The American Life of Ernestine Rose
This book
review was published in The
Truth Seeker
The
American Life of Ernestine L. Rose
By Carol A.
Kolmerten
Syracuse
University Press 1999
Hd. 300pp.
Reviewed by
Sharon Presley
Like so many
19th century freethought heroines, Ernestine Rose is virtually unknown
among freethinkers today. Humanists and freethinkers like to fancy
themselves more enlightened than other people but until recently, the
only major anthology in print, Freethought on the Frontier from
Prometheus Books, included just one woman. It took a woman editor
working for an organization run by women (Freedom from Religion
Foundation) to bring Rose and the other influential women of
freethought to our awareness (see Annie Laurie Gaylor’s anthology Women Without Superstition reviewed
in the last issue of The Truth Seeker).
Now Carol Kolmerten, an English professor at Hood College, has also
done both the freethought and feminist movements a great service by
writing this new biography of the remarkable and fascinating atheist
feminist Ernestine Rose.
Though Rose was
one of the most important early figures in the woman’s rights movement
(in 1836, the first woman to petition for women’s rights in America),
her name is scarcely remembered even in the feminist movement
today. As Kolmerten points out, Rose’s absence from conventional
recorded history is telling. Scorned not only by mainstream editors,
politicians, and ministers, she was also often ignored by many people
she shared the platform with. The women’s movement of that time drew
much of its energy and justification from pious Christian notions of
morality. As a consequence, her outspoken atheism frightened and
repelled many comrades-in arms. In a time when even social activists
were not free of anti-Semitism, anti-immigration feelings, and
unconscious racism, her background as a Polish Jew was held against her
as well.
Born in 1810 in
Piotrkow Poland as the only child of a Jewish family, Rose learned how
to argue and debate from her rabbi father, a skill she later used to
great advantage. Even as a child and adolescent, she was rebellious,
questioning her father’s religious ideas, so when her father tried to
marry her off to someone she did not love, Ernestine refused. In 1829
she made her way to London, with no money, not speaking the language,
but soon overcoming this handicap by buying a dictionary and teaching
herself English. By the early 1830s, she was involved in Owenite
socialist activities. In 1836 she married (in a civil ceremony!) fellow
activist William Rose. William was to remain supportive of her
activities for the rest of their lives. Shortly after their marriage,
they moved to the U.S., first joining an Owenite colony but later
moving out on their own to New York City.
After drifting
away from Owenite activism, Rose took up the freethought cause,
involving herself in the Thomas Paine Society and even becoming
its first woman president. She also quickly became involved in the
cause of women’s equality. Her speeches for both causes were so
impeccably logical and so well constructed that even those who despised
what she said often commented on the brilliance of her talks. An
uncompromising and fearless rationalist, Rose added wit and sarcasm to
biting logic when she spoke. ”Rose’s effective oratorical style” writes
Kolmerten, “combines a passion for her beliefs with an intellectual
conviction in the promise of America as a place where people could,
indeed should, be free to live a life of liberty and be free to pursue
ideas that might not be popular.”
Unlike many
other women speakers who spoke only in generalities, Rose knew how to
be precise, attacking specific people and arguments, “demolishing what
she perceived to be inadequate thinking in careful, logical steps with
words often tinged with sarcasm.” As a speaker, she was
formidable and unafraid, able to field comments from a hostile audience
with great aplomb, unlike many of her meeker feminist sisters. Also
setting her apart from her contemporaries in the women’s movement was
her refusal to buy into the then (and still) popular notion of women’s
“special spiritual nature.” Only the anarchist feminists of the second
half of the 19th century were as radical as Rose in their rejection of
gender stereotypes.
Both her
freethought and women’s rights activities brought much scorn and
hostility from an irrational and uncritically religious populace. When,
for example, she declaimed “trample the Bible, the church, and the
priest under your feet” because “the Bible” not man, has “enslaved you,
the churches have built on your subjugated necks,” she was, not
surprisingly, greeted with a cacophony of hisses, boos and
catcalls. In a typical piece of hysteria, one small-town Maine
editor wrote: “it would be shameful to listen to this woman, a thousand
times below a prostitute.” Then, as in the 1960’s and 1970s
and even in certain quarters today, the newspapers demonized women who
dared to stand up for their rights, calling them “vulgar,” “old maids,”
and “down upon the whole of the opposite sex.” Then, as now, virtually
none of this was true; threats to the status quo are generally met with
such ugly substitutes for thinking. But even while scorning Rose, many
men had to grudgingly admit that she had “power.” In speaking of
one of her speeches at a convention, the Herald wrote: “In point of
ability, the majority of the women are flimsy, flippant, and
superficial. Mrs. Rose alone indicates much argumentative power.”
A frequent
speaker at many of the early women’s conventions who was greatly
admired by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Rose was
unflaggingly active in the American women’s rights movement until after
the Civil War. When the war ended in 1865, however, a growing split in
the women’s movement set back their cause. Rose, along with Stanton and
Anthony, was on the ”radical” side, insisting on women’s suffrage at
the same time as the upcoming ratification of the 15th Amendment,
giving the vote to black men in 1870. But later when Stanton and
Anthony used racist language to justify getting the vote for women
before black men, Rose, who hated racism as well as compromise, was not
pleased.
In 1869, Rose
and her husband, whose incomes were always modest, moved back to
England because it was cheaper to live there. Rose continued her
freethought and women’s rights activities, asserting in one typical
speech, “Humanity, justice and morality recognize no sex.” Never
recanting her beliefs, she made sure in her will, made shortly before
she died in 1892, that her body was not be taken to a chapel or church.
Rightly noting
that “[f]ew of us are as brave as she was,” Kolmerten ends her
biography by commenting on one of Rose’s last public remarks: “I have
lived.” Indeed, Ernestine Rose lived and lived well. She lived her life
with passion, commitment and meaning, greatly advancing the causes of
freethought and feminism. She is one of the many until-now-forgotten
women who can serve as an inspiring role model for women and men in the
new Millennium.
