott’s house. We had a discussion, “spiritualism as usual being the principal topic,” Anthony wrote in her diary. She and Sarah Grimké had “an intuitive feeling that we were not to cease when the body dies.” Ernestine Rose, “believing the spirit inseparable from the body, of course, was on the unbelieving side,” she wrote. At the 1858 Rutland Free Convention, spiritualism dominated. Its adherents could lecture as long as they wanted, while non-spiritualists were limited to ten minutes each. Two female “trance speakers” closed the first evening session with lengthy talks presumably dictated to them by “the spirit world.” Later that summer, Rose furiously denounced spiritualism in print for being “as foolish in sentiment as it is false in principle and pernicious in practice.” “I dislike to have to do with ghosts,” she wrote a few months later, since “there is not substance enough in them to form an idea from, or to base an opinion on. The subject is too slippery; it is like a live eel.”33
By the late 1850s, the growing pressures over issues leading to the Civil War—from the Dred Scott decision reinforcing slavery to struggles over Kansas being a free or slave state—helped weaken the women’s rights movement. Conventions became increasingly tedious and repetitive. “At this stage of the proceedings, whatever branch of the subject connected with Woman’s Rights I speak upon, I necessarily repeat some of the ideas that already have been advanced,” Rose stated at the 1856 National, “yet it is necessary to do so, as I doubt not that there are some here … who have not been at previous meetings.” The organizers decided to forgo gathering in 1857. “We should let Conventions ‘slide’ this year,” Lucretia Mott wrote Lucy Stone. “We have had so many, & such a repetition of the same speakers, that I fear they are costing more than they come to—.” They scheduled the next meeting for May 1858, during the “Anniversary Week” celebrating abolitionism, in the hopes of attracting a larger audience. But nothing worked. Attendance declined; participants were either true believers or opponents who came to heckle. Stalwart activists often droned on too long. Sarah Grimké lost the audience at the Eighth National in 1858. “Why it was dreadful,” Martha Wright wrote Lucretia Mott, “sheet after sheet closely written and monotonously read till all who were awake were out of all patience. Such helpless looks as passed around the platform.” Organizers decided not to publish these proceedings, instead printing The Woman’s Rights Almanac of 1858. Containing Facts, Statistics, Arguments, Records of Progress, and Proofs of the Need of It. The most impressive part of this thirty-five-page pamphlet was its title: it consisted of a jumble of ill-assorted paragraphs, with little on women’s rights. Half its pages reproduced charts giving the phases of the moon.34
The Ninth National in 1859 met for only a single day. Audiences called out for different speakers, including Ernestine Rose, but also disrupted Rose’s lecture, where she repeated points from 1856. Attending the 1860 Tenth National, a sympathetic female reporter wrote that “I felt much dashed in spirits. The speaker was declaiming in a monotonous voice, a most logical but dreary speech … which consisted in enumerating … why woman is entitled to the same natural rights as man … the same things in substance, that have been said, and resaid, and said again, year after year, in these conventions.” An Eleventh National one-day convention was supposed to meet on May 9, 1861, and was advertised as late as May 1, even though civil war had been declared on April 12. The organizers canceled the convention at the last minute and did not schedule another until the war ended.35
Ernestine Rose consistently argued that women’s rights and free thought constituted a single cause, although this made her “a minority of one” in both arenas. Freethinkers attempted to revive their stalled movement in the late 1850s, with little success. In 1857, ten years after their last national meeting, “the friends of Mental Liberty” convened in Philadelphia. Too ill to attend, Rose was occasionally cited during the proceedings, chiefly for wanting the group to meet in New York. Only forty-nine people signed on as members and arranged to meet again in Philadelphia, which had replaced New York as the center of organized free thought in the United States. Ernestine Rose attended in 1858 and 1860 and remained the only woman who spoke, although she did so infrequently. These conventions followed familiar patterns, as freethinkers lamented religious faith, debated a constitution, and passed numerous resolutions impossible to fulfill. From their 1857 revival on, these Infidel Conventions proved to be as numbingly formulaic as previous ones.36
Ernestine Rose, however, continued her individual battles against religion. In November 1857, she published a furious letter denouncing a New York minister who had blamed those who lost money in the recent financial panic for not having enough “faith in God” and “breaking ‘God’s Sabbath.’ ” “From this same reasoning,” Rose sneered, “every one who goes in a mail steamer and breaks ‘God’s Sabbath’ on the ocean, must be a criminal too, then it is quite right they should all get drowned.” “Enough of this pious trash,” she concluded. But Rose had difficulty attracting an audience. Her “Sunday lectures” on the merits of religious belief and disbelief, biblical heroes, and the moral life were “concluded for the present” in 1858, since “they did not receive the attention expected, or that might have been given.” The Thomas Paine celebrations also declined. When she first attended in 1840, more than 800 freethinkers participated; by the years before the Civil War that number had dwindled to just under 200. Ernestine Rose continued to be the event’s chief speaker until its final New York meeting in 1861. Her lectures followed her usual trajectory of extolling Paine and denouncing his critics, but in 1859 she raised a new international cause célèbre, the Mortara Case. A six-year-old Italian Jewish boy had been taken from his family by the pope’s police because a servant had given him an “emergency baptism” when he was sick. The pope, who still governed parts of Italy as well as the church, ruled that the boy need not be returned to his Jewish family since the baptism made him a Catholic. Mortara provided Rose with fresh ammunition against religion. Criticizing the “despotic government” of Rome, she quickly segued to religious interference in American life. “The Constitution has divorced that unnatural marriage—the union of Church and State—but by government it is reunited,” she declared. “In Washington chaplains’ pray[ers] open Congress, while the members prey upon the people; our State governors issue out annual mandates for fasts, feasts, and thanksgiving over roast turkeys, which is quite an improvement on the ‘Pope’s bulls,’ for it is certainly pleasanter to roast a turkey than to be roasted.”37
Ernestine Rose never divided free thought, women’s rights, and anti-slavery into separate causes, seeing them all as part of one great struggle for human rights and freedom. In her 1858 Paine speech, she made this unity clear. After praising the Declaration of Independence, she stated that “as long as woman was forced to pay taxes without the right to representation—as long as the colored man is transformed into a piece of chattel because his face is darker than his owner—as long as an honest, conscientious avowal of a disbelief in the fashionable superstition called religion is a crime,” the Declaration remained “a dead letter.” During these years, Rose spoke only infrequently on the struggles leading to the Civil War. At the 1857 Paine dinner, she denounced “the cowardly, dastardly” beating “in our own Senate” of “the heroic Charles Sumner” by a southerner outraged by his criticism of the attempts to make Kansas a slave state. Late in 1859, she mentioned John Brown’s recent execution for trying to foment a slave uprising in Virginia. “I said that if the Harper’s Ferry insurrection was to be regretted,” she wrote the Investigator, “the cause that produced it was infinitely more so, and I greatly feared we would have to regret many more unhappy results springing from the same miserable cause” of slavery. She consistently supported “Disunion,” maintaining that slavery contaminated not only slaveholders but also the “falsely so-called free states” of the North. “I say falsely so-called,” she declared to an Antislavery Convention in 1855,
for if they were truly free, there would be no slavery in this country… . [F]reedom and slavery can no more exist together than truth and falsehood. It is all true or all false; all free or all slave, and as we are not all free, we are all slaves and we are all slaveholders to some extent; at any rate in aiding and abetting, unless we raise our voice against it and use the utmost efforts in our power to disunite, to break that unholy Union—of wickedness, of crime, of sin, and of shame. A Union of freedom and slavery cannot exist any more than fire and water.38
By endorsing this uncompromising position, Rose allied herself with the most extreme wing of the abolitionist movement. As war drew closer, she became even more militant, appearing at anti-slavery rallies, including one at Boston in October 1860, where she was placed on the Executive Committee, and another at Albany in February 1861. In her final Paine address, given in late January 1861, after Lincoln’s election and South Carolina’s push for secession, Ernestine Rose condemned any union of the free North and the slave South as “a Union with a vengeance; like that of husband and wife; with all the rights on one side and all the penalties on the other.” On the eve of the war, she embraced the struggle to come—in part because the rebellion had been led by South Carolina, which she had despised since her 1847 visit there. “South Carolina set up an independent empire!” she exclaimed to the 1861 Paine audience. “For my part, I would give her a passport to Heaven to keep her away from us. But whether the South is allowed to drift to her downward destiny, or forced into submission, let the watchword be ‘No more compromise!’ ”39 Embracing the coming Civil War, she did not realize how much it would harm the causes she held dear.