1.The Proceedings of the National Woman’s Rights Convention Held at Worcester, October 15th and 16th, 1851 (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1852): 32; Paulina W. Davis, A History of the National Woman’s Rights Movement (New York: Journeymen Printers’ Co-operative Association, 1871): 19.
2.For some of the proceedings of the 1850 meeting and reactions to it, see John F. McClymer, This High and Holy Moment: The First National Woman’s Rights Convention, Worcester, 1850 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1999); The Call to the Second National Woman’s Rights Convention, Women’s Rights National Historical Park, Seneca Falls, NY.
3.On women’s public speaking generally, see Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Can Not Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Feminist Rhetoric with Texts (New York: Praeger, 1989), vol. 1: 10–11. For a specific example, see the “Pastoral Letter of the Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts,” [directed against the Grimké sisters’ anti-slavery speaking tour], reprinted in The Liberator, August 11, 1837; Proceedings … 1851: 102; Ernestine Rose, Letter to Susan B. Anthony, 1877, in Paula Doress-Worters, ed., Mistress of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine L. Rose, Early Women’s Rights Leader (New York: Feminist Press, 2008): 348.
4.Boston Investigator, January 19, 1881: 5. The German reporter was Ottilie Assing, writing in 1858. Christoph Lohmann, ed., trans., intro., Radical Passions: Ottilie Assing’s Reports from America and Letters to Frederick Douglass (New York: Peter Lang, 1999): 114; Jenny P. d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose,” Revue Philosophique et Religieuse (Paris: Bureaux de la Revue, 1856), vol. 5: 129. For an English translation of this article, which I occasionally depart from, see “Madame Rose: A Life of Ernestine Rose as told to Jenny P. d’Héricourt,” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 15, #1 (2003): 183–201, Introduction by Paula Doress-Worters, trans. Jane Pincus, Mei Mei Ellerman, Ingrid Kisliuk, Erica Harth, and Allan J. Worters, with Karen Offen.
5.Editorial, Worcester Daily Spy, October 24, 1850; Joseph Barker in The Reasoner, November 2, 1856: vol. XXI, #544, 139; John White Chadwick, ed., A Life for Liberty: Anti-Slavery and Other Letters of Sallie Holley (New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1899): 127.
6.Ernestine Rose, Speech, Worcester, 1851, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself : 92–94.
7.Ernestine Rose, Speech, Worcester, 1851, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself : 94, 97–98.
8.Ernestine Rose, Speech, Worcester, 1851, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 100.
9.Ernestine Rose, Speech, Worcester, 1851, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 101–103.
10.Albany Register from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1: 1848–1861 (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881): 606; for Anthony, see Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, I: 100.
11.Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Everyman’s Library, 1974 [1762]): 370.
12.The Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention Held at Worcester, October 23rd and 24th, 1850 (Boston: Prentiss & Sawyer, 1851): 7.
13.Sara A. Underwood, Heroines of Free Thought (New York: C. P. Somerby, 1876): 268.
14.Underwood, Heroines of Free Thought: 269.
15.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention held at the Broadway Tabernacle, in the City of New York, on Tues. & Wed., Sept. 6th & 7th, 1853 (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1853): 4–5.
16.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention, in Doress-Worters, Heroines of Free Thought: 192; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the First Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 336.
17.Proceedings of the Meeting of the Loyal Women of the Republic, held in New York, May 14, 1863 (New York: Phair & Co., 1863): 27; The Liberator, May 29, 1862: 3; Farewell Letter of Mrs. Rose, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself : 208.
18.Chadwick, A Life for Liberty: 127; Ernestine L. Rose, Third National Woman’s Rights Convention, 1852, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 127; Ernestine L. Rose, “The Social Problem,” Boston Investigator, February 10, 1869: 3.
19.L. E. Barnard, “Ernestine L. Rose,” in Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, I: 95–100; Jenny P. d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 129–139; Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Underwood’s chapter on Rose is in her Heroines of Free Thought: 255–281.
1.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the Third National Woman’s Rights Convention, Syracuse, 1852, in Paula Doress-Worters, ed., Mistress of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine L. Rose, Early Women’s Rights Leader (New York: Feminist Press, 2008): 121.
2.The files of the Piótrkow Jewish community from 1808 to 1853, which are in Polish, are currently housed in the Łóđź Archives. The Polish researcher Violetta Wiernicka scoured these holdings looking for Rose’s birth certificate or her parents’ marriage registration, but in vain.
3.There are three contemporary biographies of Rose: Lemuel E. Barnard’s “Ernestine L. Rose,” first published in The Liberator, May 16, 1856, but widely reprinted in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage (reprint Salem, NH: Ayer Publishers, 1985), vol. 1: 1848–1861 [1881]: 95–100, with later additions by Susan B. Anthony. Thanks to Professor Reginald H. Pitts, SUNY–Old Westbury, and the Western Reserve Society in Cleveland for helping me to identify the person always previously called “L. E. Barnard,” as Lemuel E. Barnard, a progressive lecturer and activist. Second to be written was Jenny P. d’Héricourt’s “Madame Rose,” in La Revue Philosophique et Religieuse (Paris: Bureaux de la Revue, 1856), vol. 5: 129–139. This piece was translated by a committee under the editorship of Paula Doress-Worters as “Madame Rose: A Life of Ernestine L. Rose as told to Jenny P. d’Héricourt,” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 15, #1 (2003): 183–201. I have occasionally found this translation either too literal or incorrect and so have used my own. Third was Sara A. Underwood’s “Ernestine L. Rose,” in her Heroines of Free Thought (New York: C. P. Somerby, 1876): 255–281. Underwood met Rose in 1874. This book is available online from the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College.
4.Thanks to Professor Robert Shapiro, Judaic Studies Department, Brooklyn College, for help with this section. See also Shaul Stampfer, “Gender Differentiation and Education of the Jewish Woman in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 7 (1992): 65.
5.The phrase “I was a rebel at the age of five,” is used by Yuri Suhl, Rose’s first modern biographer, as the epigraph to his book on her. Suhl gave no reference for it. Yuri Suhl, Ernestine L. Rose: Women’s Rights Pioneer, 2nd ed. (New York: Biblio Press, 1990 [1959]): 1. The closest I have been able to find for it is from the New York Herald’s article on the 1858 Eighth National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York City, May 14, 1858: 3, which reads, “She had known what it was to rebel since she was five years old.” Since newspapers usually put first-person remarks (“I”) into the third person (“she”), this is the most likely source for the quotation. (This quotation is not in the Convention’s Proceedings.) For leaving the school, d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 131.
6.Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law: An Exploration of Women’s Issues in Halakhic Sources (New York: Schocken Books, 1984): 35–36; “Anyone who teaches his daughter Torah taught her tiflut (usually translated as indecency or frivolity),” cited in Stampfer, “Gender Differentiation”: 64; Moshe Rosman, “The History of Jewish Women in Early Modern Poland,” in ChaeRan Freeze, Paula Hyman, and Antony Polonsky, eds., Jewish Women in Eastern Europe, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 18 (2005): 35.
7.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 131; Rose, New York Herald, May 14, 1858: 3; Barnard, “Ernestine L. Rose”: 95.
8.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the Second National Woman’s Rights Convention, Worcester, MA, 1851, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 99; Ernestine L. Rose, Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention, West Chester, Pennsylvania, 1852, in Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1: 357; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, February 17, 1864, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 317.
9.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 131; Underwood, “Ernestine L. Rose”: 260.
10.Thanks to Toba, Josef, and Gina Singer for help with this point. Cited in Lucy Stone’s obituary for Ernestine Rose, Woman’s Journal, September 1892; d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 131–132.
11.Barnard, “Ernestine L. Rose”: 95–96; www.piotrkowtrybunalski.friko.pl/ciekawostki/krolowa for “Ernestyna Heretyczka.” Thanks to Agnieszka Klimek for bringing this website to my attention. Ernestine L. Rose, Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention held at Syracuse, September 8th, 9th, & 10th, 1852 (Syracuse, NY: J. E. Masters, 1852): 85–86.
12.Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, March 10, 1864, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 315. On Polish Judaism, see Raphael Mahler, Hasidim and the Jewish Enlightenment: Their Confrontation in Galicia and Poland in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Aaron and Jenny Machlowitz, Eugene Orenstein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985): 245ff; Glenn Dynner, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006): 228–229; Gershon David Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006): 239.
13.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 132; d’Héricourt, Boston Investigator, December 8, 1869: 2; Barnard, “Ernestine L. Rose”: 96; Underwood, “Ernestine L. Rose”: 261–262. Underwood states that Ernestine’s mother died years earlier, but d’Héricourt and Barnard agree that her mother died when Ernestine was fifteen. This is Ernestine’s only mention of her mother.
14.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 132; Pu’ah Rakowska, cited in ChaeRan Y. Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002): 14.
15.Israel Bartel, The Jews of Eastern Europe 1772–1881, trans. Chaya Naor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005): 14–17; Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980): 516; Julian K. Janczak, “Ludnosc,” [“Population”] in Bogdan Baranowski, ed., Dzieje Piotrkówa Trybunalskiego [Historical Events of Piótrkow Trybunalski] (Łóđź: Wydawnictwo Lodzkie, 1989): 246. Thanks to Violetta Wiernicka for this citation. On shtetls then, see Michał Galas, “Inter-Religious Contacts in the Shtetl: Proposals for Future Research,” and Adam Teller, “The Shtetl as an Arena for Polish-Jewish Integration in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Shtetl: Myth and Reality, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 17 (2004): 29, 36, 42.
16.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the 1855 New England Anti-Slavery Convention, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 188; d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 135.
17.When Napoleon ruled France, he reversed some minor laws about the Jews (like rabbis would not be paid by the state), but these changes had all been done away with by the 1830s. Thanks to Nadia Malinovich for help with this point. Ben Giladi, ed., A Tale of One City: Piotrkow Trybunalski (New York: Shengold, 1991): 37; Rose’s speech at the May 28, 1844, Social Reform Convention in Boston, cited in The Phalanx, vol. 1, #13, June 29, 1844; Oskar Flatt, Opis Piótrkowa Trybunalskiego pod wzgledem historycznum i statystycznym [Piótrkow Trybunalski’s Historical and Statistical Development] (Warsaw, 1850): 16. Thanks to Violetta Wiernicka for this citation.
18.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 132–133.
19.Thanks to Małgorzata Witecka, archivist of the Polish Archives in Warsaw, and Agnieszka Klimek for helping me to research the records of the Kalisz court.
20.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Proceedings of the National Woman’s Rights Convention, held at Cleveland, Ohio on Oct. 5th, 6th and 7th, 1853 (Cleveland: Grey, Beardsley, Spear, 1854): 104; Ernestine L. Rose, A Defence of Atheism (Boston: J. P. Mendum, 1889 [1861]): 24; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Proceedings of the Tenth National Woman’s Rights Convention, held at the Cooper Institute, New York City, May 10th and 11th, 1860 (Boston: Yerrinton & Garrison, 1860): 53–54; Rose, Proceedings … Cleveland: 104. The quotation is from Plato’s Apology.
21.Underwood, “Ernestine L. Rose”: 263–264; d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 133; d’Héricourt, Boston Investigator, December 8, 1869: 2.
22.“Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. I,” Boston Investigator, July 30, 1856: 1; Underwood, “Ernestine L. Rose”: 280; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to the Albany Daily State Register in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 168.
23.For the Hasidic nature of the Warsaw Jewish community, see the Dynner and Hundert citations in footnote 12, this chapter. The Jewish Enlightenment is known as “Haskalah.” Steven M. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family, and Crisis, 1770–1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994): 34ff.; David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press): 57–58; Matt Erlin, Berlin’s Forgotten Future: City, History, and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004): 30; Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce: 43.
24.Winfried Löschburg, A History of Travel, trans. Ruth Michaelis-Jena and Patrick Murray (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1979): 126ff, 138. Also see www.shtetlinks.jewishgenorg/lyakhovich/stagecoach.html.
25.Löschburg, A History of Travel: 113, 117, 137–138; Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce: 67; Thomas Hodgskin, Travels in the North of Germany (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969 [1820]), vol. 1: 61.
26.John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 62–63; Andreas Fahrmeir, “Governments and Forgers: Passports in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001): 219–220.
27.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 133. Throughout this section, d’Héricourt calls Potowska “Madamoiselle Susmond.” She may have used this more Germanic-sounding last name to make her entry easier.
28.On the lack of records, 75 percent of which were destroyed in 1943, private communication from Thomas Breitfeld, Director, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, February 18, 2011; for research on this section, thanks to Amy Hackett and Dana Strohscheer. On Friedrich Wilhelm III, private communication from Professor Dr. Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt Universität Greifswald, April 26, 2011; Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann, “Restoration Prussia,” in Philip G. Dwyer, ed., Modern Prussian History 1830–1947 (Harlow, Essex, UK: Pearson Education, 2001): 50; Paul and Gisela Habermann, Friedrich Wilhelm III: König von Preussen im Blick wohlwollender Zeitzeugen (Schernfeld: SH-Verlag, 1990): 56ff., 96–97.
29.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 133. When I queried H-German about this interchange, Mark Lause of the University of Cincinnati replied, “Where my research has crossed the path of Ernestine Rose … I’ve found nothing to indicate that she exaggerated her activities and importance.” I agree and have assumed that she told the truth about this encounter.
30.Her only mention of Berlin was in the context of “espionage” in Paris: “Our arrival and stay was in the Paris papers, and from them copied into the Berlin, and very likely all German papers. It was mentioned in the Berlin papers that we would come to Berlin.” “Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. IX,” Boston Investigator, November 26, 1856: 1. Rose sent six long letters to the Boston Investigator from Berlin during this stay.
31.Erlin, Berlin’s Forgotten Future: 51–52, 117; Hodgskin, Travels in the North of Germany, vol. 1: 78–79.
32.Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community: 59, 104–105, 177; Michael A. Meyer, German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 2: Emancipation and Acculturation 1780–1871 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997): 151–152, 201ff.; Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: Public Affairs, 2009): 201; d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 133.
33.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 133; Meyer, German-Jewish History in Modern Times: 199–200; Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry: 69–70, 79, 104; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the 1853 Anniversary of West Indian Emancipation, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 152.
34.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 133; The Beacon, March 31, 1838. The Beacon’s pagination changed every few years and so is not provided.
35.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 134; d’Héricourt, Boston Investigator, December 8, 1856: 1; Barnard, “Ernestine L. Rose”: 96; Underwood, “Ernestine L. Rose”: 264. Barnard writes that “In Hague [sic], she became acquainted with a very distressing case of a poor sailor, the father of four children, whose wife had been imprisoned for an alleged crime of which he insisted she was innocent. Inquiring into the case Mlle. Potoski [sic] drew up a petition which she personally presented to the King of Holland and had the satisfaction of seeing the poor woman restored to her family.” The king was Willem I. Neither the archivist, H. J. de Muij-Flenike, nor a Dutch researcher, Regina Bruijn-Boot, could find this petition in the Dutch National Archives.
36.Philip Mansel, Paris between Empires: Monarchy and Revolution 1814–1852 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), passim; “Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. V,” Boston Investigator, October 8, 1856: 1.
37.“Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. X,” Boston Investigator, December 3, 1856: 1; “Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. V,” Boston Investigator, October 8, 1856: 1.
38.Pamela M. Pilbeam, The 1830 Revolution in France (London: Macmillan, 1991): 60–64; “Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. VI,” Boston Investigator, October 15, 1856: 1; Mansel, Paris between Empires: 248.
39.Mansel, Paris between Empires: 259; Pilbeam, The 1830 Revolution: 82ff.; “Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. VI,” Boston Investigator, October 15, 1856: 1; Barnard, “Ernestine L. Rose”: 96; John M. Merriman, ed., 1830 in France (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975): 4–5; “Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. IX,” Boston Investigator, November 26, 1856: 1.
40.Jósef Straszéwicz, The Life of Countess Emily Plater, trans. J. K. Salomoński (New York: James Linen, 1843), passim. Plater joined up with the main Polish army and commanded a regular army regiment until her death from illness in December 1831; d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 134.
41.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the 1850 Thomas Paine Celebration, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 75.
42.Underwood, “Ernestine L. Rose”: [268,] 265.
1.Jenny P. d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose,” La Revue Philosophique et Religieuse (Paris: Bureaux de la Revue, 1856), vol. 5: 134.
2.Passports were not introduced in Britain until 1837. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 68; Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God (London: Vintage Books, 2007): 101–102; Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), passim. English Jews still suffered some restrictions, like not being able to run for Parliament, but their situation was better there than in most of Europe.
3.The London Journal of Flora Tristan (Promenades dan Londres), trans. Jean Hawkes (London: Virago Press, 1982 [1840, 1842]): 17; Frederick Von Raumer, England in 1835: Letters Written to Friends in Germany, trans. Sarah Austin and H. E. Lloyd (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1836): 28–29.
4.“Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. II,” Boston Investigator, August 6, 1856: 1; H. D. Rogers, “Transatlantic Correspondence,” Boston Investigator, September 21, 1832: 1.
5.Ernestine L. Rose, quoted in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage (Salem, NH: Ayer Co., 1985), vol. 2, 1861–1876 [1881]: 397; d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 134.
6.Von Raumer, England in 1835: 130. In 1856, Rose complained that “The sun never rises clear on London.” “Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. IV,” Boston Investigator, August 20, 1856: 1; Malwida von Meysenbug, Memoiren einer Idealistin, 2 vols. (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1881), vol. 1: 329. Also see Christine L. Corton, London Fog: The Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
7.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 134; Lemuel E. Barnard, “Ernestine L. Rose,” in Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1: 96; Diane Newton and Jonathan Lumby, The Grosvenors of Eaton (Eccleston, UK: Jennet, 2002), passim; “Grosvenor, Richard, second marquess of Westminster (1795–1869),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
8.Material on Grosvenor House, which was demolished in the early twentieth century and bore no resemblence to the current Grosvenor House Hotel, is drawn from “Old Grosvenor House,” ch. XIII, Survey of London, vol. 40: The Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair, Part Two: The Buildings (1980) in British History Online. In 1856, Ernestine Rose told Lemuel Barnard that “she became acquainted with Lord Grosvenor and family, with Frances Farrar, sister of Oliver Farrar, M.P., the Miss Leeds, and others of the nobility.” Few traces of these people’s lives remain. Oliver Farrar, a London lawyer, was neither a member of Parliament nor of the nobility. His sister Frances never married and lived to be ninety-three. The “Miss Leeds” cannot be found. Barnard, “Ernestine L. Rose”: 96.
9.David E. Swift, Joseph John Gurney: Banker, Reformer, and Quaker (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1962): 7, 35, 106–107, 209–210.
10.Elise A. Haighton in Theodore Stanton, ed., The Woman Question in Europe (New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1884): footnote, 167; June Rose, Elizabeth Fry (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980): 79 and passim.
11.Robert Owen, “Character and Environment: A Prison Experience,” in A. L. Morton, The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen (New York: International Publishers, 1969): 78–80.
12.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Proceedings of the Free Convention, held at Rutland, Vt., July [sic. although the convention actually took place in June] the 25th, 26th, and 27th, 1858 (Boston: J. B. Yerrinton and Son, 1858): 31. In this 1858 speech, Rose referred to a prison visit of 1843. Barnard, “Ernestine L. Rose”: 96.
13.For a brief summary of Owen’s life, see G. D. H. Cole, “Robert Owen and Owenism,” in Persons and Periods: Studies (London: Macmillan, 1938): 196–215; The Life of Robert Owen by Himself (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1920 [1857–58]): 81.
14.The Life of Robert Owen by Himself: 102–103; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at Robert Owen’s Birthday Celebration, 1853, in Paula Doress-Worters, ed., Mistress of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine L. Rose, Early Women’s Rights Leader (New York: Feminist Press, 2008): 132–133.
15.Robert Dale Owen, Threading My Way: An Autobiography (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967 [1874]): 115; The Beacon, December 23, 1837: 60–61.
16.The Life of Robert Owen by Himself: 126; Cole, “Robert Owen and Owenism”: 200; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, in Report of the Proceedings of the Festival in Commemoration of the Centenary Birthday of Robert Owen, the Philanthropist, Held at Freemasons’ Hall, London, May 16, 1871 (London: E. Truelove, 1871): 20.
17.For the complete Declaration and reactions to it, see Albert Post, Popular Freethought in America, 1825–1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943): 32–33.
18.Robert Owen, A Catechism of the New View of Society, cited in Morton, The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen: 198–199.
19.Robert Owen, Statement, March 30, 1834, cited in Morton, The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen: 196; Owen’s 1835 Lectures on the Marriages of the Priesthood in the Old Immoral World summarized these views which had been expressed earlier. This policy did not extend to Quaker or Jewish marriages.
20.Lucretia Mott to Richard and Hannah Webb, February 25, 1842, Manuscript Division, Anti-Slavery Collection, Boston Public Library, Ms. A.1.2, vol. 12.2: 34, page 7 of the letter; Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century [Great Britain] (New York: Pantheon, 1983): 184; Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Folio Society, 1974 [1832]): 127; Ernestine Rose, Centenary Birthday Speech: 20.
21.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, 1856, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 232.
22.Edward Royle, Modern Britain: A Social History, 1750–2010, 3rd ed. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012): 146; Proceedings of the Second Co-operative Congress, held in Birmingham, October 4, 5, and 6, 1831 and composed of delegates from the co-operative societies of Great Britain and Ireland (John and James Powell, 1831): 10, 11, 17.
23.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 134; Ernestine Rose, Centenary Birthday Speech: 20–21.
24.Morton, The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen: 99; for “Dear and Respected Father,” Rose’s April 14, 1845, letter to Owen, for “your Daughter,” Rose’s December, 1844 letter to Owen, both in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 67–68; Lemuel E. Barnard, “Ernestine L. Rose,” Boston Investigator, July 9, 1856: 3; Jenny P. d’Héricourt, “Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose,” Boston Investigator, December 8, 1869: 2. No known writings by Owen about Potowska exist.
25.Robert Owen, A New View of Society [1813], in Morton, The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen: 23–24; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at Robert Owen’s Birthday Celebration, 1853, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 133; Robert Owen, The New Moral World, February 6, 1836, vol. 2, #67: 115–116.
26.“The Grand National Consolidated Trade Union Manifesto,” reprinted in William L. Sachse, ed., English History in the Making: Readings from the Sources since 1689 (Waltham, MA: Ginn-Blaisdell, 1970), vol. 2: 87; Robert Owen, Statement, March 30, 1834, cited in Morton, The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen: 196.
27.J. F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969): 76, 249–250; Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: 116–117; Morris U. Schappes, “Ernestine L. Rose: Her Address on the Anniversary of West Indian Emancipation,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 34, #3 (July 1949): 355, fn. 14; Manual of the Association of all Classes of all Nations, No. 2 (London, 1836): 30; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at Robert Owen’s Birthday Celebration, 1853, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 133.
28.Thomas Hirst, Report of the Third Congress of Delegates from Co-operative Societies of Great Britain and Ireland held in London April 23rd to 30th 1832 under the presidency of Robert Owen (no publication information given): 38; Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: 57, 95, 218; The Crisis, May 18, 1833, vol. 2, #14: 146; Proceedings of the Second Co-operative Congress: 17.
29.Mrs. E. Little, “What Are the Rights of Women?” Ladies Wreath 2 (1848–49): 133; the other two citations in Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995): 199; “Kate” [Catherine Watkins, later Barmby], “An Appeal to Women,” The New Moral World, August 15, 1835 vol. 1, #42: 335; Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: 252–253.
30.Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: 135, 80, 60, 56. The female member of the GNCTU board was Anna Wheeler. Ernestine L. Rose, Centenary Birthday Speech: 20.
31.The Crisis, April 21, 1832, vol. 1, #2: 8; The Crisis, June 15, 1833, vol. 2, #23: 132.
32.Eliza Macauley, The Crisis, July 7, 1833, vol. 1, #18: 66. For more on Macauley, see Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: 71–74. For Rose in New York, The Beacon, December 23, 1837; Mary Leman Grimstone, The New Moral World, January 24, 1835, vol. 1, #13: 101; Mary Leman Grimstone, The New Moral World, February 21, 1835, vol. 1, #17: 134–135; d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 129.
33.The Crisis, August 25, 1832, vol. 1, #25: 99; Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: 153, 128; “Pastoral Letter of the Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts,” 1837, in Ruth Barnes Moynihan, Cynthia Russett, and Laurie Crumpacker, eds., Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), vol. 1: From the Sixteenth Century to 1865: 252; American Quarterly Review, 1837, cited in Valerie Kossew Pichanick, Harriet Martineau: The Woman and Her Work, 1802–76 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980): 100.
34.Moncure D. Conway, cited in Sara A. Underwood, “Ernestine L. Rose,” in Heroines of Free Thought (New York: C. Sowerby, 1876): 265; d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 134. For more on women and domestic labor in Co-operation, see Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, ch. 7 for Britain, and Carol A. Kolmerten, Women in Utopia: The Ideology of Gender in the American Owenite Communities (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990).
35.Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: 139, 217; Proceedings of the Second Co-operative Congress: 107. Ernestine Rose wrote, “I am as fond of dancing as ever” in 1865, when she was fifty-five, in a letter to the Boston Investigator, February 15, 1865: 2; Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites: 216–218.
36.Private communication from Todd Endelman; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1: 300; W. E. Rose, Letter to Robert Owen, September 31 [sic], 1845, #1389, Owen Archives, Co-operative College, Holyoake House, Manchester, England. The version printed in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 71 has been considerably cleaned up. For the Roses’ singing, Thomas Paine Celebration, 1840, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 60; d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 138–139; Ernestine L. Rose, Proceedings of the Free Convention: 61.
37.Richard William Leopold, Robert Dale Owen: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940): 110–111; d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 134; private communication from Rebecca Probert.
38.Cited in Ronald George Garnett, Co-operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain, 1825–1845 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1972): 162, footnote 66.
39.Cited in Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites: 55; Ernestine Rose, Letter to Albany Register, 1854, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 168.
40.J. B. Matrat, Practical Emigration to the United States of North America Systematized, The New Moral World, March 26, 1836, vol. 2, #74: 172–174, and The New Moral World, April 2, 1836, vol. 2, #75: 183–184; The New Moral World, May 14, 1836, vol. 2, #81: 230; d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 134–135.
1.Cited in Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 45; London information from Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God (London: Vintage Books, 2007): 67–80; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham: 450. For a map of New York City in 1838, see www.hypercities.com.
2.A[sa] Greene, A Glance at New York Embracing the City Government, Theatres, Hotels, Churches, Mobs, Monopolies, Learned Professions, Newspapers, Rogues, Dandies, Fires and Firemen, Water and Other Liquors, &c. &c. (New York: A. Greene, 1 Beekman Street, 1837), epigraph.
3.Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 469; Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Folio Society, 1974 [1832]): 248; Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City 1825—1863 (New York: King’s Crown Press, Columbia University, 1949): 23.
4.Thanks to Deborah Dash Moore and Howard Rock for help with the size of the Jewish population then; the cartoon, “The Times,” by Edward Williams Clay and Henry R. Robinson, is available on Wikipedia under File: The times panic 1837.jpg; Greene, A Glance: 12–13.
5.Ernestine L. Rose, “Speech at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention,” 1855, in Paula Doress-Worters, ed., Mistress of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine L. Rose, Early Women’s Rights Leader (New York: Feminist Press, 2008): 188; Greene, A Glance: 219.
6.Jane Wheeler, “Clothing of the 1830s,” www.connorprairie.org; The Beacon, December 23, 1837. In her 1856 description of Rose, d’Héricourt wrote that she did not “hide” her hair. Jenny P. d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose,” La Revue Philosophique et Religieuse (Paris: Bureaux de la Revue, 1856), vol. 5: 129.
7.J. F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969): 3; Frank Thistlethwaite, America and the Atlantic Community: Anglo-American Aspects, 1790–1850 (New York: Harper & Row, 1959): 59–60; the merchant was John Pintard, cited in Ernst, Immigrant Life: 23.
8.“Overflowing houses,” Benjamin Offen, quoted in Albert Post, Popular Freethought in America, 1825–1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943): 90; Greene, A Glance: 47. The Tammany Hall Society had existed since the late eighteenth century; its new home on East 14th Street was built in 1830.
9.Post, Popular Freethought: 129–130; see The Beacon, November 19, 1842, for a list of Herttell’s writings; cited in Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982): 66; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to Susan B. Anthony, 1877, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 348. For one example of Rose referring back to her petitioning, see the New York Times, May 14, 1869.
10.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Proceedings of the Free Convention, held at Rutland, Vt., July [sic, although the convention actually took place in June] the 25th, 26th, and 27th, 1858 (Boston: J. B. Yerrinton and Son, 1858): 31; The Beacon, March 16, 1839, on Offen; The Beacon, June 3, 1837, on the debate.
11.The Beacon, June 3, 1837, October 14, 1837; Boston Investigator, August 6, 1845: 3; The Beacon, March 31, 1838. For some other “Polish lady” references, see The Beacon, August 5, 1837, September 9, 1837, October 7, 21, 28, 1837, and December 23, 1837. Today, Frankfort Street lies under the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. The Roses lived in fifteen homes during their thirty-three years in New York. None of them still existed in 1939–40, when the Works Progress Administration (WPA) did a photographic survey of Manhattan. Thanks to Jahongir Usmanov for help with this point.
12.The Beacon, June 3, 1837, August 5, 1837, December 23, 1837, March 31, 1838.
13.The Beacon, June 3, 1837; Trollope, Domestic Manners: 75; de Tocqueville cited in Celia Morris Eckhardt, Fanny Wright: Rebel in America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984): 170.
14.“Red Harlot of Infidelity” from the 1836 Advocate of Moral Reform, cited in Lori D. Ginzberg, “‘The Hearts of Your Readers Will Shudder’: Fanny Wright, Infidelity, and American Freethought,” American Quarterly, vol. 46, #2 (June, 1994): 195; “crazy, atheistical woman” from the 1829 Commercial Advertiser cited in Ginzberg, “ ‘The Hearts of Your Readers Will Shudder’ ”: 203–204.
15.The Beacon, December 23, 1837. This scene is also discussed in Chapter 2, this volume.
16.On Kneeland’s conviction, see Stephan Papa, The Last Man Jailed for Blasphemy (Franklin, NC: Trillium Books, 1998); Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, May 27, 1885: 4; The Beacon, December 23, 1837; cited in Post, Popular Freethought: 203–205, 208–209; cited in Ginzberg, “‘The Hearts of Your Readers Will Shudder’”: 207.
17.Cited in Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990): 27; cited in Ginzberg, “ ‘The Hearts of Your Readers Will Shudder’ ”: 203. For the biblical verses about Lot’s daughters, see Genesis 19: 30–38. Cited in Post, Popular Freethought: 79.
18.Connecticut Courant, February 9, 1839: 1.
19.The Beacon, January 26, 1839; Robert Dale Owen, Letter, Boston Investigator, May 5, 1837: 3; Ernestine Louise Rose, Letter to Robert Owen, December, 1844, #1344, Owen Archives, Co-operative College, Holyoake House, Manchester, England. The version printed in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 65–67, has been considerably cleaned up. Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to the Boston Investigator, 1860, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 258. See Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 260–261, for Rose’s expansion of these remarks at the Tenth National Woman’s Rights Convention in May 1860.
20.The Beacon, January 26, 1837, February 22, 1843, July 1, 1843, August 10, 1844, March 29, 1845; Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, ed. Philip Sheldon Foner (New York: Citadel Press, 1974): 50ff; Twain cited in Walter Woll, Thomas Paine: Motives for Rebellion (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992): 197; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, February 15, 1865: 2.
21.Kenneth W. Burchell, “Birthday Party Politics: The Thomas Paine Birthday Celebrations and the Origins of American Democratic Reform,” in Ronald F. King and Elsie Begler, eds., Thomas Paine: Common Sense for the Modern Era (San Diego, CA: San Diego State University Press, 2007): 174–189, passim; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, February 9, 1881: 2.
22.Boston Investigator, February 19, 1840, excerpted in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 59–61.
23.For AACAN and Masquerier, Gregory Claeys, “Lewis Masquerier and the Later Development of American Owenism, 1835–1845,” Labor History, vol. 29, #2 (Spring 1988): 238, gives a list of the US branch’s members; for Masquerier as Rose’s friend, Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, February 9, 1881: 2; Sara A. Underwood, “Ernestine Rose,” in Heroines of Free Thought (New York: C. Sowerby, 1876): 265; d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 139; Carol Kolmerten, The American Life of Ernestine L. Rose (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999): 38, fn. 1; Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention held at West Chester, Pa. [sic], June 2nd and 3rd, 1852 (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thomson, 1852): 18; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to Robert Owen, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 66.
24.In 1881, Rose listed friends who accompanied her to the Paine banquets as “Francis Pares, Osborn, Thomas, James and Alfred Thompson, Oliver White, Dr. Hull, Mr. Vale, Mr. Webb, Benjamin Walker, Robert Walker, Mr. Payon, Mr. Masquerier, and many others.” Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, February 9, 1881: 2; for J. P. Mendum, Obituary, Boston Investigator, January 21, 1891: 1–2; for James Thompson, Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, February 8, 1871: 2; for William Wright, Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, June 3, 1874: 2; the unidentified person signed his letter “W. W.,” but wrote after William Wright had died. Letter, Boston Investigator, August 14, 1878: 3.
25.Herald of Freedom (Concord, NH), November 3, 1843.
26.The Working Man’s Advocate, July 20, 1844: 4; John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (Philadelphia: J. Lippincott, 1870): 163–166; for Rose’s Boston lectures, Boston Investigator, March 27, 1844, April 3, 1844; Linck C. Johnson, “Reforming the Reformers: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Sunday Lectures at Amory Hall, Boston,” ESQ (1991): 241, which mentions Rose’s talk there on “Social Reform”; Mrs. Rose, “Social Re-Organization,” The Communitist, October 2, 1844. Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, gives an exerpt from this three-hour speech: 62–64.
27.Noyes, History of American Socialisms: 177–179; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to Robert Owen, December, 1844 in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself : 65–66.
28.“Mrs. Rose, Social Lecturer,” Boston Investigator, March 27, 1844: 3.
29.Post, Popular Freethought: 100–101, 125, 160–161, 50–51; Claeys, “Lewis Masquerier”: 235–236; Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century [Great Britain] (New York: Pantheon, 1983): 249, 258–259; Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites: 191–192. A lone, small Owenite commune managed to survive in Wales until the 1850s.
30.Boston Investigator, May 14, 1845: 1. The complete convention proceedings were published in this issue and that of May 28, 1845: 1. They were also reprinted as The Meteor of Light, containing the Minutes of the Proceedings of the Infidel Convention, held in the City of New York, May 4th, 5th, and 6th, 1845 (Boston: J. P. Mendum, 1845).
31.The European delegates were Robert Owen (England) and Henry Schroeder (Germany). The other women were Laurinda Brunsen (New York), Hannah Allen (New York), Ruth Brettelle (New Jersey), Eliza Smith (Pennsylvania), and Mrs. Otis Hinckley [sic] (Indiana). Boston Investigator, May 14, 1845: 1; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham: 735–736.
32.This debate was not reprinted in the Boston Investigator and was only partially provided in the Meteor of Light. It appears in The Beacon, June 1, 1845: 191. Thanks to Marcia Gallo for help with the point about “queer.”
33.Cited in Post, Popular Freethought: 169.
34.Mrs. Rose, Speech at the New England Social Reform Society Convention, 1844, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 63–64.
35.Cited in A. L. Morton, The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen (New York: International Publishers, 1969): 63.
36.Proceedings of the Free Convention: 30.
37.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 130; Herald of Freedom, November 3, 1843; Mrs. Rose, Speech at the New England Social Reform Society Convention (which should not be confused with the New England Moral Reform Society, created to “reform” prostitutes), 1844, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 63.
1.New York Herald, May 14, 1858: 3. Although the word “feminism” did not exist until the late nineteenth century, its meaning is appropriate for the early women’s rights movement as well. On this subject, see Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 3, and Karen M. Offen, “On the French Origin of the Words Feminism and Feminist,” Feminist Issues, vol. 8, #2 (Fall 1988): 45–51; Ernestine Rose, from the Albany Argus, March 4, 1854, cited in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage (Reprint Salem, NH: Ayer and Co., 1985), vol. 1: 1848–1861 [1881]: 607.
2.Paulina W. Davis, A History of the National Woman’s Rights Movement (Reprint New York: Source Books, 1970 [1871]): 11; William E. Rose, Letter to Robert Owen, 1845, in Paula Doress-Worters, ed., Mistress of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine L. Rose, Early Women’s Rights Leader (New York: Feminist Press, 2008): 71; Boston Investigator, October 8, 1845: 3, October 15, 1845: 3, July 29, 1846: 3, August 26, 1846: 1, December 23, 1846: 3. For this gendered treatment of tuberculosis in the period, see Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), parts I and II.
3.Boston Investigator, July 29, 1846: 3, writing about events at the end of March that year; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3, 1876–1885 [1886]: 515.
4.For Royall, Annie Laurie Gaylor, ed., Women without Superstition: “No Gods—No Masters”: Selected Writings of Women Freethinkers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison, WI: Freedom from Religion Foundation, 1997): 23–32, and Cynthia Earman, “An Uncommon Scold,” Treasure Talk, Library of Congress, January 2001; for Anthony, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1: In the School of Anti-Slavery 1840–1866, ed. Ann D. Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997): 265–266. Any abbreviations and misspellings in Anthony’s diary have been preserved here.
5.The friend was Moncure D. Conway; the advertisements cannot be found. Cited in Sara A. Underwood, “Ernestine L. Rose,” in Heroines of Free Thought (New York: C. Somerby, 1876): 270–271.
6.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the Anniversary of the West Indian Emancipation, 1853, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 151.
7.US and British anti-slavery women gathered tens of thousands of names on abolitionist petitions. The US Congress passed the “Gag Rules” from 1836 to 1844 to prevent these petitions from even being presented.
8.Rose was the only woman in a group that included Emerson and Thoreau. She spoke on “Social Reform.” Linck C. Johnson, “Reforming the Reformers: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Sunday Lectures at Amory Hall, Boston,” ESQ 37 (1991): 235–289.
9.Cited in Julie Roy Jeffrey, “Permeable Boundaries: Abolitionist Women and Separate Spheres,” Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 21 (Spring 2001): 89; Foster cited in Anna M. Speicher, The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000): 89; Angelina Grimké cited in Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974): 107; Abby Kelley cited in Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978): 34.
10.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the Anniversary of the West Indian Emancipation, 1853, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 149–150.
11.Albert Post, Popular Free Thought in America 1825–1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943): 208; cited in Gregory Claeys, “Lewis Masquerier and the Later Development of American Owenism, 1835–1845,” Labor History, vol. 29, #2 (Spring 1988): 234; cited in Oliver Johnson, William Lloyd Garrison and His Times (Boston: B. B. Russell, 1879): 79. Thanks to Harriet Alonso for supplying this quotation.
12.Nancy A. Hewitt, “Feminist Frequencies: Regenerating the Wave Metaphor,” Feminist Studies, vol. 38, #3 (Fall 2012): 669–670; Julia Wilbur Papers, Box 3: Diaries, 1844–1865, Quaker History Collection, Haverford College, Haverford, PA, November 30, 1853; William C. Nell to Amy Post, November 10, 1857, in William Cooper Nell, Selected Writings 1832–1874, ed. Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac (Baltimore, MD: Black Classics Press, 2002): 496. Thanks to Nancy Hewitt for sending me the Wilbur and Nell documents.
13.Lucretia Mott to Richard and Hannah Webb, May 14, 1849, in Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002): 185; Lucretia Mott, Sermon at the Unitarian Church, Brooklyn, November 24, 1867, in Dana Greene, ed., Lucretia Mott: Her Complete Speeches and Sermons (New York: Edwin Mellon, 1980): 300–301; Lucretia Mott to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, March 16, 1855, in Selected Letters: 236; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the Fourth National Woman’s Rights Convention, 1853, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 162.
14.Cited in Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991): 138, 142, 384.
15.Cited in the Boston Investigator, September 5, 1849: 3; Kelley Foster cited in Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: 253.
16.Cited in William Lloyd Garrison 1805–1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), vol. 3: 281, 297; The Liberator, May 17, 1850: 2.
17.Philip S. Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992 [1976]): 158, 167, 18. For Rose’s active support of black women’s voting rights, see Chapter 7 in this volume.
18.For New York State, see Carole Shammas, “Re-Assessing the Married Women’s Property Acts,” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 6, #1 (Spring 1994): 14; for Rose, “Woman’s Rights,” 1860, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 259.
19.Davis, History: 11, footnote; E. C. S. [Elizabeth Cady Stanton], “Reminiscences of Paulina Wright Davis,” in Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1: 283; Paulina Wright, Letter to Abby Kelley, December 25, 1842, in Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: 160. For Davis’s anatomy lectures, see the Paulina Wright Davis Papers, Vassar College Library, Folder 46. No biography of Davis currently exists. The best summary of her life is Sarah Henry Lederman’s piece on her for Wikipedia.
20.Paulina Wright Davis in The Una, April 1854, vol. 2, #4: 243; Davis, History: 11–12, 19.
21.Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Scrapbooks, Vassar College Library; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (Reprint New York: Schocken Books, 1971 [1898]): 150.
22.Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1: 422. For Stanton’s life in these years, see Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), ch. 3, and Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), ch. 2. Thanks to Carol Faulkner for information on Mott and Stanton’s meetings.
23.For the proceedings of these two conventions, see the Library of Congress website, www.loc.gov.
24.Only the Motts and one other participant lived more than forty miles away, and all three were then visiting relatives in the region. For distances traveled, Judith Wellman, “The Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks,” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 3, #1 (Spring 1991): 14; for Douglass’s editorial, Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1: 74–75; for the New York Herald, Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1: 805. For the importance of the Seneca Falls convention, Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 10–11.
25.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the Fourth National Woman’s Rights Convention, 1853, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 158.
26.Abner Kneeland died in 1844, Benjamin Offen in 1848, and Thomas Herttell in 1849; Boston Investigator, February 16, 1848: 1. I have been unable to discover the author, title, or provenance of this poem. Rose used it in an 1847 letter she wrote to the Boston Infidel Relief Society and at the 1849 Paine Dinner. Boston Investigator, December 1, 1847: 3; Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 73–74; toast to Rose made at the 1850 Paine dinner, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 75; for the other toasts, The Beacon, February 8, 1840: 92.
27.Boston Investigator, February 21, 1849: 1. This passage is not included in Doress-Worters’s edited version of Rose’s speech (Mistress of Herself). Boston Investigator, February 2, 1850: 1; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the Thomas Paine Celebration, 1850, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 75, 77. After the brief 1848 Polish uprising against Russia failed, Bem fought for Hungary against Austria.
28.Ernestine L. Rose, Paine Speech, 1850, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 78. Jagiello information drawn from Ellen C. Clayton, Female Warriors: Memorials of Female Valour and Heroism from the Mythological Ages to the Present, 2 vols. (London: Tinsley Bros., 1879), vol. 2: 105–107. Thanks to Agnieszka Klimek for help with Jagiello, whose last name is often mispelled “Jagella” or “Jagello.” Ernestine Rose, Speech, Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention Held at Worcester October 23 and 24, 1850 (Boston: Prentiss & Sawyer, 1851): 15.
29.The Liberator, June 7, 1850: 3. Despite the committee, Davis ended up doing all the work herself. Davis, History: 12–13; John F. McClymer, This High and Holy Moment: The First National Woman’s Rights Convention, Worcester, 1850 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999): 67–68.
30.McClymer, This High and Holy Moment: 67–69; Proceedings … 1850: 7, 9, 20, 46, 51, 53. The second speaker was Abby Price, from the Christian commune of Hopedale.
31.The first phrases in this sentence are from Rose’s speech at the Eighth National Woman’s Rights Convention in 1858, used at the beginning of this chapter. New York Herald, May 14, 1858: 3. The last phrase contrasts free thought as “of more importance even than the one that has so long lain at my heart, the rights of woman.” Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the Hartford Bible Convention, 1853, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 136.
32.Ernestine Rose, Resolution and Speech, National Woman’s Rights Convention, 1850, from the New York Tribune, October 25, 1850, reprinted in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 81–82; Proceedings … 1850: 14; the newspaper was the Boston Chronotype; McClymer, This High and Holy Moment: 104.
33.Proceedings … 1850: 15; Rose’s speech as reported in the Boston Daily Mail, reprinted in McClymer, This High and Holy Moment: 119.
34.Proceedings … 1850: 15, 16, 17; New-York Tribune, October 26, 1850, reprinted in McClymer, This High and Holy Moment: 140, 148; Proceedings … 1850: 19–20. The other committees were the Central Committee, the Committee on Education, the Committee on Industrial Avocations, the Committee on Social Relations, and the Committee of Publication. All were headed by women except the Committee on Industrial Avocations.
35.Harriot K. Hunt, M.D., Glances and Glimpses: Or Fifty Years Social, including Twenty Years Professional Life (Reprint New York: Source Book Press, 1970 [1856]): 252; for the Tribune, Doress-Worters Mistress of Herself: 81; for the Daily Mail, McClymer, This High and Holy Moment: 107.
36.Cited in McClymer, This High and Holy Moment: 154–155, 157.
37.For the participants, Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1: 824–825; for the Committees, Proceedings … 1850: 19; Susan B. Anthony cited in Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, ed. and intro. Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: Schocken Books, 1981): 243.
38.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the Second National Woman’s Rights Convention, 1851, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 98, 102.
1.Ernestine Rose, “Woman’s Rights,” 1860, in Paula Doress-Worters, ed., Mistress of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine L. Rose, Early Women’s Rights Leader (New York: Feminist Press, 2008): 258–259.
2.She probably traveled through Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennesee, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin. She did not visit Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, or Texas. L[emuel] E. Barnard, “Ernestine L. Rose,” The Liberator, May 16, 1856, reprinted with later additions by Susan B. Anthony in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage (Reprint Salem, NH: Ayer, 1985 [1881]), vol. 1, 1848–1861: 97; Jenny P. d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose,” (La Revue Philosophique et Religieuse), 1856, vol. 5: 135; Farewell Letter of Mrs. Rose, 1856, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 209.
3.For the schedule Anthony set up, which called for two lectures a day from January 5 to 26, see Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti-Slavery 1840–1866, ed. Ann D. Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997): 291; for one instance of Anthony being called “Napoleon,” a frequently used nickname, see Antoinette Brown in The Liberator, October 14, 1855; Ernestine Rose, Taunton correspondence with Charles H. Plummer, 1854–55, Alma Lutz Collection, Vassar College Archives; Albany State Register, February 17, 1855, reprinted in The Liberator, March 9, 1855.
4.The Liberator, March 16, 1855, March 23, 1855, May 25, 1855; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention, 1855, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 187–193; The Liberator, June 1, 1855; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, written July 25, 1855, published in the Boston Investigator, August 1, 1855: 1; New York Tribune, July 30, 1855: 1; The Liberator, September 14, 1855; Boston Investigator, September 19, 1855: 1 and September 26, 1855: 1. The baby’s last name was Lyons.
5.Mrs. E. L. Rose, Letter, 1855, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 194–196; the Proceedings of the Sixth National Woman’s Rights Convention appeared in the New-York Daily Times, October 23 and 24, 1855; for the Indiana Convention, Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1: 307; Boston Investigator, December 12, 1855: 1, 4, December 19, 1855: 4, December 26, 1855: 2.
6.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 139; Boston Investigator, February 16, 1859: 1; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to Charles H. Plummer, January 29, 1855, Vassar College Archives; Boston Investigator, Classified advertisement, December 22, 1852: 3. This ad ran throughout the fall of 1852, as well as in 1853 and ’54; Boston Investigator, Classified advertisement, June 27, 1860: 8, as well as in a number of other issues. Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention held at Syracuse, September 8th, 9th, and 10th, 1852 (Syracuse, NY: J. E. Masters, 1852): 96; Proceedings of the Presentation to the Honorable Robert Dale Owen of a Silver Pitcher, on behalf of the Women of Indiana, on the 28th Day of May, 1851 (New Albany [IN]: 1851): 4; Martha Wright to Lucretia Mott, March 29, 1855, citing Anthony, in the Garrison Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; Susan B. Anthony in Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1: 98.
7.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 138–139. In describing Rose’s pleasure in cooking, d’Héricourt uses an obsolete French idiom, “chanter sa marmite, comme disent les bonnes femmes.” Thanks to Claudette Fillard for help with the translation. For more on housework, see Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982). On moving, Ernestine Rose, Speech, Tenth National Woman’s Rights Convention, 1860, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 283.
8.Boston Investigator, December 5, 1855: 1. William sometimes had male friends stay with him when Ernestine was on the road. One mentioned was S. C. Chandler. Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, 1858 in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself : 245; Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention, Held at the Broadway Tabernacle, in the City of New York, on Tuesday and Wednesday, Sept. 6th and 7th, 1853 (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1853): 47. In her biography of Ernestine Rose, Carol Kolmerten argues that being called “Mrs. Rose” meant she was an outsider in the women’s movement. But this was common usage in the mid-nineteenth century. Anthony and Stanton were each other’s best friends for over fifty years, but they remained “Susan” and “Mrs. Stanton” to each other until the end. Carol A. Kolmerten, The American Life of Ernestine L. Rose (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999): 78. Remarks against single women from the New York Herald, 1853, cited in Sylvia D. Hoffert, When Hens Crow: The Woman’s Rights Movement in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995): 97.
9.Bangor Jeffersonian, December 25, 1855, reprinted in The Liberator, January 4, 1856: 4. For this subject in general, see Gayle V. Fischer, Pantaloons and Power: Nineteenth-Century Dress Reform in the United States (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001); “The Champions of Woman’s Suffrage,” Harper’s Bazar, June 12, 1869: 385.
10.Ernestine L. Rose, Letters to Charles H. Plummer, Alma Lutz Collection, Vassar College Archives; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 655–656; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, 1853, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 145.
11.Susan B. Anthony Diary in Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1: 294–295, any misspellings or abbreviations are reproduced as written; Joseph Barker, Sheffield Lecture, printed in George Jacob Holyoake’s The Reasoner, vol. 21, #54, November 2, 1856: 139.
12.From the Ohio Democrat, reprinted in the Boston Investigator, March 3, 1852: 2; praise for her “argumentative power” from the New York Herald, September 12, 1852. For one example of an audience calling for Rose to speak, see the New York Tribune, May 13, 1859: 5, reporting on the Ninth National Woman’s Rights Convention. The female reporter’s comment is in the Boston Investigator, May 20, 1860: 1. The reporter published anonymously but was Ada Clare, who wrote for Henry Clapp’s Saturday Press. Sherry Ceniza, Walt Whitman and 19th-Century Women Reformers (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998): 146.
13.Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978): 193–194; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Proceedings of the National Woman’s Rights Convention held at Cleveland, Ohio, on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, October 5th, 6th, and 7th, 1853 (Cleveland: Gray, Beardsley, Spear, 1854): 33. Rose used nearly identical words at the Fifth National Convention the following year in Philadelphia, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 179–180, and at the Seventh National in New York in 1856, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 226; Ernestine L. Rose, Testimony before New York State Assembly Committee, 1855, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 185; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Proceedings … Cleveland: 36; for the same argument, also see Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Proceedings of the Tenth National Woman’s Rights Convention, held at the Cooper Institute, New York City, May 10th and 11th, 1860 (Boston: Yerrinton & Garrison, 1860): 52.
14.For an early petition Rose distributed asking for the vote, see The Liberator, January 24, 1851: 6; for the speech cited, Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, 1856, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 232; for one example of her refusal to promise how women would use their rights, Proceedings … Cleveland: 33; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Second National Woman’s Rights Convention, 1851, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself : 92; Ernestine L. Rose, Reviews of Horace Mann’s Two Lectures, 1852, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 109; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, New England Anti-Slavery Convention, 1855, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 190.
15.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Fourth National Woman’s Rights Convention, 1853, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 158; New York Herald, May 14, 1858: 3; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the Anniversary of West Indian Emancipation, 1853, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 148; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Proceedings … New York … 1853: 52; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the Third National Woman’s Rights Convention, 1852, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 122.
16.Ernestine L. Rose, Reviews of Horace Mann’s Two Lectures, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 111; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to Joseph Barker, Boston Investigator, December 12, 1855: 1.
17.Ernestine L. Rose, Third National Woman’s Rights Convention, 1852, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 127. In 1849, Lucretia Mott gave a similar speech rebutting the critic Richard Henry Dana’s lecture arguing that demands for women’s rights “unsexed” women. Her “Discourse on Woman,” like Rose’s 1851 Worcester speech, was published as a tract and widely distributed by the women’s movement.
18.Proceedings … Syracuse: 78–87; for Rose’s comments: 85–86.
19.For Mott’s introduction of Rose, which is incorrect in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 121, see Proceedings … Syracuse: 63; for Rose’s reply, Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 121; for “hen-picked,” which was not included in the original Proceedings, see The Liberator, October 8, 1852: 4; for Brown’s feelings for Rose, see her letter of December 19, 1850, where she wrote Lucy Stone from New York City, “If I knew where Mrs. Rose was I would call on her, shall perhaps find her out,” cited in Friends and Sisters: Letters between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1846–93, ed. Carol Lasser and Marlene Deahl Merrill (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987): 98. For Rose’s other remarks at the convention, Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 123, 125–126.
20.For one example of a woman’s statement of religious belief, see Syracuse … Proceedings: 89; for “neither Greek nor Jew,” Galatians 3:28; for Eve, Genesis 3:16; for an extended account of the biblical argument for women’s rights, Lucretia Mott, “Discourse on Woman,” in Lucretia Mott: Her Complete Speeches and Sermons, ed. Dana Greene (New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 1980): 145ff.; for the hymn, Proceedings … Syracuse: 97; Proceedings … Cleveland: 150–170, 185–187; Stanton, Anthony and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1: 144; for the Philadelphia Convention, the only proceedings are in The Liberator, January 12, 1855: 4. Thanks to Carol Faulkner for help with Grew.
21.Solomon from Ecclesiastes 3:1; for one use of this quotation, see Proceedings … Cleveland: 23; Ernestine Rose, Third National Woman’s Rights Convention, 1852, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 130; Ernestine Rose, Hartford Bible Convention, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 141. Rose quoted from John 3:19.
22.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Hartford Bible Convention, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 144, 137; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Proceedings of the Hartford Bible Convention (New York: Partridge & Britten, 1854): 330–331. These proceedings are online at https//archive.org/details/proceedingsforhar00hart. William Lloyd Garrison 1805–1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), vol. 3: 385; for the Bangor article and Rose’s replies to it, Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 197–199; Ella Gibbons, Letter, Boston Investigator, June 12, 1889: 3; for Anthony, Yuri Suhl Collection, Box 3, Folder 17, Howard Gotlieb Archives, Boston University; for Rose’s attempts to organize other Bible Conventions, which she did with Joseph Barker, Horace Seaver, J. Mendum, J. M. Beckett, and the German freethinker Augustus Theodore Stamm, see the Boston Investigator, October 11, 1854: 1, December 12, 1855: 4, and December 19, 1855: 4.
23.Proceedings … New York … 1853: 47, 53, 77, 88; New York Express quoted in The Liberator, September 16, 1853: 4.
24.Proceedings … New York … 1853: 89, 90, 95; Anneke cited in Gerhard K. Friesen, “A Letter from M. F. Anneke: A Forgotten German-American Pioneer in Women’s Rights,” Journal of German-American Studies, vol. 12, #1 (1977): 38; “Farewell Letter of Mrs. Rose,” 1856, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 209.
25.For Anneke’s life, see Susan L. Piepke, Mathilde Franziska Anneke (1817–1884): The Works and Life of a German-American Activist including English Translations of “Woman in Conflict with Society” and “Broken Chains” (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), and Maria Wagner, Mathilde Franziska Anneke in Selbstzeugnissen und Dokumenten (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1980). Quotation on religion cited in Piepke, Mathilde Franziska Anneke: 35, 31; on Rose, Anneke’s Deutscher Frauen = Zeitung [German Women’s Newspaper], October 15, 1852: 53. Rose’s speech is on pp. 53–55. Although this newspaper ran for two and a half years, this is the only surviving copy and is at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. For Rose speaking to German-American women, Friesen, “A Letter from M. F. Anneke”: 39; Anneke’s comment on meeting Rose again in 1869 in Wagner, Mathilde Franziska Anneke: 346–347. Anneke used the German word “Streiterin,” a female fighter for a cause, which I have translated as “campaigner.” Thanks to Jörg Thurow and the German Women’s History Study Group for help with this translation.
26.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Fourth National Woman’s Rights Convention, 1853, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 159–162.
27.Sallie Holley, A Life for Liberty: Anti-Slavery and Other Letters of Sallie Holley, ed. John White Chadwick (New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1899): 127.
28.Ceniza, Walt Whitman: 140, 101; Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: New York University Press, 1984), vol. 1: 344; Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1982), vol. 6: September 15, 1889—July 6, 1890: 322–323, vol. 7: July 7, 1890—February 10, 1891: 258–259. In his papers at Boston University, Box 4, Folder 4, Yuri Suhl says that Rose’s favorite line from Whitman was “I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,” from his Leaves of Grass, but gives no source for this. I have not found any comment from Rose about Whitman.
29.Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: 108. On the anti-alcohol movement and feminism, see Ian Tyrrell, “Women and Temperance in Antebellum America, 1830–1860,” in Civil War History, vol. 28, #2 (June, 1982): 128–152; Ernestine L. Rose, “Causes of Social Evils: Slavery, Intemperance, and War,” Boston Investigator, January 25, 1854: 3; “Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. X,” Boston Investigator, December 3, 1856: 1. On the split between German immigrants and Americans on the issue of alcohol, see Michaela Bank,“Women of Two Countries”: German-American Women, Women’s Rights and Nativism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), passim.
30.The Washington Theatre was also known as Carusi’s Saloon. Susan B. Anthony Diary, March 21, 1854, Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1: 265; Susan B. Anthony Diary, March 24, 1854, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 170; Susan B. Anthony Diary, March 28, 1854, Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, 270; Susan B. Anthony Diary, April 2, 1854 in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 172.
31.The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1: 268–269. Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 172–174, gives the wrong date for this exchange and cuts parts of it. Proceedings … New York … 1853: 90; Proceedings of the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, held in New York City, at the Broadway Tabernacle, on Tuesday and Wednesday, Nov. 25th and 26th, 1856 (New York: Edwin O. Jenkins, 1856): 19. On Phillips, see James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty’s Hero (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986).
32.Proceedings … Syracuse: 20; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1: 650; New York Tribune, reprinted in The Liberator, November 3, 1854: 4; for one example of Rose being called “exotic,” see the Albany Register, March 6, 1854, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 162; for a parody of Rose’s accent, the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, reprinted in The Liberator, October 21, 1853. For Stone, Andrea Moore Kerr, Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), especially p. 50 for her impact on audiences and the Higginson quotation. For the other quotations about her, Sally G. McMillan, Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015): x, 20, 76–78, 80; and Joelle Million, Woman’s Voice, Woman’s Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of the Woman’s Rights Movement (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003): 96.
33.Lucy Stone to Susan B. Anthony, November 2, 1855, Stanton and Anthony Papers, microfilm, reel 8, frames 298–309; Lucy Stone to Susan B. Anthony, March 24, 1859, Blackwell Family Papers, Library of Congress, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/mss/eadxmlmss/eadpdfmss/1998/ms998003.pdf. Thanks to Ann D. Gordon for sending me these letters. Boston Investigator, March 10, 1886: 6.
34.Susan B. Anthony Diary, April 9, 1854, Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1: 269, any misspellings or abbreviations are reproduced as written. The hymn’s lyrics, written by Stephen Greenleaf Bulfinch, went
All men are equal in their birth,
Heirs of the earth and skies;
All men are equal when that earth
Fades from their dying eyes.
God meets the throngs who pay their vows
In courts that hands have made,
And hears the worshiper who bows
Beneath the plantain shade.
’Tis man alone who difference sees
And speaks of high and low
And worships these, and tramples those
While the same path they go.
On, then, to the glorious field!
He who dies his life shall save;
God himself shall be our shield,
He shall bless and crown the brave.
Anthony copied the third verse into her diary, so she probably gave that one to Rose; Susan B. Anthony Diary, April 9, 1854, Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1: 269–270.
35.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Worcester, 1851, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 103; Proceedings … New York … 1853: 64; Farewell Letter of Mrs. Rose, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 208.
36.Boston Investigator, October 11, 1854: 3; The Lily, November 1, 1854; Anthony cited in Dale McGowan, ed., Voices of Unbelief: Documents from Atheists and Agnostics (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012): 85; The Liberator, January 12, 1855: 4. The Proceedings of this convention were not published separately, but appear in this edition of The Liberator.
37.The Liberator, January 12, 1855: 4; Stamm came from Homburg in Hessen and received an M.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1855. Boston Investigator, October 11, 1854: 1, December 12, 1855: 4, December 19, 1855: 4. For Finch, see Rose’s letter on his death, Boston Investigator, April 17, 1857: 2. For Assing, Maria Wagner, Was Die Deutschen aus Amerika berichteten 1828–1865 (Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz Akademischer Verlag, 1985); Christopher Lohmann, ed., Radical Passion: Ottilie Assing’s Reports from America and Letters to Frederick Douglass (New York: Peter Lang, 1999): 82. For Assing’s life, Maria Diedrich, Love across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (New York: Hill & Wang, 1999).
38.For one instance of Rose’s use of Paine’s motto, see her speech at the 1851 Paine dinner, Boston Investigator, February 12, 1851: 1; Proceedings … New York … 1853: 84, 87.
39.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the 1852 Thomas Paine Celebration, Boston Investigator, February 11, 1852: 1; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the 1855 Thomas Paine Celebration, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 182.
40.Farewell Letter of Mrs. Rose, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 208.
1.Boston Investigator, July 7, 1858: 2 for the weather; Proceedings of the Free Convention, held at Rutland, Vt., July [sic, although the convention took place on these dates in June, not July] 25th, 26th, and 27th, 1858 (Boston: J. B. Yerrinton and Son, 1858): 11, https://archive.org/details/proceedingoffre00freerich.
2.Proceedings … Free: 120; on the Davises, see Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), passim.
3.“Moral Lunatics” from the Portland, Maine, Advertiser and Burlington Free Press cited in Thomas L. Altherr, “A Convention of ‘Moral Lunatics’: The Rutland, Vermont Free Convention of 1858,” Vermont History 69 (Symposium Supplement), 2001: 90, 101; New York Times, June 29, 1858; New York Tribune, reprinted in The Liberator, July 9, 1858; New York Times, June 29, 1858.
4.Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, part 2 (1849). Thanks to Claudette Fillard for suggesting this reference. Susan B. Anthony, Letter to Mr. Garrison, in Paula Doress-Worters, ed., Mistress of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine L. Rose, Early Women’s Rights Leader (New York: Feminist Press, 2008): 178.
5.Ernestine L. Rose, Farewell Letter, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 208–209. This was not the famous portrait of Paine done by John Wesley Jarvis in 1805, which hangs in the Smithsonian. Jarvis suffered a stroke in 1834, so Rose’s painting was most likely a copy done by his son, the painter Charles Wesley Jarvis. J. M. Wheeler to Moncure D. Conway in The Freethinker, vol. 17, part 2, October 3, 1897: 637. The source of the Roses’ extra income is unclear, but a few years later, they had invested in Boston and Chicago properties. See Chapter 8 for more detail.
6.For information on Lemuel Barnard, thanks to Reginald H. Pitts, State University of New York at Old Westbury and the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland. Barnard published as “L. E. Barnard,” so in women’s history circles, his gender was in doubt. His piece on Rose was first published in his new magazine Excelsior, or the Reformer’s Companion early in 1856. Information on the Excelsior from The Criterion: Literary and Critical Journal, vol. 1, #13 (1856): 201. This original version of Barnard’s article was reprinted in The Liberator, May 16, 1856, and the Boston Investigator, July 9, 1856: 4. The better known version, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage (Reprint Salem NH: Ayer Publishers, 1985 [1881]), vol. 1, 1848–1861: 95–100, diverges from the original in the middle of Barnard’s second-to-last paragraph, where Susan B. Anthony changed the sentence “for twenty-four years a public speaker” to “for fifty years a public speaker.” She then added four pages of her own reminiscences and an 1877 letter from Rose. That version eliminates Barnard’s last paragraph, which I cite.
7.“Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. I,” Boston Investigator, July 30, 1856: 1.
8.The Reasoner, June 1, 1856, vol. 20, #522: 170; The Reasoner, June 8, 1856, vol. 20, #523: 181–182.
9.“Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. II,” in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 211–212; “Letter from Mrs. Rose,” Boston Investigator, November 26, 1856: 1. Also see George Jacob Holyoake, Letter to Robert Owen, #2606, Co-operative College, Holyoake House, Manchester, England, where Holyoake informs Owen that Rose wants to see him again before she leaves.
10.By the time Rose visited the Crystal Palace, it had been moved from Hyde Park to Sydenham, a London suburb. It still housed important exhibitions. “Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. II,” Boston Investigator, August 6, 1856: 1; “Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. III,” Boston Investigator, August 13, 1856: 1; “Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. IV,” Boston Investigator, August 20, 1856: 1.
11.Mary Howitt: An Autobiography, ed. Margaret Howitt (London: Wm. Isbister, 1889), 2 vols., vol. 2: 69; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 223–234.
12.For Barbara Leigh Smith, see Sheila R. Herstein, A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), especially ch. 3, “First Attempts: An Educational Experiment and the Married Women’s Property Campaign.” For that campaign, Rebecca Probert, “Family Law Reform and the Women’s Movement in England and Wales, 1830–1914,” in Stephan Meder and Christoph-Eric Mecke, eds., Family Law in Early Women’s Rights Debates: Western Europe and the United States in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2012): 184–185; for Parkes, Emma Lowndes, Turning Victorian Ladies into Women: The Life of Bessie Rayner Parkes 1829–1925 (Palo Alto, CA: Academica Press, 2012); [Bessie Rayner Parkes], Remarks on the Education of Girls (London: John Chapman, 1854): 12, 20; for Fox, Brenda Colloms, “Fox, Eliza Florence Bridell (1823/4–1903),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, October 2009.
13.Ernestine Rose, Speech, Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 224, and The Woman’s Rights Almanac for 1858, Containing Facts, Statistics, Arguments, Records and Progress, and Proofs of the Need of It (Worcester, MA: Z. Baker; Boston: R. F. Walcott): 21. I have corrected the spelling of Deroin’s name, which Americans often mangled. For confirmation of Rose’s description of Deroin, see Adrien Ranvier, “Une Féministe de 1848: Jeanne Deroin,” La Révolution de 1848: Bulletin de la Société d’histoire de la révolution de 1848, 4 (1907–1908): 495.
14.Thanks to Claire Moses for helping to identify Lemonnier, whose name the Boston Investigator spelled as “Lemourier.” Rose wrote in longhand and was not a perfect speller; her editors probably did not know French, so foreign names were often distorted: the “Champs Élysées” becomes the “Champs Ulysses” twice in their pages. Rose also mentioned Charles Lemaire and Felix Etienne, whom I have been unable to identify. “Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. IX,” Boston Investigator, November 26, 1856: 1; Madame D’Héricourt, “What M. Proudhon Thinks of Women,” The Reasoner, vol. 22, #562, March 8, 1857, 1. Bessie Rayner Parkes translated some of d’Héricourt’s pieces into English and Holyoake published them.
15.“Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. IX,” Boston Investigator, November 26, 1856: 1. For d’Héricourt’s life, Karen Offen, “A Nineteenth-Century French Feminist Rediscovered: Jenny P. d’Héricourt 1809–1875,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 13, #1 (Autumn, 1987): 144–158; for Mikhailov, Richard Stites, “M. L. Mikhailov and the Emergence of the Woman Question in Russia,” Canadian Slavic Studies, vol. 3, #2 (Summer, 1969): 178–199; d’Héricourt published her pieces in the radical Turin journal La Ragione (Reason).
16.For d’Héricourt’s use of “biography” to describe her piece, Jenny P. d’Héricourt, “Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose,” Boston Investigator, December 8, 1869: 2; for the quotation about Rose, Jenny P. d’Héricourt, “Madame Rose,” Revue Philosophique et Religieuse, vol. 5, 1856: 136. The 1869 Investigator piece is a shortened, English version of d’Héricourt’s original 1856 article. For an English translation of this article, which I sometimes depart from, see Paula Doress-Worters, ed., “Madame Rose: A Life of Ernestine L. Rose as told to Jenny P. d’Héricourt,” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 15, #1 (2003): 183–201; Jenny P. d’Héricourt, “La Bible et La Question des Femmes,” Revue Philosophique et Religieuse, vol. 6, August 1, 1857: 16–34.
17.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 129–130.
18.D’Héricourt, “Madame Rose”: 135, 137–138.
19.“Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. XI,” Boston Investigator, December 3, 1856: 1. In this letter, Rose mentions visiting [any misspellings are preserved throughout] Lyons, Geneva, Chamberry, Basle, Strasborg, Badenbaden, Heidelberg, Frankfort, Coblentz, Cologne, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Trieste, Venice, Milan, Turin, Genoa, Leghorn, Florence, Rome, Naples, Pompei, Mt. Vesuvius, and Marseilles; “Letter from Mrs. Rose,” Boston Investigator, November 26, 1856: 2; “Letters from Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, No. XI,” in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 220; “Farewell Letter of Mrs. Rose,” in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 209; “Letter from Mrs. Rose,” Boston Investigator, November 26, 1856: 2.
20.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 222; Proceedings of the Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, held in New York City at the Broadway Tabernacle on Tuesday and Wednesday, November 25 and 26, 1856 (New York: Edward O. Jenkins, 1856): 13.
21.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Seventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 228–229, 234–235.
22.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Fourth National, 1853, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 159–160; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Seventh National, 1856, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 230.
23.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Fourth National, 1853, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 160. Richard Carlile’s Every Woman’s Book: or What Is Love? Containing the Most Important Instructions for the Prudent Regulation of the Principles of Love and the Number of the Family was published in London; Robert Dale Owen’s Moral Physiology: or a Brief and Plain Treatment of the Population Question came out in New York. It was the first contraceptive tract published in the United States. Charles Knowlton’s guide to contraception, Fruits of Philosophy or, the Private Companion of Young Married People, appeared in the United States in 1832 and stayed in print for many years, but Rose never met him. Angus McLaren, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978): 52, 56–57; Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994): 181–182.
24.Brodie, Contraception and Abortion: 123–124; the New York Times denunciation of Dale Owen was reprinted in The Beacon, October 21, 1839; on Wright, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 511, and Lori D. Ginzberg, “‘The Hearts of Your Readers Will Shudder’: Fanny Wright, Infidelity and American Freethought,” American Quarterly, vol. 46, #2 (June 1994): 195, 196.
25.Proceedings … Free: 54, 60–61.
26.Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to the Editor, June 29, 1858, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 244–245. The Times published her letter on July 2, 1858, and referred to it in their July 3 edition; the letter was also printed in the Boston Investigator. Boston Investigator, November 10, 1869: 3, November 17, 1869: 5, January 19, 1870: 1, 4.
27.Boston Investigator, November 17, 1869: 5. The article was signed “Montgarnier,” almost certainly a pseudonym. I have been unable to discover his real identity. Montgarnier had published articles in the Investigator since 1839.
28.The first quotation is from Moncure D. Conway, who visited Modern Times and later became a friend of Rose’s; the second is from Andrews. Both cited in Madeleine B. Stern, The Pantarch: A Biography of Stephen Pearl Andrews (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968): 85, 83; New York Herald, May 14, 1858: 3. This is the fullest account of this convention, whose proceedings were not published.
29.Wright cited in Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011): 158; Beverly Wilson Palmer, ed., Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002): 261; Ernestine Rose, Speech, Second Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association, New York Times, May 14, 1869.
30.Rose’s mention of “ecclesiastical” law-givers refers to the fact that high officials of the Church of England automatically had seats in the House of Lords. Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to the Editor, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 239.
31.For these statements and the ensuing debate between Greeley, Dale Owen, and Andrews, see Taylor Stoehr, Free Love in America: A Documentary History (New York: AMS Press, 1979): 228–244; Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Martha Coffin Wright, cited in Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009): 100; Stanton and Blackwell’s speeches are given in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 266–279.
32.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Tenth National, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 280–283.
33.Susan B. Anthony, Diary, April 14, 1854, in The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1: In the School of Anti-Slavery 1840–1866, ed. Ann D. Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997): 271; on spiritualism and women, see Braude, Radical Spirits, especially p. 3; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter on Religion, Boston Investigator, August 25, 1858: 1; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter on Spiritualism, Boston Investigator, October 13, 1858: 1.
34.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, Seventh National, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 225; Lucretia Mott to Lucy Stone, July 1, 1857, in Palmer, Mott Letters: 259. Thanks to Gunja SenGupta for help with Anniversary Week. For Grimké, Anna M. Speicher, The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers (Syracuse, NY: University of Syracuse Press, 2000): 139, and the New York Herald, May 14, 1858: 3.
35.New York Tribune, May 13, 1859: 5 for the audience calling for Rose; [Ada Clare], “Woman’s Rights,” Boston Investigator, May 30, 1860: 3. Clare went on to praise Rose’s delivery when she spoke after this “dreary” speech; Boston Investigator, May 1, 1861: 4. The Liberator, April 19, 1861. The Annual Anti-Slavery Meeting was also canceled the week before it would have taken place. The Liberator, April 26, 1861.
36.Minutes of the Infidel Convention, held in the City of Philadelphia, September 7th & 8th, 1857 (Philadelphia: Published by the Central Committee, 1858): 3, 36; Rose also wrote a letter to the group in 1859, Boston Investigator, November 23, 1859: 1; for her participation in the 1860 convention, see the Boston Investigator, October 31, 1860: 1, and November 7, 1860: 1.
37.Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, November 4, 1857: 1; “Mrs. Rose,” Boston Investigator, May 26, 1858: 1; for Paine Banquet attendance figures, see the Boston Investigator for February 17, 1858: 2, February 16, 1859: 3, 4, February 15, 1860: 1, and February 20, 1861: 3; Ernestine L. Rose, Thomas Paine Speech 1859, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 247. For Rose’s other mentions of the Mortara Case, see the Boston Investigator, February 15, 1860: 3, and Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 292 for 1861.
38.Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the 1857 Thomas Paine Dinner, Boston Investigator, February 18, 1857: 1; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, December 14, 1859, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 250; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 192.
39.The Liberator, October 5, 1860, February 15, 1861; Boston Investigator, March 13, 1861: 1; Ernestine L. Rose, Thomas Paine Speech 1861, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself, 294.
1.Ernestine L. Rose, “The World Moves!” Boston Investigator, August 29, 1860: 3.
2.A Defence of Atheism: Being a Lecture Delivered in Mercantile Hall, Boston, April 10, 1861, by Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose (Boston: J. P. Mendum, Investigator Office, 1889). This work was published in 1861, 1881, and 1889; the third edition is the most widely available. The Boston Investigator advertised A Defence of Atheism and sold it for 5¢ for many years.
3.Rose, Defence of Atheism: 4–6, 18.
4.Rose, Defence of Atheism: 8–12.
5.Rose, Defence of Atheism: 13–15, 18–19.
6.Mazzini asserted this in the presence of Garibaldi, who replied, “I am an atheist. Have I then no sense of duty?” “Ah,” replied Mazzini, “You imbibed a sense of duty with your mother’s milk.” This anecdote, reported by G. J. Holyoake, is cited in Priscilla Robertson, Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952): 366. Rose, Defence of Atheism: 19–22. The friend was the English editor J. M. Wheeler, writing Rose’s obituary in his Freethinker, August 14, 1892, six weeks after she gave him her book.
7.Cited in Sherry H. Penney and James D. Livingston, A Very Dangerous Woman: Martha Wright and Women’s Rights (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004): 136; Lucretia Mott to Martha Wright, November 3, 1858, Mott MSS, Box 2, Lucretia Mott Papers, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College; Lucretia Mott to Mary Hussey Earle, February 20, 1863, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002): 330, 333; Lucretia Mott to Martha Wright, September 5, 1855, Mott Letters: 244. The phrase “the mad-dog cry of ‘atheist,’ ” used frequently in this period, came from the hideous execution of the atheist Lucilio Vanini in 1619 in Toulouse. Just before his death, the executioner pulled out his tongue with a pair of pincers. Vanini’s howl became interpreted as demonstrating that atheists were really animals rather than humans.
8.Ernestine L. Rose, “Toast for the Committee of the Paine Celebration,” in Paula Doress-Worters, ed., Mistress of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine L. Rose, Early Women’s Rights Leader (New York: Feminist Press, 2008): 302. The Boston Investigator originally misprinted “cancer” as “curse,” which Doress-Worters reprints. Rose wrote correcting the error: “I have no more belief in the efficacy of a curse to do harm than in the efficacy of religion, from which it sprang, to do good.” Boston Investigator, February 12, 1862: 5; Letter from C. T., Boston Investigator, March 3, 1862: 5. Ward Howe’s lyrics were published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1862.
9.Boston Investigator, June 4, 1862: 2, June 25, 1862: 2, June 10, 1863: 2; The Liberator, November 24, 1854; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, September 26, 1855: 1. After Barker returned to England, he denounced his former colleagues as having “immoral habits” and “licentiousness of life,” but never mentioned Rose again. The Life of Joseph Barker Written by Himself, ed. John Thomas Barker (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1880): 314–315.
10.Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, December 23, 1860, in The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1: In the School of Anti-Slavery 1840–1866, ed. Ann D. Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997): 452; The Liberator, February 15, 1861. Also see Rose’s follow-up letter on this mêlée, published in the Boston Investigator, March 13, 1861: 3, and The Liberator, March 22, 1861; The Liberator, March 16, 1862.
11.James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), passim; The Liberator, May 29, 1862: 3, August 15, 1862.
12.For the Woman’s National Loyal League, which was also called the National Woman’s Loyal League or the Women’s Loyal League, see Wendy Hamand Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), ch. 5, and Proceedings of the Meeting of the Loyal Women of the Republic, held in New York, May 14, 1863 (New York: Phair & Co., 1863).
13.Proceedings … Loyal Women: 21–22, 27–28.
14.Proceedings … Loyal Women: 42–48.
15.Proceedings … Loyal Women: 49, 53–54, iii, 11, 32. For more examples of Christian diction, see 6–7, 9–10, 11, 16, 33, 39, 56–57, 60, 65, 69–71. The only other speaker who did not express some religious sentiments was Lucy N. Coleman, who was hissed for saying “the God of Heaven—if such exists” and hissed again for declaring “I would willingly stand on the battle-field.” Proceedings … Loyal Women: 25. For the amendment, Evelyn A. Kirkley, Rational Mothers and Infidel Gentlemen: Gender and American Atheism 1865–1915 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000): 6–7; New York Herald, May 15, 1863.
16.McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: 609–611; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 888–895.
17.Paine cited in Louis Harap, The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974): 24.
18.Boston Investigator, January 16, 1856: 1. The acrostic was submitted by a Maine man who used the pseudonym “Cosmopolite.” Any comment Rose may have made about it no longer exists. For Seaver’s life, see the Horace Seaver Memorial (Boston: J. P. Mendum, 1889), which is available online at https://archive.org/details/horaceseavermemo00bost. For Rose raising money for Seaver, Boston Investigator, March 4, 1858: 3, and repeated in a number of subsequent issues; Boston Investigator, May 5, 1858: 2, for Seaver’s thanks. “Philo-Spinoza” wrote for the Investigator for more than thirty years. His real name remains unknown. His pseudonym combines the name of Philo Judaeus, a Hellenistic Greek Jew who criticized literal interpretations of the Bible, with that of the seventeenth-century Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, condemned by the Jewish community as a heretic for his unorthodox views.
19.Bertram Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War (New York: Atheneum, 1970): 1–2; Harap, The Image of the Jew: 11, 7, 5; Boston Investigator, August 27, 1862: 3, December 3, 1862: 2.
20.Hasia R. Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration 1820–1880 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), Jewish People in America series, vol. 2: 186. For a detailed discussion of Grant’s order and its ramifications, see Korn, American Jewry, ch. 6, “Exodus 1862”: 121–155; for the newspapers, Korn, American Jewry: 161. Seaver’s first two antisemitic editorials appeared in the Boston Investigator, August 19, 1863, and September 23, 1863. This third one, published October 28, 1863, is reprinted in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 311–313.
21.Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, January 29, 1864, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 313–315, 317–318. Doress-Worters prints Rose’s letters as Seaver divided them; I discuss them as a whole. The antisemitic letter was written by John W. Cole, a Connecticut merchant, Boston Investigator, January 20, 1864: 5. Frances Trollope, Domestic Matters of the Americans (London: Folio Society, 1974 [1832]): 224; Ernestine L. Rose, “Encouraging Letter,” Boston Investigator, February 24, 1864: 5.
22.For Rose, Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 326; for Seaver, Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 316, 319; for Rose’s supporter, William Wood, “The Jewish God and the Editor,” Boston Investigator, May 18, 1864: 2.
23.For Seaver, Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 321; for Rose, Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 325–326. For Seaver accusing Rose of “scolding,” Boston Investigator, March 9, 1864: 2. For Seaver’s replies to Rose’s letters, which Doress-Worters edits severely, see the Boston Investigator, March 2, 1864: 2; March 9, 1864: 2; March 16, 1864: 2; April 6, 1864: 3, and April 13, 1864: 2. For Rose’s last letter, Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 330; for Seaver’s, Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 333.
24.Boston Investigator, March 30, 1864: 4, April 20, 1864: 3; Philo-Spinoza, “Moses and the Prophets,” Boston Investigator, June 1, 1864: 3; Wood, Boston Investigator, May 18, 1864: 2; The Jewish Record, vol. 3, #22, February 19, 1864: 2. The Jewish Record became The Hebrew Leader in 1865.
25.Boston Investigator, February 20, 1867: 4.
26.Burrows and Wallace, Gotham: 902–905; New York World, April 20, 1865.
27.Ida Husted Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Indianapolis, IN: Bowen-Merrill, 1898–1908), vol. 1: 237–238; New York Tribune, May 13, 1864; Rose wrote to J. M. Beckett, the Bostonian who invited her to the Infidel Convention, on January 13, 1865. Beckett gave the letter to Horace Seaver, who published it with his account of the proceedings. Boston Investigator, February 15, 1865: 1.
28.Lucretia Mott to Martha Wright, September 8, 1857, Mott Letters: 261; Boston Investigator, March 23, 1859: 3; The Revolution, June 17, 1869; Sara A. Underwood, Heroines of Free Thought (New York: C. Somerby, 1876): 273.
29.Little is known about Sara Underwood, who also produced a book on spirit writing. She was married to B[enjamin] F[ranklin] Underwood, who also worked for the Investigator as a free-thought lecturer and journalist. Sara Underwood’s Heroines of Free Thought included Manon Roland, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, George Sand, Harriet Martineau, Frances Wright d’Arusmont, Emma Martin, Margaret Reynolds Chappellsmith, Frances Power Cobbe, and George Eliot as well as Ernestine Rose. Rose was the only American among them, although she lived in England when the book was published. I have not been able to identify “Old Mother.” For Slenker, who met Rose and began writing for the Investigator in 1867 with a piece on “Why Are There So Few Women Infidels?” see Annie Laurie Gaylor, ed., Women without Superstition “No Gods, No Masters”: The Collected Writings of Women Freethinkers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison, WI: Freedom from Religion Foundation, 1997): 237–241. For Dickinson, see J. Matthew Gallman, America’s Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna E. Dickinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
30.Sara A. Underwood, “New York Anniversaries,” Boston Investigator, May 27, 1868: 2. Underwood described Stanton as looking and acting like an ancient Roman matron; she found her face had “a certain masculine character.” She thought Rose “more benignant and womanly.”
31.Underwood, Heroines of Free Thought: 267. For Stanton’s life, see Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), and Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
32.Ernestine L. Rose, “Speech at the First Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association,” May 10, 1867, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 336; Proceedings of the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, Held at the Church of the Puritans, New York, May 10, 1866 (New York: Robert J. Johnston, 1866): 2.
33.Proceedings … Eleventh: 19–20, 40, 43; Proceedings of the First Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association held at the Church of the Puritans, New York, May 9 and 10, 1867 (New York: Robert J. Johnston, 1867): 77–80.
34.Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011): 88–95; Philip S. Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992 [1976]): 79–80; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, letter to the National Anti-Slavery Standard, December 26, 1865, reprinted in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage (Salem, NH: Ayer, 1985 [1881]), vol. 2, 1861–1876: 94–95; Dudden, Fighting Chance: 88; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2: 322, footnote. Others who opposed Amendment 14 according to Stanton and Anthony included Martha Wright, the free black Robert Purvis, minister Olympia Brown, Josephine Griffing, the white reformer Parker Pillsbury, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Susan B. Anthony, and Clarina Howard Nichols, as well as Rose, Mott, Davis, and Stanton.
35.Ernestine L. Rose, “Speech at the First Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association,” in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 334–336; Proceedings … First Anniversary of AERA: 20, 53.
36.The Revolution, November 26, 1868. The portraits were gifts from J. P. Mendum, Rose’s friend and the Boston Investigator’s publisher. The long article about the Jews was written by a Californian identified only as “Exit.” The Jewish Messenger rebuked The Revolution’s editors for publishing it; Stanton replied that the Messenger was harder on Jewish women than The Revolution. The Revolution, March 11, 1869, April 8, 1869; Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: 135–136; Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001): 208–209.
37.Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2: 353. Stanton repeated this remark a number of times, often changing the names of the women mentioned. For some examples, see The Revolution, December 24, 1868; The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2, Against an Aristocracy of Sex 1866–1873, ed. Ann D. Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997): 196, 198, n. 1; Dudden, Fighting Chance: 169; Ernestine L. Rose, Speech, 1869 Anniversary Meeting of the Equal Rights Association, in Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2: 397.
38.Underwood, Heroines of Free Thought: 256–258, 280–281. On the Universal Peace Union, see Merle Curti, Peace or War: The American Struggle 1636–1936 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1936): 77. Ernestine Rose also attended the Universal Peace Union New York meeting in May 1869, where only thirteen others participated. New York World, May 15, 1869. For more on Rose and pacifism, see Chapter 8, this volume.
39.Ernestine L. Rose, “Authoresses to the Rescue,” written December 20, 1868, published in The Revolution, January 21, 1869, and the Boston Investigator, February 2, 1869: 2; Ernestine L. Rose, “The Social Problem,” written January 3, 1869, published in the Boston Investigator, February 10, 1869: 3, and The Revolution, April 15, 1869.
40.Ernestine L. Rose, “Letter to the National Woman Suffrage Convention,” Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 343–344. For the complete letter, see The Revolution, January 28, 1869.
41.“The Working Woman’s Association,” The Revolution, January 14, 1869; New York Times, January 9, 1869: 8.
42.The proceedings of this convention were not published. The accounts in the New York Times and the New York Tribune are much fuller than that given in the History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, and I have relied primarily on them. New York Times, May 13, 1869; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2: 378–382; New York Times, May 14, 1869; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2: 389–391; New York Times, May 14, 1869; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2: 392–397; Jenny P. d’Héricourt, “Ernestine L. Rose,” The Agitator, June 25, 1869. Anneke and d’Héricourt’s speeches were translated into English by Stanton’s cousin, Elizabeth Smith Miller. New York Times, May 14, 1869; New York Tribune, May 14, 1869; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2: 396–398.
43.“Ernestine Rose Has Sailed for Europe,” Boston Investigator, June 16, 1869: 5; Lucretia Mott to Susan B. Anthony, June 6, 1869, in Palmer, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott: 417; a copy of Rose’s citizenship document is in the Yuri Suhl Papers, Box 15, Howard Gotlieb Archives, Boston University.
44.Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2: 406, 427–428; New York Times, May 19, 1869; The Revolution, May 27, 1869; Boston Investigator, June 30, 1869: 5.
45.Boston Investigator, June 16, 1869: 5; Harper, Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1: 329; Stanton and Anthony Papers, Microfilm, Anthony Diary, May 18, 1870, reel 2.
1.Laura Curtis Bullard, “Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose in England,” The Revolution, July 13, 1871; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, September 15, 1869: 2. Since Rose sent handwritten letters, editors often misread her script, so Luxeuil became “Luxenill.” The French historian Françoise Basch corrected this error in her Rebelles Américaines au XIXe Siècle: Mariage, amour libre et politique (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1990): 131, footnote 15. (The book deals with Ernestine Rose and Victoria Woodhull.)
2.Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, September 15, 1869: 2; D’Héricourt’s piece on Rose was published in the Chicago-based women’s rights newspaper The Agitator on June 25, 1869, and reprinted in the Boston Investigator, December 8, 1869: 2. Doggett had written for The Agitator; she also helped found the Chicago branch of Sorosis and was elected to the Academy of Science there for her work in botany. For Doggett, see Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, vol. 5: Let the Oppressed Go Free 1861–1867, ed. Walter M. Merrill and Louis Rachames (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979): 335, footnote 2; Kate N. Doggett, Letter from Lisbon, The Revolution, March 3, 1870: 135.
3.Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, July 20, 1870: 2. Both names were seriously distorted by the Investigator. Richer, identified because Rose stated he edited a “Women’s Rights paper,” became “Lion Banjoue” and Léodile Champseix was called “Marie Champsex.” Champseix wrote as a woman but used the male pseudonym André Léo, the names of her twin sons. She first corresponded with US feminists in 1869.
4.Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, February 8, 1871: 2; Paulina W. Davis, A History of the National Woman’s Rights Movement for Twenty Years (New York: Journeymen Printers’ Co-operative Association, 1871): 10, 19; Paulina Wright Davis Papers, Vassar College, 1872, and Folder 12, Travel Diary.
5.Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, February 8, 1871: 2; Wikipedia entry for James Thompson; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, February 9, 1881: 2.
6.The National Reformer, March 9, 1873, November 2, 1873; Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928 [Great Britain] (London: UCL Press, 1999): 213; The Revolution, March 9, 1871.
7.Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: 260. The National Reformer, the Boston Investigator, and The Revolution all published accounts of Rose’s speech; I have used the fullest one, which is from The Revolution, July 13, 1871.
8.National Reformer, May 7, 1871, reprinted in the Boston Investigator, May 24, 1871.
9.For a chart of this and other radical families, see Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: 768; for Ashworth, 20–21.
10.For one early piece championing Bradlaugh, see the Boston Investigator, December 7, 1864: 2; Warren Sylvester Smith, The London Heretics 1870–1914 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1968): 38ff; Shaw cited in Susan Budd, Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society 1850–1960 (London: Heineman, 1977): 43.
11.The Times [London], June 25, 1880, cited in Anne Taylor, Annie Besant: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 150; Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, “Ernestine L. Rose,” National Reformer, August 14, 1892.
12.Mary Elizabeth Burtis, Moncure Conway 1831–1907 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1952): 178. For Conway’s openness to free thought, see Burtis, Moncure Conway: 132, and Smith, The London Heretics: 105, 113; Boston Investigator, July 5, 1871: 6.
13.Report of the Proceedings of the Festival in Commemoration of the Centenary Birthday of ROBERT OWEN, the Philanthropist, held at Freemasons Hall, London, May 16, 1871 (London: E. Truelove, 1871): 20–21; Boston Investigator, July 5, 1871: 6; September 6, 1871: 6; August 28, 1872: 5.
14.Report of … Centenary Birthday of ROBERT OWEN: 21; “Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose in England,” The Revolution, July 13, 1871; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to Susan B. Anthony, July 4, 1876, in Paula Doress-Worters, ed., Mistress of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine L. Rose, Early Women’s Rights Leader (New York: Feminist Press, 2008): 346; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, written December 27, 1870, Boston Investigator, February 8, 1871: 2; since Rose’s letters had to cross the Atlantic by ship, they were written weeks before they could be published.
15.Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, August 23, 1871: 6; National Reformer, November 2, 1873; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, February 9, 1876: 1.
16.Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, October 21, 1874: 4; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to Susan B. Anthony, July 4, 1876, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 346; “Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose,” Boston Investigator, June 30, 1886: 4.
17.Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, August 8, 1877: 2. The Freethinker’s editor was G. W. Foote. Smith, The London Heretics: 62–66.
18.Report of a General Conference of Liberal Thinkers, for the “Discussion of Matters Pertaining to the Religious Needs of Our Time, and the Methods of Meeting Them” Held June 13th & 14th at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, London (London: Trűbner & Co., 1878): 28. Available online at https://books.google.com/books?id=gFM-AAAAYAA. Hereafter called Liberal Thinkers; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “An English Heretic. Charles Bradlaugh,” Boston Investigator, August 21, 1872: 3; Smith, The London Heretics: 38.
19.Maurice J. Quinlan, Victorian Prelude: A History of English Manners 1700–1830: 46, 54, 165, 208, 213. In addition, pubs were closed throughout Britain, except in London. Boston Investigator, April 20, 1870: 5.
20.“Our London Letter,” Boston Investigator, written February 15, 1873, published April 2, 1873: 2; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, October 21, 1874: 1. P. A. Taylor’s given names were Peter Alfred, but he was usually referred to as P. A.; Mentia Taylor’s full first name was Clementia, but she never used it. Mentia Taylor attended Ernestine Rose’s funeral; P. A. Taylor died in 1891, the year before Rose.
21.Alcott cited in Elizabeth Crawford, “Taylor [née Doughty], Clementia,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/. For the Taylors, see Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: 673–677, and Wikipedia entry on Peter Alfred Taylor. “Open evenings” from The Revolution, January 19, 1871.
22.Ernestine L. Rose, Owen Centenary: 21. Rose also praised Thomas Henry Huxley, the freethinking biologist known as “Darwin’s bulldog.” Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: 351.
23.On the Contagious Diseases Acts and the campaign to repeal them, Christine Bolt, The Women’s Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993): 127–132. Thanks to Susan Pedersen for help with this section.
24.Membership in the House of Lords then descended only through the male line; the House of Commons was also all-male, elected only by men. Gladstone cited in Patricia Hollis, Women in Public 1850–1900: Documents of the Victorian Women’s Movement (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979): 320; Lady Amberley cited in Philippa Levine, Victorian Feminism 1850–1900 (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1987): 76; Queen Victoria cited in Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: 10; Beresford Hope cited in Hollis, Women in Public 1850–1900: 306.
25.Cited in the Boston Investigator, June 5, 1872: 6; for Priscilla Bright McLaren, Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: 400–404. In addition, Crawford writes about four women present at Rose’s first Edinburgh speech. They were Rosaline Masson: 390; Flora Stevenson: 655; Jane Taylour: 683; and Eliza Wigham: 708.
26.Rose gave three speeches in Edinburgh, the long one I have quoted from on January 27, published in The Daily Review (Edinburgh), January 28, 1873. The Review printed her remarks in the third person (“she”); I have changed them back to the first person (“I”), which she would have used. Her second Edinburgh speech was made on January 29, the third on January 30. Both appeared in The Daily Review, January 31, 1873. Her first Edinburgh speech was reprinted in the Boston Investigator, February 26, 1873: 3.
27.Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, 1861–1876 (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881): 534; The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), ed. Ann D. Gordon, vol. 2, Against an Aristocracy of Sex 1866–1873: 363, note 3; The Revolution, November 4, 1869; February 17, 1870; August 4, 1870; September 8, 1870; Davis, History: 6; Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Papers, ed. Ann D. Gordon, Microfilm, Reel 18, frames 858, 865; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to Susan B. Anthony, July 4, 1876, Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2: 50–51.
28.National Reformer, March 9, 1873; Boston Investigator, July 20, 1870: 6; March 22, 1871: 6; February 11, 1874: 4; February 14, 1877: 3.
29.Boston Investigator, July 20, 1870: 6; February 8, 1871: 2; August 21, 1871: 6. Rose made five speeches in 1871, three in 1872, as well as attending a women’s peace conference in London, and four speeches in 1873. Boston Investigator, July 23, 1873: 6.
30.Boston Investigator, November 17, 1873: 6; November 26, 1873: 6.
31.Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2: 534; Boston Investigator, January 14, 1874: 2. Stansfeld also championed Italian nationalism. He attended William Rose’s funeral in 1882. National Reformer, February 15, 1874, written January 20, 1874.
32.The editors of the History of Woman Suffrage did not print the proceedings of this convention. The fullest account of it, which I have used, is from the New York Times, May 15, 1874: 8, and May 16, 1874: 8. The speaker preceding Rose was Octavius B. Frothingham, a radical clergyman.
33.Boston Investigator, April 26, 1871: 6; February 26, 1873: 3; July 15, 1874: 2; July 29, 1874: 2; February 10, 1875: 3; April 28, 1875, for the new masthead; February 9, 1876: 1; November 21, 1877: 6; November 28, 1877: 6; December 6, 1876: 6 for Anthony. For Rose’s donations in the late 1870s, see the Boston Investigator, February 9, 1876: 1; May 24, 1876: 1; August 2, 1876: 5; February 2, 1877: 5; November 22, 1877: 5; January 2, 1878: 5; June 12, 1878: 5; March 5, 1879: 3.
34.Boston Investigator, December 23, 1874: 2, written November 14; February 10, 1875: 3, written on Ernestine Rose’s birthday, January 13; April 14, 1875: 2, written March 20; National Reformer, October 10, 1875, reprinted in the Boston Investigator, November 3, 1875: 5.
35.Boston Investigator, February 21, 1877: 2, written January 12. Rose misspelled Yorkshire place names here, which the Investigator reproduced. So “Elkley” is really “Ilkley” and “Harrowgate” is “Harrogate.” Holyoake was referring back to 1845 and wrote that his observation was made “more than thirty years later.” George Jacob Holyoake, The History of Co-operation, revised and completed, 2 vols. (New York: E. Dutton, 1906), vol. 2: 463.
36.Thanks to my friend, John Graney, MD, for trying to diagnose her. Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, February 8, 1871: 3; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to Susan B. Anthony, Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2: 50; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, August 8, 1877: 2, written July 8; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to Mrs. Moncure Conway, May 9, 1879, University of Michigan Special Collections; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, August 8, 1877: 2, written July 8.
37.Liberal Thinkers: 3; Smith, The London Heretics: 115; Ernestine Rose, Liberal Thinkers: 26. Rose was echoing the French revolutionary Manon Roland’s comment just before she was guillotined: “O Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name.” Ernestine Rose, Liberal Thinkers: 27. For Voysey, who then opened a “theistic church” in London and became a hero to both Conway and many liberal Anglicans, see Smith, The London Heretics: 127–129; for his decision not to return the second day because of Rose’s remarks, Burtis, Moncure Conway: 171.
38.Ernestine Rose, Liberal Thinkers: 27; Arthur J. Nethercot, The First Five Lives of Annie Besant (London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1961): 69–70, 73, 77; National Reformer, October 10, 1875; Nethercot, The First Five Lives of Annie Besant: 128–136; Taylor, Annie Besant: 109, 127, 135.
39.Ernestine Rose, Liberal Thinkers: 27. For Higginson, The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911), ed. Howard N. Meyer (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000), for the Worcester Call: 13; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Liberal Thinkers: 28–31; Ernestine Rose and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Liberal Thinkers: 31. I have been unable to identify the quotation she used.
40.Liberal Thinkers: 49, 43. The speaker was Johnston Russell of Limerick. Ernestine Rose, Liberal Thinkers: 62–63; Unitarian Herald cited in the Boston Investigator, July 31, 1878: 3; Ernestine Rose, Liberal Thinkers: 74, 77.
41.Burtis, Moncure Conway: 172–173; Stanton and Anthony Papers, Microfilm, Reel 20, frame 317; Ernestine Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, December 25, 1878: 2; Congrès International des Sociétés des Amis de la Paix, tenu à Paris les 26e, 27e, 29e et 30e Septembre, et le 1e Octobre 1878 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1880): 36. Hereafter Amis de la Paix. Thanks to Sandi Cooper for letting me read her copy of the proceedings. Merle Curti, Peace or War: The American Struggle 1636–1936 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1936): 86; Charles Lemonnier, Les États-Unis d’Europe (Paris: Librairie de la Bibliothèque Démocratique, 1872); Lemonnier published the bilingual monthly “Les États Unis d’Europe—Die Vereinigten Staaten von Europa,” until 1889; Autobiography, Memories and Experiences of Moncure Daniel Conway, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904), vol. 2: 284; Boston Investigator, July 31, 1872: 6; April 9, 1873: 4.
42.Ernestine Rose, Amis de la Paix: 36; Amis de la Paix: 58, 89, 99, 142. The Frenchwoman who proposed the resolution was Eugénie Niboyet; other women who spoke were Léonie Rouzade, Hubertine Auclert, Julia Ward Howe, and Mrs. Henry Richard.
43.Sara A. Underwood, Heroines of Free Thought (New York: C. Somerby, 1876): 259; D. M. Bennett, The World’s Sages, Infidels and Thinkers (New York: Liberal and Scientific Publishing House, 1876): 949; Elmina D. Slenker, Letter, Boston Investigator, December 4, 1878: 5. For Slenker, see Annie Laurie Gaylor, ed., Women without Superstition “No Gods—No Masters”: The Collected Writings of Women Freethinkers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison, WI: Freedom from Religion Foundation, 1997): 237–242; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to Susan B. Anthony, January 9, 1877, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 347. Dale Owen wrote very little, saying “as to Ernestine L. Rose, I think it probable that you know more of her than I do.” Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1: 292–293; for Barnard: 95–100; Stanton and Anthony Papers, Microfilm, Reel 20, frame 634; Boston Investigator, February 14, 1877: 3; February 7, 1877: 4.
44.Boston Investigator, December 25, 1878: 2, written November 26. The Comstock Law’s prohibition of birth control information remained in effect until 1915, when Margaret Sanger contested it. In 1887, Elmina D. Slenker, then sixty, was jailed for “mailing private, sealed letters giving advice on sex and marriage.” Gaylor, Women without Superstition: 401, 237. Rose wrote that the short piece she quoted in the December 25 letter came from “a satirical journal, edited by my old friend, Fritz Jemit, called Der Guckkasten [the show-box].” Neither I nor some German researchers have been able to identify the editor or the journal. Reprinted from the Manchester Women’s Suffrage Journal in the Boston Investigator, March 10, 1880: 4, written January 31, 1880; Rose actually wrote two letters to Stanton, one on May 15, 1880, which is reprinted in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 351, and a second one with slight changes on May 17, which she asked Stanton to use. Chicago Historical Society/Chicago History Museum.
45.Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to Mrs. Moncure Conway, May 9, 1879, University of Michigan Special Collections; Walter Arnstein, The Bradlaugh Case: Atheism, Sex, and Politics among the Late Victorians (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983): 50; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, footnote: 842–843; Arnstein, The Bradlaugh Case: 75.
46.Kate Field, “Mr. Bradlaugh’s Great Speech,” New York Tribune, July 25, 1880; member of Parliament cited in Arnstein, The Bradlaugh Case: 110.
47.Taylor, Annie Besant: 92ff.; Arthur Bonner and Charles Bradlaugh Bonner, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner: The Story of Her Life (London: Watts, 1942): 30; Alice Bradlaugh, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain 1866–1915 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1980): 118.
48.From the Boston Investigator, February 22, 1882, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 355–356; National Reformer, February 5, 1882; Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 356. The elder daughter, Alice, was “Miss Bradlaugh,” while her younger sister was “Miss Hypatia Bradlaugh.”
49.Letter from Sarah Hull Haddock, whom I have not been able to identify, to Madam Anneke, Box 5, Folder 7, Anneke Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society. Thanks to Carol Faulkner for sending me this letter. Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, “Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose,” National Reformer, August 14, 1892.
1.Anthony’s diary entry for March 22, 1883, in Ida Husted Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, 3 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Bowen-Merrill, 1898–1908), vol. 2: 553–554; Stanton and Anthony Papers, Microfilm, Reel 22, frames 1009, 1011; Stanton’s diary entry from December 15, 1882, in Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1922), vol. 2: 201.
2.Anthony cited in Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2: 554; Miss Jeannie Armstrong, “Mrs. E. L. Rose, &c.,” Boston Investigator, December 16, 1885: 2. Anne Taylor, Annie Besant: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 157–158. The decision to reject Besant and Bradlaugh from University College, London, Britain’s first secular college, was made by a “Lady Superintendent” and upheld by the College Council, which gave no reason for its decision. Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, “Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose,” National Reformer, August 14, 1892.
3.Stanton and Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, vol. 2: 201; Stanton and Anthony Papers, Microfilm, Reel 20, frames 1010, 1011; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (reprint, New York: Schocken Books, 1971 [1898]): 366.
4.The National Reformer printed her 1860 speech on divorce, July 23, 1882; the Boston Investigator printed A Defence of Atheism, November 2, 1881: 1, and her 1851 Worcester speech, March 17, 1886: 1. In addition, advertisements for these speeches appeared weekly in the Boston Investigator until Rose’s death in August 1892. Her Worcester Speech was also excerpted in the International Council of Women’s “Conference of the Pioneers” in 1888, Report of the International Council of Women (Washington, DC: Spring 1888), “Conference of the Pioneers,” Stanton and Anthony Papers, Microfilm, Reel 26, frame 332; the Boston Investigator printed her 1883 Edinburgh speech, February 2, 1887: 1. For Ernestine Rose Nock, the Boston Investigator, January 17, 1883: 2; January 31, 1883, 2. For tributes to Rose, Boston Investigator, June 6, 1883: 3, November 7, 1883: 2; December 19, 1883: 4; May 27, 1885, 2; July 22, 1885: 2; August 26, 1885: 5; December 9, 1885: 2; December 16, 1885: 2; March 10, 1886: 6; March 17, 1886: 6; April 28, 1886: 5; June 30, 1886: 4; December 22, 1886: 4; January 26, 1887: 6; February 23, 1887: 2; March 16, 1887: 4; June 15, 1887: 6; August 10, 1887: 3; October 19, 1887: 3; December 28, 1887: 6; January 18, 1888: 1; April 25, 1888: 2; June 6, 1888: 6; June 13, 1888: 6; July 11, 1888: 6; July 18, 1888: 2; December 5, 1888: 4; January 30, 1889: 6; February 13, 1889: 3; April 10, 1889: 4; May 1, 1889: 2; May 22, 1889: 6; June 12, 1889: 6; June 19, 1889: 6; October 9, 1889: 2; November 26, 1890: 3; June 17, 1891: 2. For Ernestine Rose’s Letters, sometimes included in tribute articles: Boston Investigator, December 19, 1883: 4; May 27, 1885: 2; June 24, 1885: 5; June 30, 1886: 4; March 6, 1889: 6; November 6, 1889: 6. For Rose’s letters about the Boston Investigator, Boston Investigator, June 30, 1886: 4; National Reformer, January 13, 1889.
5.For Robert Ingersoll, who became a colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War, see Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), ch. 6, “The Great Agnostic and the Golden Age of Freethought”: 149–185; Jeannie Armstrong, “Mrs. E. L. Rose, &c.,” Boston Investigator, December 16, 1885: 2; “Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose,” Boston Investigator, June 24, 1885: 5; “A Pleasant Occasion,” Boston Investigator, December 9, 1885: 2.
6.Ernestine L. Rose, Letter to Rev. Edward F. Strickland, August 30, 1887, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati. Rose’s letter implies that she knew Strickland’s “dear wife.” His collection ended up in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA and contains the only photograph of her that remains. It is used on this book’s cover and is its first illustration. Thanks to Ann D. Gordon for help in identifying Strickland. J. M. Wheeler, “Rose (Ernestine Louise),” in his Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of All Ages and Nations (London: Progressive Publishing, 1889); Elmina D. Slenker, “Eminent Women: Ernestine L. Rose,” The Truth Seeker, August 31, 1889. Her article on Rose was the second (following one on Frances Wright) in a series of ten women.
7.“Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose,” Boston Investigator, October 19, 1887: 3; in rebuttal to an 1882 London penny pamphlet, Death’s Test on Christians and Infidels—Echoes from Seventy Death Beds, which argued that freethinkers would convert, The Freethinker published R[euben] May, ed., Death’s Test or Christian Lies about Dying Infidels (London: Freethought Publishing Co., 1882); Hypatia Bradlaugh, “Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose,” National Reformer, August 14, 1892.
8.Women’s Penny Paper, February 2, 1889: 1. Muller used the pseudonym “Helena B. Temple.” For her life, see Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928 [Great Britain] (London: UCL Press, 1999): 428–430. Sara A. Underwood used much of this article for a piece on Rose in the “Women’s Department” of the Chicago Religio-Philosophical Journal, which the Boston Investigator reprinted on May 1, 1889: 2.
9.“A Note from Mr. Holyoake,” Boston Investigator, June 19, 1889: 6; Joseph Mazzini Wheeler, “A Visit to Two Veteran Freethinkers in England,” Boston Investigator, October 9, 1889: 2.
10.Boston Investigator, August 28, 1889: 4, 6; October 2, 1889: 6; Ernestine L. Rose, Letter, Boston Investigator, November 6, 1889: 6, written October 21.
11.“Obituaries—Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose,” Boston Investigator, August 17, 1892: 6; Charles Bradlaugh, Wikipedia entry; Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, Boston Investigator, February 25, 1891: 6; Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, “Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose,” National Reformer, August 14, 1892.
12.For a portrait of Washington Epps, MD, see Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s 1885 painting in the Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA. Epps witnessed Rose’s will. For a list of those who attended Rose’s funeral, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, “Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose,” National Reformer, August 14, 1892: 107, and George Jacob Holyoake, “Eulogy for Ernestine Rose,” August 8, 1892, in Paula Doress-Worters, ed., Mistress of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine L. Rose, Early Women’s Rights Leader (New York: Feminist Press, 2008): 357.
13.Holyoake, “Eulogy,” in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 358; Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, “Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose,” National Reformer, August 14, 1892; “Funeral of Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose,” London Daily News, August 9, 1892, reprinted in the Boston Investigator and Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 357–358.
14.“Last Will and Testament of Ernestine Louise Rose,” reprinted in Yuri Suhl, Ernestine L. Rose: Women’s Rights Pioneer, 2nd ed. (New York: Biblio Press, 1990): 289–290; Yuri Suhl Papers, Howard Gotlieb Archival Center, Boston University. Rose’s stepmother’s name and that of her daughter remain unknown; the daughter did marry a man whose last name was Morgenstern. G. J. Holyoake, “The Late Mrs. Rose,” Boston Investigator, January 11, 1893: 6, reprinted from the London Freethinker.
15.For the other tributes, see L[ucy] S[tone], Women’s Journal, August 13, 1892; J. M. Wheeler, Freethinker, August 14, 1892; J. H. Cook, “A Tribute to Ernestine L. Rose,” Boston Investigator, September 7, 1892: 3; “In Memory of Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose,” New York Tribune, October 13, 1892; Susan B. Anthony, Minutes of the Suffrage Convention, January 16, 1893, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage (Reprint, Salem, NH: Ayer, 1985): vol. 1, 100, 1902 edition; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Tribute to Ernestine Rose,” January 16, 1893, 25th Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, in Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: 359–360; Samuel Putnam, 400 Years of Freethought (New York: Truth Seeker, 1894): 216, 495, 795; “Ernestine L. Rose, a Reminiscence from Lillie Devereux Blake,” Boston Investigator, November 26, 1890: 3. Blake’s words about New York State women and Rose are cited without notes in Suhl, Ernestine L. Rose: 275. For Blake’s life, see Grace Farrell, Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing a Life Erased (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002).
16.Henry Lewis, “Ernestine Rose: First Jewish Advocate of Women’s Rights,” Forward, June 19, 1927.
17.Boston Investigator, March 22, 1871: 6; according to a 2012 Gallup Poll, 96 percent of Americans would vote for a black for president, 95 percent for a woman, 94 percent for a Catholic, 92 percent for a Hispanic, 91 percent for a Jew, 80 percent for a Mormon, 68 percent for a gay or lesbian, 58 percent for a Muslim, and 54 percent for an atheist.