WILLIAM’S DEATH INITIALLY devastated Ernestine Rose and it took her quite a while to resume even some everyday activities. When Susan B. Anthony visited her in March 1883, she wrote in her diary that Rose “threw her arms around my neck and her first words were: ‘O, that my heart would break now and you might close my eyes, dear Susan!’ ” When Anthony saw her again that summer, she wrote, “It is very sad to see so great and grand an intellect … so incapable of making the best of the inevitable—accepting it cheerfully”; two days later she added, “Nothing I could propose seemed possible or attractive to her—She mourns her loss of her adoring husband—he was never exhaust[ed] in doing for her.” Anthony also hoped that she herself would “not live to feel that no one cares for me or can help me to conditions of enjoyment,” a sentiment Elizabeth Cady Stanton expressed in slightly different terms when she visited Rose in December 1882. Although she found Rose “as bright, witty, and sarcastic as ever,” she added, “It is sad to be as alone in the world as she is, with not one soul with a drop of her blood in their veins living, no one life-long friend at hand on whom she can call.”1
Seeing Rose relatively soon after her husband’s death, both Stanton and Anthony overestimated her isolation in England. Unlike Stanton, with her six children, Rose had not had anyone in her close circle “with a drop of her blood in their veins” since she was seventeen. On her first visit to Rose, Anthony surmised that “she is vastly more isolated in England because of her non-Christian views than she ever was in America. Sectarianism sways everything here more now than fifty years ago with us.” But Ernestine Rose retained a circle of extremely close friends in London. On a visit in October 1883, Anthony wrote, “Last evening at Mrs. Rose’s I met the daughter of Charles Bradlaugh, a talented young woman, whom the college refused to admit to botany lectures because of her father’s atheism.” This was Alice Bradlaugh, who often called on Rose. Ernestine Rose was “very fond of my sister, who visited her frequently,” Hypatia Bradlaugh later wrote. “On one occasion while my sister was with her, a lady—an old and valued friend—called. Mrs. Rose introduced my sister, who went almost immediately. When she was gone the lady said: ‘Did you say that was Miss Bradlaugh—you don’t mean any relation to the Bradlaugh?’ Mrs. Rose answered: ‘Yes, his daughter.’ ‘Then … you cannot expect me to come and see you Mrs. Rose, if you have such people as that here.’ ‘Then, my dear,’ replied the old lady with spirit, ‘you must stay away!’ ” This unnamed friend did stay away for a while because of the Bradlaughs’ atheism. Alice Bradlaugh offered not to visit, “but Mrs. Rose would not hear of that.” Finally the friend returned, allowing “the remembrance of a long-standing friendship to fortify her against the possible risks of contamination.”2
Both Stanton and Anthony urged Rose to return to the United States, but she chose to stay in London, both because she wanted to lie in the same grave as William and because she “feared she had not strength for the voyage.” At least she had “money enough to carry her along comfortably,” Anthony wrote after she visited Rose’s executor. Stanton remembered that when the pair made their final visit to Rose “a few days before sailing,” we “found our noble coadjutor … though in delicate health, pleasantly situated in the heart of London, as deeply interested as ever in the struggles of the hour.”3 These interests, as well as emotional support from friends both in England and America, kept Ernestine Rose going. Major confirmation came from Charles Bradlaugh at the National Reformer and from Josiah P. Mendum and Horace Seaver at the Boston Investigator. Both free-thought journals printed some of her speeches as well as numerous tributes to her. In 1883, the Investigator published a letter from a Virginia man, saying he had named his daughter “Ernestine Rose Nock.” “I think it will please Mrs. Rose to know she is remembered by her admirers in America,” a Brooklyn woman then wrote. In addition, the Investigator printed almost every letter Ernestine Rose sent them. As she aged, the Investigator became increasingly important to her. “For many years, I have been a feeble invalid, almost helpless,” she wrote Mendum in 1886, “yet in all that time I have managed to read, and with a great deal of pleasure, the good old Investigator, which I think grows better and better with its advanced age.” On Rose’s seventy-ninth birthday, in 1889, the Reformer wrote, “The brave old lady is sorely tried by the fogs of our London winter—the cold, damp air which chains her indoors despite her will. The Boston Investigator is each week greedily read by her as bringing news of her Transatlantic Liberal friends, and thus lessening the loneliness of her indoor life.”4
Despite her infirmities and sorrows, Ernestine Rose stayed engaged and kept up with new developments. From the late 1870s through the 1890s, Colonel Robert Ingersoll led the free-thought movement in the United States, championing women’s rights and anti-racism as well. In 1885, Rose hoped Ingersoll would “visit her, should he ever go to England,” but he never did. She then contributed $10 to the Ingersoll Secular Society and in appreciation that group proposed a toast to “Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, dear to all American Liberals” at their annual meeting.5 In 1887, Edward F. Strickland, a progressive clergyman, asked Rose for her photograph and autograph for his collection on women’s rights leaders. “I am very glad that you and your dear wife take an interest in reform movements. For over fifty years I have endeavored to promote the rights of humanity without distinction of sex, sect, party, country or color,” Rose wrote back. Two years later, in 1889, an English atheist, Joseph Mazzini Wheeler, included Rose, whom he knew personally, in his monumental Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of All Ages and Nations. He concluded his entry by writing, “Mrs. Rose has a fine face and head, and though aged and suffering, retains the utmost interest in the Freethought cause.” That same year, Elmina D. Slenker, a US atheist, wrote a long article about Rose for her series on “Eminent Women,” published in the American free-thought newspaper The Truth Seeker. Rose had visited her childhood home, Slenker remembered; “I had heard her lecture, and knew her for a really loving and lovely, womanly woman, and I felt indignant and hurt that anyone should so unkindly malign her, simply because she was a Radical reformer, and belonged to the sex which had no rights men were bound to respect.” Slenker apologized for calling her “Mrs. Rose,” as “we should insist on women keeping their own individual names, and being known by them whenever it is feasible” before explaining that Rose became famous under that name and made it “distinctively her own.” Slenker concluded, “This good, brave worker for human happiness is still living in England, enjoying the supreme satisfaction of knowing she has lived down all the scorn and contumely of an ignorant past, and is now reverenced as one of the world’s beloved and blessed saviors.”6
Slenker was unduly optimistic. Freethinkers, no matter how aged, still remained vulnerable to attacks from believers. In 1887, Rose received a fifteen-page letter from a medical student, urging her to convert to Christianity. In reply, she sent him her Defence of Atheism and her 1851 lecture on women’s rights. He returned them “torn up, with an insulting letter, saying he would not read them and asking Mrs. Rose where her bravery would be on her death-bed.” “A woman who ventured to speak against slavery in the slave States is little likely to quail on her death-bed before the bogey pictures of a Christian god or a Christian devil,” commented the London Freethinker, which published this piece. The Investigator echoed these sentiments. Many Christians continued to assume that atheists could be converted on their deathbeds. Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner later reported that “Mrs. Rose had greatly dreaded that during her last illness she would be invaded by religious persons who might make her unsay the convictions of her whole life when her brain was weakened by illness and she did not know what she was doing,” so she arranged for Hypatia to be with her “when she fell ill.”7
Before then, however, two writers depicted Ernestine Rose’s last years. In February 1889, Henrietta Muller, a wealthy English feminist who founded and edited the Women’s Penny Paper—“The only Paper in the World Conducted, Written, Printed and Published by Women”—visited Rose’s home in London. She found Rose lonely and depressed, sitting in her chair near a portrait of William. “Our lives were as one,” Rose told Muller; “he rejoiced in my work, and gladly furnished the means for my journeys and lectures.” Muller said she would like to read some of Rose’s speeches. Rose replied, “I have destroyed nearly all the newspaper reports lately, thinking no one would care to see them.” Her hired attendant, Miss Byrne, confirmed that “it is only quite lately that whole bags full of papers have been torn up.” Muller “could not help regretting that we might never” again hear that “still sonorous voice” on an English platform. Before Muller departed, “three or four sparrows hopped down on the balcony close to the window, and Mrs. Rose called for a plate of crumbled bread and fed them. A kindly smile beamed on her face as she watched these birds, who were evidently her daily pensioners and little companions. ‘There is a sick one,’ she said, ‘who is always fed by two others.’ ” When Muller left, Rose gave her “a hearty, sisterly shake of the hand.”8
The second portrait comes from later in 1889, when Joseph Mazzini Wheeler visited “two veteran freethinkers” in Brighton. George Jacob Holyoake had moved there and Rose stayed near him for a few months each year. “She suffers much, and is only able to go out and enjoy the sea-air by means of a bath-chair,” Wheeler reported. “But she still retains her keen interest in all Liberal movements, and her fine face is lighted up when she speaks of America, of which she is proud to own herself a citizen, and recalls the memories of the days when her voice was a trumpet-call to the soldiers of freedom.” Wheeler found her “seated at the window; beside her was a chair, upon which was a pile of coppers ready to give to any musician or needy person who may pass… . [T]he poor bless her wherever she goes, for she is ever mindful of others, and her chief pleasure is in ministering to their wants.”9
Both Muller and Wheeler found Ernestine Rose lonely and depressed because of the recent deaths of close friends. Alice Bradlaugh, her most frequent visitor, died prematurely of typhoid in 1888, at thirty-two. Horace Seaver fell mortally ill early in 1889 and died on August 21 at seventy-nine. A tribute to him mentioned that “he was pleased to receive remembrances from his old friend Mrs. Rose.” “It is impossible for me to describe to you my grief and sorrow when I heard that our dear friend Horace Seaver had died,” Rose wrote Josiah Mendum in October, “and how sorry I was and am for you to have lost your fifty years’ companion and friend.” She added that she would have written sooner but for her health, and she contributed $25 for a monument to commemorate Seaver. It was the last letter she was able to write.10 More losses followed. Josiah Mendum died at eighty, on January 11, 1891. His son Ernest Mendum wrote in the Investigator that “the closest friendship existed between this brave and noble woman and those two brave and noble men, Horace Seaver and Josiah P. Mendum, as long as they lived.” Less than three weeks later, on January 30, Charles Bradlaugh died at fifty-eight. Three thousand mourners, including Mohandas Gandhi, attended his funeral, which was silent at Bradlaugh’s request. “It was a great blow to” Ernestine Rose “when my father died,” Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner wrote; “she had always counted upon him to do her the last services at the graveside, and when I went to see her in the years before his death, at parting, she rarely omitted to say: ‘Give my love to dear father, and tell him I hope the time will soon come when he will take charge of me.’ ”11
Ernestine Rose herself died a year and a half later at eighty-two. Bradlaugh Bonner was sent for but reached Brighton “too late to see Mrs. Rose alive.” However, “she was fortunate in having a kind and able doctor”—Washington Epps—“and a devoted attendant”—Miss Byrne—both of whom attended her funeral on August 8 at Highgate Cemetery where she was buried in William’s grave.12 “I have lost another true and valued friend, and the world has lost a good citizen,” Bradlaugh Bonner wrote in her obituary for the National Reformer. George Jacob Holyoake, “who spoke by the desire of Mrs. Rose,” delivered the eulogy to “many” mourners “who either knew and admired Mrs. Rose personally or honored her for the work she had done.” “It is no longer necessary for me to live,” he quoted her as saying; “I can do nothing now. But I have lived.” William Rose’s “regard for his wife exceeded anything of the kind I have ever known,” Holyoake declared, “and her affection for him was such that though she had numerous personal friends in … America, she would never leave England, where her husband lay buried. Her desire was to be in the same grave, and today, in this spot, her desire is fulfilled.”13
Ernestine Rose wrote her will in 1890. She left her “gold watch with chain and key as worn by me” to Ernest Mendum, her namesake. She left the rest of her estate to descendants of her father’s family by his second wife, which implies that she communicated with her Polish relatives, although she never wrote about this. All her personal effects except her watch went to her London “niece,” Jeannette Morgenstern Pulvermacher. The rest of her property was divided equally between Pulvermacher and her two sisters, Ernestine Morgenstern Radjewski of Berlin and Bertha Morgenstern Sigismund of New York. These three women were actually Rose’s half-nieces, the children of her half-sister, her father’s second wife’s daughter. This legacy, as well as one descendant being named “Ernestine,” means that Rose had some contact with her family, but not a great deal. Pulvermacher actually died in 1890, and so her daughter, Anna Pulvermacher Allinson, inherited. She attended Rose’s funeral, but she and her family, the Allinsons, never met Ernestine Rose. When Yuri Suhl, Rose’s first biographer, visited them in London in the 1940s, they had only dim memories of a portrait of Rose that used to hang in their front hall. A few months after Rose’s funeral, a London free-thought newspaper suggested that she had wanted to leave her estate to “the furtherance of her views,” but her executors, Philip S. and Philip M. Justice, “had refused to act for her if she did so.” However, “she left her property exactly as she wished,” Holyoake wrote, and “there was less of it than was commonly supposed, she having sunk a considerable portion of it in an annuity some years ago.”14
A number of other tributes to Rose appeared after her death. One that would have especially pleased her was made by Lillie Devereux Blake, a US feminist and freethinker from the next generation. Blake had heard Rose speak in 1874 “when she was an old lady and in frail health, but she thrilled the audience by the electric force of her words, and her dark eyes flashed as her voice rose in the fiery earnestness of her eloquence.” After Rose’s death, Blake declared that “the liberal laws which we now live under are due to the tireless exertions of this gifted woman and never ought the women of New York to forget the debt of gratitude they owe to Ernestine L. Rose.”15
However, they did forget, as did almost everyone else. “I doubt whether one American Jew in ten thousand has ever heard of her,” Henry Lewis wrote in a 1927 article on Rose. “In vain you will search for her in the files of old Jewish newspapers and periodicals, in any existing history of the Jews in America or in the fat tomes of the Jewish Encyclopedia.”16 As a Jew, as an atheist, as a woman and a foreigner, Ernestine Rose did not fit into the early-twentieth-century narrative of US history. In 1871, the Boston Investigator predicted—correctly, as it turned out—that Ernestine Rose would be appreciated “in about a hundred years.” The renewed women’s liberation movement of the 1970s revived women’s history; black history and Jewish Studies also contributed to restoring her life.
Ernestine Rose wrote hardly anything about her personal life and kept little documentation of her career because she thought it would interest no one. She was wrong. She ardently put her principles into practice. At a time when respectable women were supposed to remain in their homes, she petitioned and lectured, toured and wrote. She embodied female equality in both her everyday life and her political activism. She was a true pioneer, working for the ideals of racial equality, feminism, free thought, and internationalism. Today, progress has certainly been made in some of the causes she championed, but it remains incomplete. Equal human rights still are not available to many women and minorities throughout the United States. Immigration—the arrival of “foreigners” like Ernestine Rose—remains controversial. The resurgence of fundamentalist religions with their patriarchal foundations has given Rose’s nineteenth-century struggles for free thought renewed importance. A 2012 Gallup Poll found that more Americans would vote for blacks, Jews, women, gays, and Muslims than for atheists. But it also showed that more than half of all Americans, 54 percent, would vote for an atheist for president, compared to only 18 percent in 1958.17 As Ernestine Rose would have said, “The world moves.”