8

The Heroine of a Hundred Battles

ERNESTINE ROSE’S TRAVELS to restore her health succeeded. After eighteen months of recuperation, during which she continued to write public letters, she remained surprisingly active throughout most of her sixties. For most of the 1870s, she effectively supported both free thought and feminism by participating in numerous meetings where she often made speeches. She also dedicated herself to the cause of peace, attending three European conferences. In addition, she made a host of new friends in England. And she continued to send many letters across the Atlantic, most to the Boston Investigator, but also to the National Woman Suffrage Association and especially to Susan B. Anthony. She remained a public personage both in the United States and Western Europe.

Initially, “Mrs. Rose was forced to try a complete change of air, by advice of her physicians,” wrote The Revolution. “She came abroad, therefore, both for change and rest.” A week after the couple’s ship docked in France, they went to Luxeuil-les-Bains, a spa first developed by the Romans. Rose found it “the most curious and interesting town I have ever seen” and her health improved from “its various springs of hot and cold waters.” Luxeuil had a reputation for aiding women with gynecological problems, but Ernestine Rose only referred to its “benefit” for “poor, miserable dyspeptics, and Americans in particular.” Her own few stomach problems stemmed from seasickness, but the hot springs almost certainly helped her rheumatism. Even in Luxeuil, Rose encountered Europeans who “knew my name and heretical proclivities, which gave rise to very interesting conversations and discussions on religion and Women’s Rights,” she wrote the Investigator.¹

After Luxeuil, the Roses traveled to Lake Lucerne in the Swiss Alps before wintering at Nice in the south of France. Kate N. Doggett, a feminist Chicago friend of Ernestine’s, visited there in February 1870. Both Doggett and Rose had been selected by the National Woman Suffrage Association to be delegates to the Women’s Industrial Conference in Berlin in the fall of 1869, but only Doggett had attended. From Nice, Doggett reported to The Revolution that Ernestine Rose’s “friends will be glad to know that she is much better than when she left America last spring,” adding that Rose planned to return the following year. “As I looked into her bright eyes and saw the color deepen in her cheeks as she talked in her animated way of the good cause she has by no means relinquished on this side of the Atlantic,” Doggett wrote, “I could hardly persuade myself she was an invalid. She has nerve power now to supply a dozen average women, or men either, for that matter.” The Roses and Doggett attempted to cross the Alps to visit Turin in northern Italy, but freezing winds forced them to return. “I wish to record the fact, for I think the mistral is the only obstacle by which Ernestine L. Rose was ever vanquished,” Doggett concluded.²

That spring, the Roses visited Paris for seven weeks, “seeing some of the foremost men and women in the reformatory movements.” They renewed their acquaintance with Charles Lemonnier and Charles Fauvety, radical editors whom they had met in 1856, as well as being introduced to the new women’s rights activists Léon Richer and André Leo (Léodile Champseix). Then, since Ernestine had “not been very well since we left Nice,” the couple visited Bad Homburg in Germany “to try what its famous waters will do for me.”³ The Roses continued their travel to spas by spending the winter of 1870–71 in Bath, England, famous for its hot springs and mineral waters. They despised it. “Every denomination can be found in Bath, but I greatly fear not one freethinker,” Ernestine wrote the Investigator. “Is it not sad to see human beings so stupefied?”

Rose also disliked Bath because “we have no company, no friends, no acquaintances, and are not likely to have,” adding that “in London we have quite a number of friends, but here we are entire strangers.” The Roses were a gregarious couple, easily connecting with fellow reformers and liberals. Ernestine Rose maintained a number of friendships with US feminists, among them Anthony, Stanton, and Pauline Wright Davis, who visited her twice in London in the early 1870s.⁴ But a number of close American friends began to die during these years. Rose lamented the “sad news that James Thompson was no more,” explaining that “he was our oldest and most intimate friend in New York … and now we would be almost strangers in the city we have spent the best part of our lives—nearly 35 years.” An English immigrant like the Roses, Thompson had often helped William Rose organize the Thomas Paine dinners and was a noted chess master.⁵ In the 1870s, however, these losses were balanced by their new transatlantic friends.

In London, the Roses already knew the free-thought Owenite editor, George Jacob Holyoake, from their 1856 visit. They soon became fond of his brother Austin, who shared their values. Austin Holyoake, a printer and author, warmly remembered how the Roses had “kindly made daily calls upon me” during his illness in the summer of 1872. He had also taught the English feminist Emily Faithfull how to set type, which allowed her to found the all-female Victoria Press. She became a correspondent to The Revolution and in 1871 she reported on Ernestine Rose’s first “very telling” public speech in Bath on the issue of women voting for and serving on local boards of education.⁶

Parliament had recently passed a law allowing women who owned or rented property and had paid taxes for a year to vote and stand for office in many local elections. While the United States then restricted the suffrage by gender and age, Great Britain added home ownership or rental and tax payments to those requirements. Under them only about one-third of adult men qualified to vote in national elections. The Roses went to the first meeting in Bath to nominate female candidates for the School Board. Although many women attended, none spoke to the audience. “A lady” asked the chairman to read a widely publicized letter by Angela Burdett-Coutts, the wealthiest woman in England and a major philanthropist. Burdett-Coutts argued forcefully that although women could serve on subcommittees, they should neither hold public office nor participate in politics. This roused Ernestine Rose to address the gathering.

In 1870, women spoke publicly far less often in Great Britain than in the United States. “It required considerable courage then for a woman to sit on a public platform and actually to speak from one was considered almost indecent,” writes an English historian. Rose began by explaining that “I have for all my life-time been interested in the education of all parties, particularly in the education of my own sex.” She then asserted, “Yes, the world moves. Woman is actually beginning to be considered as a human being … who has influences beyond the boudoir, the ball-room, and the theatre, for those, until very recently, have been the only places assigned to her except the kitchen and the cradle.” Supported by cheers, applause, and approving laughter from the audience, Rose argued that the United States could educate Britain on this subject:

There it is almost a settled fact that woman is a human being; that she has a mind, and that that mind requires cultivation; that she has wants and needs, which wants and needs require assistance. Hence, we are over there—don’t be frightened at the name—a “woman’s rights” people … and remember that “woman’s rights” simply means “human rights.”

Rose swayed the meeting, which then nominated two women to run for positions on the board. Finding them “quite unprepared with any plan for future action,” Rose encouraged these candidates to hold another meeting where they would state their views. Overcoming their dislike of “the publicity of such a course,” Rose gave another “one of her stirring and eloquent addresses, which roused the meeting to a pitch of enthusiasm quite unusual for a decorous English audience.” The two women were then elected.⁷ A few weeks later, Rose spoke at a Conference of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in London, receiving praise from the atheist National Reformer: “The speech of the meeting was made by … Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose of New York. The good old lady, with her white curls, her erect, healthy looking body, her clear, distinct voice, her occasional quaint phrases, her stern determination, and her real genius as a speaker, won from those present a far more hearty and lengthy tribute of applause than was accorded to any one else.”⁸

These speeches launched Ernestine Rose as a lecturer in Great Britain, as well as introducing her to numerous new reformist friends. One of the female nominees in Bath was Ann Ashworth, a member of a large radical family. Her uncle, the Liberal M.P. Jacob Bright, succeeded in getting the bill for women’s local suffrage passed, in addition to supporting married women’s property rights and women’s national suffrage. Her aunt was Priscilla Bright McLaren, head of the Edinburgh Women’s Suffrage Society.⁹ In the spring of 1871, Rose spoke in Bristol as well as again in Bath before she and William moved to London in April. The editor of the National Reformer, who covered Rose’s women’s rights speech there so positively, was Charles Bradlaugh. He, and later his two daughters, became close friends and supporters of Ernestine Rose.

Bradlaugh and Rose knew about each other before they met, through the pages of the Boston Investigator, which covered both their careers in detail. A generation younger than Rose, Bradlaugh became an atheist as a teenager and by the mid-1850s had achieved prominence among English radicals. He spoke and wrote widely, often under the pseudonym “Iconoclast.” Like Rose, Bradlaugh was a superb public speaker. “He was the most magnetic person I have ever known, and the greatest orator,” playwright George Bernard Shaw later wrote; “Bradlaugh was the heavy-weight champion of the platform.”¹⁰ He became editor of the weekly National Reformer in 1860 and helped found Britain’s National Secular Society in 1866. The government prosecuted him for blasphemy and sedition in 1868. Although he was acquitted, his reputation as an atheist, a republican, and an agitator placed him outside traditional Victorian values. “As a mere speculative freethinker, Mr. Bradlaugh might possibly have passed muster,” The Times of London wrote when he had been elected to the House of Commons in 1880, “but as a social reformer, with republican opinions and a very aggressive mode of displaying them he is thought to be deserving of Parliamentary ostracism.” These beliefs, which made him unacceptable to The Times, endeared him to Ernestine Rose. “She was greatly attached to Mr. Bradlaugh, who in turn felt a thorough admiration and reverence for her,” his daughter wrote.¹¹

When the Roses moved to London in 1871, they also were befriended by Moncure D. Conway and his wife, Ellen. Conway was a radical minister who invited Ernestine Rose to speak a number of times at his extremely liberal South Place Chapel. Raised in a slaveholding Virginia family, he rejected his heritage early on, converting to both anti-slavery and Unitarianism in his twenties. In 1864 he and his wife, who shared his views, moved to London and in 1868 he was one of four speakers at the first British public meeting for female suffrage. In addition to women’s rights, Conway shared Rose’s devotion to Robert Owen and Thomas Paine. He moved his chapel away from Unitarianism to “the uttermost ends of Agnosticism,” dropping formal prayer and reading from a variety of works, including Hindu scriptures and the poems of William Blake. Conway invited Rose to speak to his congregation about Robert Owen on Sunday, May 14, 1871, and wrote the Investigator that she was “something of a lioness in London.” For her talk, the chapel “was crowded with a thousand people … and so completely did she charm the audience that three times applause began, and had to be checked.”¹²

Rose’s lecture took place on the actual centenary of Owen’s birth; two days later a large “Festival” assembled to celebrate his life. Although many women attended, sang, and read poetry there, Ernestine Rose was the only female speaker. Owen was a “man of one idea, and that idea the happiness of the human race,” she declared. “The time will come when that one idea will be understood,” she continued, adding that “I have no doubt that he would have advocated the Woman’s Rights Bill had he lived.” After reminiscing about her years with Owen and praising his character and beliefs, she concluded by asserting that when the world followed Owen’s principles, “we shall have a race of really superior, rational, healthy, and happy human beings.” London liberal newspapers reported that “Mrs. Rose made the speech of the evening—the most appropriate one and the best delivered,” while Moncure Conway wrote that “the enthusiasm at her burning words, her fine sarcasm, her clear statement was so great that the people pressed nearer and nearer, and fairly stood up. … In voice and manner she is one of the very few real orators I have ever heard.” The following summer, Conway wrote that “some recent speeches of hers on the woman question have drawn about her such troops of admiring friends, that it is to be feared that she and her excellent husband will find it difficult to go home again.”¹³

In fact, the Roses did remain in England, returning to the United States only for a visit in 1873–74. They never provided a complete explanation, and in her first years abroad, Ernestine made a number of contradictory statements on the subject. At the Owen centenary, she declared, “I am not an American, although I have my residence in the United States”—despite the fact that she had become a US citizen just before leaving for Europe. A few months later, The Revolution reported that Mrs. Rose “intends to remain abroad a year longer, when she will return to her American home.” In 1876, Rose wrote Susan B. Anthony to “keep a warm place for me with the American people. I hope some day to be there yet.” Her most complete rationale for living in England came at the end of 1870, in a letter to the Boston Investigator. “When you hire an apartment, (large or small), the people of the house engage to keep house for you without any extra charges,” she wrote, adding that the couple lived in two large, well-furnished rooms, with “fire and gas, and all kinds of services.” These included having the rooms cleaned, cooking food the Roses had purchased, and serving meals when and how they wished. “Thus we have all the real comfort of housekeeping without the trouble of it, or servants, and our expenses for living” were far less than in New York—$11 a week instead of $35. Never having employed a servant in the United States, the Roses were understandably reluctant to hire one in England. Yet they were getting on in years, and housework demanded a great deal of time and energy. US boarding houses required communal eating at set times and usually provided only a single room to live in. The “mode of living” she described “is peculiar to England only,” Rose explained. “You cannot live the same way on the Continent, though you can live reasonable [sic] in many places.”¹⁴

The Roses had a fair amount of money during their first two years in Europe, when they visited expensive spas and lived in tourist destinations such as Nice and Bath. This lifestyle continued through the summer of 1871, when they traveled to the mountain resorts of Petersthal in Germany and Lausanne in Switzerland. But the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871, and the equally great but less well-known Boston Fire of November 1872 hurt the Roses’ finances. The couple had invested heavily in real estate lost in these conflagrations. In 1873, Charles Bradlaugh wrote that he regretted “to hear that the bulk of the property belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Rose had been swept away in the late disastrous fires in Boston and Chicago,” while in 1876, Ernestine Rose told the Boston Investigator that “as you know, the Chicago and Boston fires have crippled our means.”¹⁵ These losses made the relatively lower costs of living in London all the more important. The missing factor in these explanations for their life in England remains William Rose. William had been born in London and lived there until he was twenty-three, when he and his new wife emigrated to New York. Did he want to return to his native land? It is impossible to say, as no letter or remark by him remains from these years. Ernestine’s mentions of him in her letters only deal with his health or send his “kind regards” to their friends.

Ernestine Rose occasionally commented on the differences between the two nations, although she consistently maintained that “neither in America nor England are the obstacles to free thought and free speech removed, and Liberalism triumphant.” But in terms of government, Great Britain could not match the United States. Although royal power had diminished, a conservative monarch still reigned. The House of Lords held equal power with the House of Commons and British class divisions carried far more weight than those in the United States. Rose consistently championed American democracy, writing this on the centennial of the US Declaration of Independence in 1876: “The glorious day upon which human equality was first proclaimed ought to be commemorated … until its grand principles are carried into practice.” Compared to the promise of the United States, England remained retrograde. “I see not much to admire in the English Government, though there are some very good people here,” she wrote later. “But, you know, I am a republican or a democrat all through, and so as I ‘put no faith in princes’ nor priests either, I am deeply interested in all the affairs of America… . [M]‌ay kings and tyrants soon learn from its grand example that the only true or legitimate power to rule is in the PEOPLE and not in any pretended ‘right Divine.’ ”¹⁶ Both nations continued to be extremely religious, but only Great Britain maintained a state church. “The Church of England would, if she could, stamp out every vestige of Free Thought rather than give up her strong hold on the State,” Rose wrote in 1877. The British government prosecuted both Holyoake and Bradlaugh for blasphemy and convicted the editor of The Freethinker for that crime in 1883. He served a year in prison.¹⁷

Still, British free thought grew dramatically under Bradlaugh’s leadership in the 1860s and 1870s. His National Secular Society came to have thousands of members meeting weekly in numerous Halls of Science. In 1872, the American reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a friend of Ernestine Rose, attended a London meeting of the Society where Bradlaugh spoke, followed briefly by Rose. He described a group of about 1,500 people “in the grasp of a born orator. … Nine-tenths were men; almost all were well-dressed. They looked as if all classes might be represented there, and while the majority were plainly artisans, I was afterward told that a peer of the realm stood just behind me.” In addition, Bradlaugh’s National Reformer, established in 1860, became Britain’s premier and longest-running free-thought journal, achieving a position similar to that of the Boston Investigator in the United States. By the time Rose joined the British free-thought movement, biblical criticism and debates about Darwinism, churchly intransigence, and the growth of skepticism had created a congenial community of non-believers in England.¹⁸

In addition to championing free thought, Rose supported the related cause of opening secular institutions on Sundays. Early-nineteenth-century British sabbath societies had succeeded in forcing museums, galleries, and post offices to close on that day, as well as banning public music, dancing, theater, horse-racing, sailing, and rowing. This produced the notoriously tedious English Sunday—“this lugubrious holiday” as the Boston Investigator termed it.¹⁹ In 1873, both Ernestine Rose and Moncure Conway contributed “some able words toward the laudable object of opening a large Museum on Sundays”—the Bethnal Green Museum, located in a working-class area of London. The next year, Rose sent the Investigator remarks that P. A. Taylor made on this subject in the House of Commons. “It is an excellent and unanswerable speech, which was listened to with great attention and warmly applauded, and yet lost by a great majority” she wrote, because “the power of the Church is very great here, and the members have not the moral courage to go against the theological Mr. Grundies.” Rose went on to praise Taylor as “an independent member of the most radical type,” and both he and his wife, the feminist Mentia Taylor, became her friends.²⁰

The Taylors had long been active in the same radical causes as the Roses. In his parliamentary campaign, P. A. Taylor advocated the separation of church and state and the abolition of mandatory taxes to support the Church of England. Both the Taylors actively opposed US slavery. Wealthy and childless, the couple ran a school for working-class adults on the grounds of their home, Aubrey House, where they also hosted salons “open to all, friend and stranger, black and white, rich and poor,” as Louisa May Alcott wrote after she visited in 1873. George Jacob Holyoake attended their “open evenings” from 1861 on.²¹ Ernestine Rose met Mentia Taylor either through one of these mutual friends or in the English women’s suffrage movement, which Taylor had helped to found. Mentia Taylor organized the petition for the women’s vote, which John Stuart Mill, the writer and philosopher, presented repeatedly and unsuccessfully to Parliament during his 1866–68 term as a member. Mill’s feminist prestige increased with the publication of his Subjection of Women in 1869; Ernestine Rose referred positively to him and P. A. Taylor in her 1871 Owen centenary speech. But Mill also caused problems within the early women’s movement by insisting that it proceed slowly and focus only on the single issue of suffrage.²²

This stricture arose because of a British feminist campaign that had no American equivalent. In the 1860s, Parliament passed the Contagious Diseases Acts to protect the military from venereal disease. These acts gave police the power to subject any woman in towns near military bases whom they suspected of being a prostitute to a pelvic exam in the station. If they found evidence of disease, the woman could be sent to a locked hospital; men were never inspected. Numerous English feminists, including Mentia Taylor, joined the Ladies’ National Campaign for the repeal of these acts, which did not happen until 1886. Even though Mill himself testified against these acts in Parliament, he and others insisted that this campaign, which necessarily raised sexual issues, would contaminate women’s bid for the vote. They succeeded in having Contagious Diseases activists removed as officers of the suffrage movement.²³

Ernestine Rose never became involved in the Contagious Diseases campaign. Throughout her life, she avoided most public references to sexuality, correctly believing it would lead to the charge of supporting “free love.” She also did not support this campaign because it invoked Christian beliefs and prayer even more than the US anti-slavery movement had done. Neither did she participate in the simultaneous push for married women’s property rights in Britain. Instead, Rose focused on the ballot, as she had during her last years in the United States. American opposition to the woman’s vote came naturally from conservative opponents, but also from feminists’ allies—those abolitionists who put “the black man’s vote” first. A similar situation prevailed in Britain, where many liberals working to extend the franchise to male citizens refused to include women. William Gladstone, the longtime Liberal Party prime minister, consistently opposed woman’s suffrage on the grounds that it would “trespass upon the delicacy, the purity, the refinement, the elevation of her own nature, which are the present sources of its power.” US feminists sometimes assumed that as a powerful female monarch, Queen Victoria would support their cause. The experience of Kate, Lady Amberley, among many others, proved this false. Amberley, who had visited the United States and remained in contact with women’s rights leaders there, argued for the vote on the same grounds as Ernestine Rose, asserting that the ballot would “make the life of a woman of the higher and lower classes more complete, less dependent … and give her the chance of leading an honest and happy life.” In a furious response, Victoria wrote, “The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write or join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights’ with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety. Lady Amberley ought to get a good whipping.” Many Britons shared these feelings, especially members of Parliament. In 1871, the M.P. Alexander Beresford Hope argued at length against enfranchising women, concluding that if it were done, “Our legislation would develop hysterical and spasmodic features, partaking more of the French and American system than reproducing the tradition of the English Parliament.”²⁴

Ernestine Rose repeatedly challenged Beresford Hope, first at a large London women’s suffrage meeting in May 1872 where she pursued “the subject in a vein of pleasant irony which would not have caused that Hon. Gentleman quite so much amusement as it did the audience,” the London Telegraph reported. She continued her attack during her time lecturing in Edinburgh in January of 1873 where she had been invited by Priscilla Bright McLaren, aunt of the candidate Rose had aided in Bath.²⁵ Rose mentioned that Beresford Hope opposed women’s suffrage in part because it would “bring sympathy and consolation into parliament.” “Mr. Beresford Hope; alas! What was in a name! he was exceedingly hopeless,” Rose joked, before asserting that fearing sympathy in Parliament was “exceedingly illogical.” This comment was a reference to parliamentary arguments that women should not be allowed to vote because they were “not logical.” “I am not going to stand here and prove that I am logical,” Rose declared. “The franchise was never given for logic. Had it been based upon logic, I doubt whether that member of Parliament would ever have been in his place.” Her remarks occasioned “great laughter and applause.” Rose went on to make points she had frequently used in her American speeches, maintaining that men and women should have equal human rights. She concluded by tackling the widely accepted view that “woman, if she got the franchise, would cease to be womanly”:

She might become stronger in mind, more faithful in convictions; she might become more intellectual; she might take a greater and wider view of the duties and responsibilities of life; but would that unsex her? Would that change her nature? Would she be less a mother, less a sister, less a woman? No! Believe, trust in the right, do rightly, do justly, and leave all the consequences to themselves. (Loud applause.)

Rose repeated these points more briefly in speeches made over the next two days, asserting that she demanded justice for women “simply because she asked for it for men” and urging “those present to do all they could to elevate not women merely, but humanity at large.”²⁶

The US women’s suffrage movement mentioned Ernestine Rose frequently, and American feminists kept appointing her to offices, hoping she might soon return. She remained on the National Woman Suffrage Association’s (NWSA) Executive Committee and was designated its chairwoman in 1870 as well as being listed as a vice president of the New York State Suffrage Association. They placed her on the Committee of Arrangements for the 1870 “Decade Meeting” celebrating the “twentieth anniversary of a great national movement for freedom.” She signed the Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States, issued by the NWSA on the centennial of the Declaration of Independence and was listed as a vice president in the 1876 Constitution of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Rose appreciated these accolades. “I am glad to see my name among the vice-presidents of the National Association,” she wrote Susan B. Anthony.²⁷

The editors of the Boston Investigator often mentioned Rose as well. Rose and Horace Seaver had put their 1864 battle over antisemitism completely behind them. In 1873, Austin Holyoake wrote that the Roses spoke to him “of the devotedness, the self-sacrifice, and the untiring energy of both Mr. Mendum and Mr. Seaver. Mr. and Mrs. Rose have been intimate friends of both gentlemen for years, and they say that more worthy members of society do not exist in the States.” As well as publishing all of Ernestine Rose’s letters, the Investigator’s editors periodically praised her contributions to the US women’s movement and deplored her exclusion from its tributes. “Certain it is that when the Woman’s Rights Party, of which she was almost or quite the originator, count up their jewels, she seldom if ever shines among them in their papers,” they wrote in 1870, criticizing The Revolution; “but to omit her name from the catalogue, is like playing Hamlet with the character of Hamlet left out.” The Investigator repeatedly argued that Rose was ignored because she “is not a Christian, and for this reason is not appreciated by her sex as her merits deserve. … At present, all bigotry is not confined to the masculine gender.”²⁸

The Investigator also reported frequently on Rose’s health, hoping that “it may soon be fully restored, so that when she returns home she may be able to pursue the useful mission of social and religious reform to which her life has been constantly and successfully devoted.” From her departure in June 1869 through the summer of 1871, Rose wrote about her ailments, particularly her rheumatism. But from then on, she mentioned no health problems and spoke more frequently in Britain. In July 1873, the Investigator announced that the Roses had bought steamship tickets to return to the states, adding, “They were in tolerably good health, and had found many friends in England where they had enjoyed a very agreeable city and country residence. Our readers will join with us in wishing them a pleasant and a safe passage home.”²⁹ When the couple arrived in September, the editors expressed their pleasure at the return “of these well-known and much esteemed Liberal friends, after their long absence in Europe. ‘Welcome home.’ ” The Roses seem to have intended to live in the United States, but their situation changed dramatically in November when Ernestine fell “seriously ill” with an unnamed malady. “She has not been able to leave her room for some weeks, or even to sit up long at a time,” the Investigator wrote. “We sincerely hope that her sickness may not prove fatal.”³⁰

Ernestine Rose slowly recovered, but her illness contributed to the Roses’ decision to return to England for good. By January 1874 she became able to write letters again from New York City, sending greetings to the NWSA Convention in Washington, DC, as well as articles and letters to the Boston Investigator. She detailed the views of Sir James Stansfeld, a radical M.P. friend, who supported votes for women as well as non-religious schools, rare then in Britain. “I am very much interested, as you well know,” Rose wrote, “in secular education and woman’s suffrage, and perhaps some of your readers might be interested in seeing that these two great Reforms are gaining ground in England.” (Neither would be achieved until the twentieth century.) A week later, Charles Bradlaugh, then on a speaking tour of the United States, wrote the National Reformer that the Roses met him when he arrived in New York City. Remarking that the sixty-four-year-old Ernestine’s “page of life was nearly filled,” he added that “Mr. and Mrs. Rose intend to make England their permanent abode, and I trust that returning health may enable the heroine of a hundred battles to sometimes gratify us with her presence at the New Hall of Science” in London.³¹

The Roses spent the spring of 1874 winding up their affairs in the United States. In May, Ernestine Rose spoke at her last American convention, the Sixth Annual meeting of the National Woman Suffrage Association in New York City. On the first day, Rose declared that “suffrage was the true right of woman, and to refuse it to her was an injustice which men were not able to defend.” She then told the group that “ill-health would prevent her from ever again appearing in public, and on retiring she was roundly applauded.” On the convention’s second day, she gave “a short but impressive address.” The male speaker who preceded her declared that women were essentially different from men. Rose vehemently disagreed, asserting that just as it “was very difficult to make European monarchs recognize the fact that they were not better than the people for whose purpose they were instituted,” so it was “equally difficult to inspire into men’s minds the idea that women were other than their help-mates, and were not created for the same glorious destiny.” Let men make “whatever laws they pleased, but let them make them alike for men and women. What right had men to make laws” for women anyway, she then asked rhetorically. “The laws were as binding on her as on man, and all she asked was participation in their formation.” Assessing the overall impact of the US women’s movement, Ernestine Rose declared, “The wonder was not that they had not accomplished more, but that they had accomplished so much.”³²

Before the Roses left for England in June, they donated four oil paintings depicting Thomas Paine, Robert Owen, Willam Rose, and Ernestine Rose to hang in Paine Hall, a major new edifice built as the Investigator’s headquarters in Boston. The Roses, “always ready to lend a helping hand in every good work, and who, though in another part of the world, are interested in all Liberal measures going on at home,” contributed to this project, which was completed when a wealthy California investor gave Mendum and Seaver land to fund it. The building’s cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1874, over a box containing photographs, including one of Ernestine Rose, to “inform the Liberals of 1974 or 2000” that “we met … to honor Thomas Paine.” Rose immediately wrote back from London, congratulating the editors “and through you, all friends of progress” and hoping that they might “live to see many more temples dedicated to freedom and humanity.” Paine Hall was inaugurated on January 29, 1875, the anniversary of Thomas Paine’s birthday, and Ernestine Rose wrote regretting that she and William could not attend the ceremony. “But that cannot be, though perhaps if the Atlantic were as accommodating to us as the Red Sea is said to have been to ‘the children of Israel,’ we might cross over and arrive just in time to take you all by surprise. But as we do not belong to ‘the household of faith,’ we cannot expect such a watery miracle on our behalf.” However, their portraits—described as those of “Mr. and Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose”—graced the scene and the editors used an engraving of Paine Hall as part of the Investigator’s masthead from April on. Mendum and Seaver hired Paine Hall out to numerous groups and speakers, including Susan B. Anthony, who began her 1876 lecture there by referring to Rose’s portrait “opposite her on the wall, saying that she was always glad to be in the same vicinity with a picture of that noble worker for the cause of woman’s freedom.” Ernestine Rose donated money to fund the building for many years and urged other subscribers to do the same.³³

From the Roses’ return to England in 1874, Ernestine alternated complaints about her health with accounts of speeches she made, which implies that she periodically recovered. The couple spent the winter of 1874–75 in Brighton, “a very healthy place,” but one they found “very dull, very religious, and very anti-progressive.” In November, they attended an “anti-Woman’s Rights lecture,” given by a minister. “The whole thing was made up of Biblical quotations, misrepresentations, downright falsehoods, insults, and flattery,” Rose wrote the Investigator. After the minister cited John Ruskin’s pronouncement that “woman is Queen in her husband’s house—Queen over the crockery, jewelry, china, etc.,” Rose added, she “spoke about fifteen minutes, and told him he made a mistake to think that not a Women’s Rights woman was present.” Two months later, in January 1875, she wrote that she was “too ill to … even” write a speech for the Paine Hall dedication. She was still sick at the end of March 1875, describing herself as “a prisoner” of the London weather, “not yet well enough to go out in this wretched north east wind which has now lasted over six weeks, with hardly a gleam of sunshine, and the Lord only knows (if he knows anything) how much longer it will last—What an awful climate!” In October, her ill health was confirmed by the London National Reformer: “Unfortunately, the party lost the services of one of its bravest and most eloquent platform advocates, the Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, who worked with so much intrepidity and power. Now and then we notice an article from her pen in the Investigator, but ill health prevents her from using her tongue in the cause.”³⁴

But Rose continued to rebound. She wrote that 1876 was “a very sick year throughout,” but also mentioned that she had given two speeches in Yorkshire, “notwithstanding all the scolding about my heresies, for the people there are very religious.” The Roses had gone north to recover in Ilkley and Harrogate, where William “was taken very sick from drinking a little of what was called sulphur water, but which was more like poison, for it nearly killed him. … The anxiety and exertion of taking care of him pulled me very much down again.” Rose added that when they returned to Brighton that fall, they both felt better. George Jacob Holyoake, writing about the same period, said, “Mention is made of her delicate health, which ‘prevented her from speaking with her wonted effect.’ It is pleasant to report that … she is still a speaker of remarkable power.”³⁵

Given the vague language Ernestine Rose used to describe her symptoms, it is impossible to diagnose her ailments. The cause of her nearly fatal illness in 1873 remains unknown. She certainly suffered from rheumatism, which caused her “my full share of aches,” but at the same time she asserted that “my general health is pretty good.” In a letter to Susan B. Anthony, dated July 4, 1876, she wrote, “I suffer from great debility and dizziness in my head, which prevents me from much mental labor.” Her dizziness came and went. A year later, in July 1877, she wrote the Investigator that “I can think, and think all the more because I cannot work,” but then in 1879, she complained to the Conways that “my Head swims badly today, but I hope it will get steady again.” She called her most constant symptom “neuralgia,” which might be what is today known as fibromyalgia, but it too was not constant. “I have suffered so much all the winter, and do now from neuralgia in my head, chest, and the whole upper part of my body,” she wrote in the summer of 1877, “and am so weak, that I can hardly write. … I keep up, but suffer constant pain.”³⁶

Her last major recovery came in 1878, when she spoke at length over two days at the London Conference of Liberal Thinkers in June. Moncure D. Conway had organized this meeting “for the discussion of matters pertaining to the religious needs of our time, and the method of meeting them.” He cast his net widely, inviting liberal clergymen and rabbis, Britons and foreigners, as well as freethinkers like Holyoake and Rose, resulting in “the most inclusive group of its kind ever assembled.” Speaking forcefully on the afternoon of the first day, Ernestine Rose began by declaring her militant atheism: “I belong to no religious sect; I profess no religion; and I have long ago discarded even the name. It is too indefinite and misleading, and is only calculated to divide the human family instead of uniting it. Well may we exclaim, ‘Oh! religion what crimes have been perpetrated in thy name.’ ” Rose then criticized the US Free Religious Association (FRA), touted by the previous speaker. Founded by liberal Unitarians, the FRA included Lucretia Mott, Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. “Free is all right. But what is Religion?” Rose asked rhetorically, before proposing a name for the group, a gambit she had used many times before, from naming the Infidel Society in 1845 to suggesting that US women change their “Equal Rights Association” to the “Woman’s Franchise Association” in 1869. Suggesting that this group “unite in a Society of Friends of Progress,” she maintained that then “the Christian, the Mahometan, the Jew, the Deist, and the Atheist” could “reform the laws so as to have perfect freedom of conscience, the right to think and to express our thoughts on all subjects. Progress opens as wide a field as the human race—it endeavors to remove the obstacles that prevent our growth.” Rose, however, had trouble being open-minded about clergymen and she then turned on two ministers who had spoken before her, saying that if they were “not too fixed in their bigotry” they could “all unite with us to form a union which should give us strength, strength not to injure anyone, not even to prevent the irrational views that some of the religionists have of their god, but a strength to take care that as long as they have them they should have a perfect right to express them.” One of the clergy she mentioned was the Reverend Charles Voysey, who had been expelled from the Church of England for his radical views. He did not return on the Conference’s second day.³⁷ Rose steamed on, declaring that the strength provided by such a union

shall enable us to assist each other to improve the world, to obtain rational and consistent laws, laws that will not deprive a mother of her child—(loud and continued applause)—as has been done to Mrs. Besant, simply because she thinks differently from the judge; laws that will not incarcerate an innocent, respectable man, simply because he sold something he conscientiously thought would benefit society.

Here, Ernestine Rose alluded to a cause célèbre of the previous year—the trial and conviction of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh for publishing a book on birth control. Annie Besant had become a prominent lecturer and journalist in British free thought—she had written the 1875 National Reformer article saying that Rose was now too ill to continue speaking in public. Almost forty years younger than Rose, she was married at twenty to an Anglican clergyman. Besant (who always used her married name) left her husband and son five years later, taking her daughter Mabel with her. She and Bradlaugh decided to bring a test case on contraception by reprinting the American Charles Knowlton’s 1832 book as a cheap pamphlet in 1876. Anglo-American freethinkers had often published birth control manuals, but they were in book form, which made them unaffordable to many. Hundreds of thousands of copies of Bradlaugh and Besant’s low-priced work sold and the two were then tried and convicted of obscenity. The verdict was overturned on a technicality. Frank Besant sued for custody of his daughter Mabel and won. Rose’s American friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who attended this trial as well as the Conference of Liberal Thinkers, said the judge “damned” Besant “for her infidel opinions,” ruling that the girl could “not be brought up in opposition to the view of mankind generally as to what is moral, what is decent, what is womanly, or proper merely because her mother differs from these views. … [T]‌he child might even grow up to write such things herself!” Mabel was taken away just a few weeks before Rose referred to the case.³⁸

At the Conference, Rose used Besant’s ordeal to show why women needed equality. “I want that woman should have the same rights as a human being,” she declared. “Now when a judge says that if this woman had been the father instead of the mother, the child might have been left with her, I think that is one of the laws that should be altered.” Higginson, a longtime activist reformer in the United States, had helped write the Call to the 1850 Worcester National Woman’s Rights Convention where Rose spoke; he had also led a black Union regiment during the Civil War. Following Rose as speaker, he first praised “my dear old friend Mrs. Rose, whom we used to be proud for so many years to claim as an American, while her sonorous eloquence filled our halls, and whom you, I suppose, now try to claim as an English woman, though she is not”; he then criticized her proposal for a Society of Friends of Progress. Having been active in the US Free Religious Association, he argued that “if our experience has proved anything, it has been this: [L]‌imit your aims a little and not … expect to do everything at once, and with one organization.” Asserting that this was almost the only point “on which I should dissent from the position taken by my old friend Mrs. Rose,” he added that if they followed her strategy, in five years they would regret creating so broad a group. He closed by using the image of “Esquimaux” sled dogs pulling together. “I am not a Radical dog in the least,” Rose responded, “but it is just as well to know, in the cause of freedom and expression of opinion, that ‘we may aim at the sun, and at least hit the moon.’ ” “That was quite what I was afraid of,” Higginson replied.³⁹

On the Conference’s second day, Rose again spoke at length. Conway and others attempted to organize the group as the Association of Liberal Thinkers with its goals as both the “collection and diffusion of information concerning world-wide religious developments” and “the emancipation of mankind from superstition.” One speaker asserted that “what Mrs. Rose calls the service of humanity, and what others call the service of God are identical. The names are different, but the goodness is the same.” Rose disagreed. Declaring that she was “glad to see so good a meeting come together” and that she supported “all parts that … benefit the human family,” she invoked her familiar stance of preferring to be right than to unite with those whose views she could not support: “I am placed in a peculiar position, for there are some parts that I entirely differ from, and I fear that when it comes to a vote on such parts that I shall be a minority of one, and if it should be so, it would not be the first time, and I would much rather be in a minority even of one, for the right, than in a large majority for wrong and oppression.” Rose insisted that she could not support any mention of religion, because “in my convictions, in my conscience, I call all religions superstitions, and consider them merely as superstitions. I cannot vote for what appears to me the great curse of the human mind, the great standing block in the way of human progress.”

Yet Rose was torn, as so many good friends—from Higginson to Conway, both extremely liberal Unitarians—supported the inclusion of religion. “If you will allow me with all my heart to aid and assist you, I can say,—I wanted to say, ‘God speed,’ ” she blurted. At this, “the audience burst into roars of laughter,” the male reporter for the English Unitarian Herald wrote, adding, “It was the most extraordinary speech I ever heard from a woman; and coming as it did from a lady of advanced years, and spoken as it was with a really deep earnestness, it could not but touch all who listened sympathetically.” The remainder of the Conference politely and lengthily debated the wording of its proposals. Ultimately, “religion” was completely removed. Moncure Conway suggested that Ernestine Rose be nominated to a committee to implement the group’s aims, but Rose replied that she could not serve. However, she seconded the motion thanking Conway for the meeting “with a great deal of pleasure” and “the resolution was carried by loud acclamation.”⁴⁰

The good feelings aroused by this Conference in June 1878 did not last and the group disbanded the following year, unable to agree on a program. Ernestine Rose’s health continued to fluctuate. On July 4, she wrote Susan B. Anthony that “I should like to write to you of the future, as well as of the present and the past. But I am too feeble, having hardly recovered from a severe illness, to even do that.” She and William then “left London for the sea shore … which made us feel a little stronger.” In August they traveled to Paris, for the Exposition Universelle—the third Paris World’s Fair. “The whole ensemble was grand and magnificent beyond description,” Rose wrote the Investigator. “The whole world seemed to be represented in it.” The couple remained in Paris five weeks, attending a peace conference there at the end of September.

This International Congress of the Friends of Peace was Ernestine Rose’s fifth peace conference. In the United States, she and William had been among “the first members of the Universal Peace Union [UPU],” going to meetings in both New York and Philadelphia. The UPU affiliated with various French peace groups in the late 1860s, among them the one directed by the Roses’ friend Charles Lemonnier. He published a pamphlet advocating a United States of Europe, believing that a single, republican, federal nation would do away with war. The Roses went to a Congress he helped organize at Lausanne in the summer of 1871 where Victor Hugo presided. The next summer, Ernestine attended a Woman’s Peace Congress in London, organized by Julia Ward Howe, who also spoke at Conway’s South Place Chapel. Howe remained traditionally religious and Conway criticized her for it. The Boston Investigator wrote that he “throws cold water” on Howe’s proposal to organize a “great prayer for peace” in London, adding, “He says that praying people generally believe the Lord is a man of war, a God of battles and all that sort of thing. Only Quakers and Infidels are in favor of peace.”⁴¹

In Paris, both Howe and Rose represented the United States at the International Congress of the Friends of Peace. Thanking the group for “allowing her the honor of saying a few words on this subject of peace, which is very dear to my heart,” Rose apologized both for her poor French and for not being “strong enough to speak for long.” She then expressed feminist concerns. “I just want to say that women should be represented in these universal peace societies,” she stated, to shouts of “Very good, very good!” War is worse on women, she continued, “because if it is unfortunate to lose one’s life, it is even more unfortunate to lose one’s dear ones.” After expounding on war as “the crime of crimes,” Rose maintained that peace could not exist without justice, since “one cannot remain quiet when one is under the yoke of oppression. Let us then do everything that we can for freedom and against war, and everywhere men and women will unite for this goal! (Lively applause.)” Other women supported her position, which resulted in a proposal that every peace society must include a “Women’s Committee.” After reassuring the women present that they had the right to vote, the group passed this resolution unanimously. These brief remarks were Rose’s last public speech.⁴²

Forced to retire from the platform because of her illnesses, Rose began to be commemorated by the free-thought and feminist communities. Sara Underwood’s glowing twenty-six-page tribute, which praised Rose as “an earnest and indefatigable worker in behalf of all reforms for the greater part of her lifetime,” appeared in her 1876 Heroines of Freethought. The freethinking author D. M. Bennett used Underwood’s chapter for Rose’s entry in his encyclopedia, The World’s Sages, Infidels and Thinkers, and Elmina D. Slenker praised her book in the Boston Investigator. “Among them all none stands more conspicuous than your old and beloved correspondent, Mrs. ERNESTINE L. ROSE—she whom every reader of the Investigator has learned to love as a real human goddess of Freethought, and whose old-time enthusiasm has not waxed old, nor waned in brightness even to this day.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony began trying to gather information on Rose for their History of Woman Suffrage, writing to Robert Dale Owen and Ernestine Rose herself. Dale Owen knew little and Rose could not provide much help since, as she wrote Anthony in 1877,

I have nothing to refer to. I have never spoken from notes; and as I did not intend to publish anything about myself, for I had no other ambition except to work for the cause of humanity, irrespective of sex, sect, country, or color, and did not expect that a Susan B. Anthony would wish to do it for me, I made no memorandum of places, dates, or names; and thirty or forty years ago, the press was not sufficiently educated in the rights of women, even to notice, much less to report speeches as it does now; and therefore I have not anything to assist me or you.

Anthony ended up reprinting Lemuel E. Barnard’s 1856 essay on Rose in volume 1 of the 1881 History of Woman Suffrage, supplementing it with Rose’s letter and some brief reminiscences of her own. In addition, she contributed a short and extremely inaccurate paragraph on Rose to Johnson’s Universal Encyclopedia, first published in 1876. The Boston Investigator also reprinted Barnard’s piece the week after it published a toast sent by Rose for Thomas Paine’s birthday in January 1877. “The Paine Memorial Building,” she wrote, “May it be instrumental in promoting Common Sense, which is very uncommon,—The Rights of Man, women included, and The Age of Reason, in place of superstition.”⁴³

Ernestine Rose continued to write letters to both the Investigator and the US and British women’s movements. At the end of 1878 she began a long missive to the Investigator by congratulating them for working “for the repeal of bad laws,” referring to the Comstock Act. Passed to suppress “Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use,” the law was widely used to prevent any distribution of contraceptive information as well as pornography. She then discussed her visit to Paris and the peace conference before adding that although “I am against war … I am not a ‘non-resistant,’ for self-defence is the first law of nature and when Russia, or any other highway robber attacks us we must defend ourselves.” Rose remained focused on Russia because it still ruled Poland. She then praised the German scientist Carl Vogt’s Man, His Place in Creation and in the History of Earth and quoted at length from its free-thought conclusion which excoriated the religious for attacking “Materialism and Darwinism.” She gave a brief anecdote from a German satirical journal and concluded with a short reminiscence of the English free-thought publisher Richard Carlile. Rose’s letters to women’s groups focused on the suffrage. Writing in 1880 to decline the invitation of the Manchester Women’s Suffrage Association to attend their demonstration, she hoped that it would be “grand.” “But our cause does not depend upon numbers, but on justice,” she commented. “That all women do not ask for the suffrage doesn’t make the demand of it less just. All the slaves did not ask for their freedom.” A few months later, she wrote Elizabeth Cady Stanton, saying that although it was impossible for her to travel abroad, she sent her “voice across the Atlantic to plead for Human rights without distinction of sex and to swell the grand chorus in the demand of Justice to Woman by declaring her right to the suffrage and proclaim her a citizen.”⁴⁴

Most of Ernestine Rose’s energy when she felt well went into her English friendships. “We enjoyed ourselves very much at your house yesterday,” she wrote the Conways in 1879, enclosing two of her speeches on divorce and slavery with the letter. She became especially close to Charles Bradlaugh, who supported the same causes she did: republicanism, free thought, and universal suffrage. In the United States in 1875, Bradlaugh declared to a feminist goup that “the Woman question is no American question, no national question; it is a question for the whole world. … [W]‌henever woman suffrage is debated, my voice is at their service.” Bradlaugh ran unsuccessfully three times for Parliament from Northampton, a manufacturing center northwest of London, before being elected in 1880. Conservative members of the House of Commons, as well as Queen Victoria, who wrote almost daily to the Liberal Prime Minister Gladstone, held Bradlaugh’s republicanism and support of birth control against him almost as much as his atheism. By then, affirmation rather than swearing a religious oath was allowed by many British institutions, but not Parliament. In an unprecedented move, the House of Commons refused to let Bradlaugh either affirm or take its oath, which he offered to do. Nonetheless, he still gave his maiden speech in June of 1880, standing behind the bar that blocked his way into the chamber.⁴⁵

A few weeks later, the American reporter Kate Field, “curious to know what Mr. Bradlaugh’s sensations were on this historic occasion,” interviewed him. “Why should I have been agitated? I was not in the wrong,” he answered. “Remember my life and remember I have gone through far worse ordeals. I confess, however, that I was touched when, in going out of the House, Mr. [P. A.] Taylor and several others shook hands with me. Kindness moves me far more than anything else, and I very nearly broke down completely when, in the lobby, Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose kissed me.” Vehement opposition to his taking his seat prevailed, even though he was repeatedly re-elected. Bradlaugh’s case lasted six years, until the House of Commons finally seated him in 1886. “Suppose Northampton had selected a woman as its representative,” one parliamentary enemy declaimed. “Are we to be told that female suffrage is to be immediately established because a constituency has thought it proper to act in violation of the law?”⁴⁶

Rose also became close to Bradlaugh’s two daughters, Alice and Hypatia, named after a female Greek philosopher stoned to death by Christians. Both young women began studying political economy at the City of London College with Joseph Hiam Levy, a Jewish free-thought lecturer. Both also were musical: Alice played the piano, and in 1878 she founded the London Secular Choral Union, while Hypatia sang.⁴⁷

These friends and others sustained Ernestine Rose through the great tragedy of her life: William’s unexpected death from a heart attack in London on January 25, 1882. “He had gone into the city on some little business when he fell in the street,” the couple’s attorney wrote, “and although carried immediately to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, he died ere he reached it.” “As soon as the sad news reached me, I hurried to the residence of Mrs. Rose,” Charles Bradlaugh wrote, “and found the good old lady very brave but very heart-broken at the loss of her faithful partner.” Moncure Conway “spoke a few words” at William’s funeral in Highgate Cemetery, which was “attended by Mrs. Besant, Mr. Bradlaugh, Miss Bradlaugh, and a large number of members of the London Branches of the National Secular Society, as a mark of respect to the deceased and of sympathy with Mrs. Rose,” the National Reformer reported. “Mr. Rose was a very worthy man in all the relations of life,” Josiah Mendum wrote in the Boston Investigator:

Pleasant in his manners, prompt in all his duties, and remarkably kind and benevolent in his disposition, he was greatly esteemed by all who enjoyed the pleasure of his acquaintance. He was a genuine and intelligent Liberal, made so by reading and reflection, and although quiet and unassuming, yet his upright example and kind deeds spoke louder than words of the purity and goodness of his mind and heart… . Mr. Rose was greatly respected by all who knew him.⁴⁸

William died at sixty-nine; he was three years younger than Ernestine. “She depended so much upon him,” an Englishwoman wrote to Mathilde Franziska Anneke a few weeks later, urging her to send Rose a letter of consolation. “He was the younger and has always been the stronger. As her long avowed unbelief in a future state forbids her the prospect of meeting him in the future, they say she is very wretched.” This correspondent added that Rose “will not consent to anything that will help her in any way, that she will not ride or walk—or anything her friends wish, and they say she has many friends and very good ones.” There is no doubt that William’s death transformed Ernestine’s life. Hypatia Bradlaugh later wrote that since he died “—a shock for which she was totally unprepared—Mrs. Rose has never been the same. She has been slowly and lingeringly dying, and always wishing for death.” However, with support from friends both in England and the United States, she never lost her spirit completely and maintained her values of idealism and activism.⁴⁹