There's a neat fifty-minute interview with me about The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter now up on the New Books Network -- a great podcast where authors speak about their books. Here's the link
The New York Times recently published a section called "Overlooked," writing obituaries about women whom they never covered despite their importance. I just submitted my suggestion for Ernestine Rose. However, the Times has received over 2000 new suggestions and seems to want to write the obituaries themselves. Therefore, I'm posting my obituary of her here.
This "Queen of the Platform in the 1850s became forgotten in the early twentieth century.
by Bonnie S. Anderson
An outstanding orator for women's rights, free thought, and anti-slavery, Ernestine Rose was far more famous in the mid-nineteenth century than her co-workers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Lecturing in 23 of the existing 31 states, at a time when women rarely spoke publicly, she earned her reputation despite major handicaps: she remained the only immigrant as well as the only atheist in the early women's movement.
Born in Poland in 1810, she was the sole child of Rabbi Potowsky, who educated her as a "surrogate son" at home. When she interrogated the Bible, he told her "little girls must not ask questions," even though little boys were supposed to do so. She later told a reporter that this "made her an advocate of religious freedom and women's right" at an early age.
When she was 15, her mother died, leaving her a substantial inheritance. Her father betrothed her to a man she did not want to marry, writing a contract that if she did not go through with the wedding, her fiance would receive her money. When her betrothed refused to release her from the engagement, she took an unprecedented action for a young girl, traveling alone by sleigh to plead her case before a district court. Ernestyna Potowska succeeded. She remained immensely proud of this triumph, invoking it in later years to demonstrate what women could achieve. The court awarded her the money and when she returned home, she discovered her father had remarried a girl her own age. Realizing that she could not live happily with her new step-mother, she left her family, Poland, and Judaism forever.
She went first to Berlin, then the center of liberal Judaism. There, she read "not dead books (like the Bible) but living ones." She also invented a perfumed paper which could be burned to bring pleasant odors to homes. After two years in Berlin, she traveled to Paris, arriving in time for the Revolution of 1830, which replaced a conservative monarch with a liberal one. Deploring all monarchies, she moved on to London, the largest and most industrialized city in the Western world.
There, she "found friends as liberty-loving as herself" in the circle surrounding Robert Owen. An immensely successful factory owner turned radical, Owen became her substitute father and new educator. Owen endorsed socialism, free thought, labor unions, and equal marriage. His movement attracted women and allowed them to write and speak in public. There, Potowska began her career as an orator. She also met and married her adored and adoring husband, the silversmith William Rose. In 1836, the new couple traveled to the United States, settling in New York City for the next 33 years.
In New York, Ernestine Rose began her political work, debating socialist principles in the active Owenite community there and also carrying a petition for Married Women's Property Rights around lower Manhattan. In this era, everything a married woman owned belonged to her husband. Rose received only one signature a month but continued on. This work introduced her to other women's rights activists and she also began lecturing for free thought and against slavery. She bore two children who died young. By the late 1840s, she spent the bulk of her time traveling and lecturing. This supported both by William and by the couple's decision to save money by not hiring a servant.
Rose came to the fore of the women's movement in 1851 at the second National Women's Rights Convention, held in Worcester, Mass. She had not attended the Seneca Falls, N.Y. gathering in 1848 which was both small and local. Present at the First National in 1850, she attracted notice because of her oratory. Delegated to present the main speech in 1851, she gave "an address which has never been surpassed," a co-worker wrote in an early history of women's rights. Even though she was the only "foreigner" among this group of native-born Americans, Ernestine Rose became an acknowledged leader of the movement. Lecturing to audiences of thousands, she spoke for racial equality as well as women's rights. "Black and white, male and female, all deserve human rights," she frequently proclaimed. "They who sat with her in bygone days on the platform will remember her matchless powers as a speaker," Susan B. Anthony later declared, "and how sage we all felt when she had the floor."
Although Ernestine Rose attempted to unite her three causes of women's rights, free thought, and anti-slavery, she met with little success in this attempt. Women's rights workers were devoutly Christian, often beginning meetings with prayers and hymns. There, she muted her atheism and avoided religious discussions. Freethinkers, for their part, tended to disparage abolitionism. They believed the Bible to be the chief justification for slavery and thought combating religion the most important battle to be waged. The anti-slavery movement had divided over women's rights, with the largest and most successful faction opposing them. Abolitionists also relied heavily on Christian teachings.
The Civil War divided the women's movement between those who thought the vote for black men should take precedence and those, like Rose, who wanted the vote for all. During the war, her health began to fail. In 1869, she and William emigrated back to England, returning to the United States for just one visit. In Britain, Ernestine Rose again became a powerful speaker for a few years, embraced by the freethought and feminist communities. However, her health continued to decline and she gave her last public speech in 1878. Her English friends sustained her through the great tragedy of her life: William's death from a heart attack in 1882. Ernestine lived another 10 years, maintaining her values as she became confined to a wheel chair. "For over fifty years, I have endeavored to promote the rights of humanity without distinction of sex, sect, party, country, or color," she wrote an American couple when she was 77. Two years later, in 1889, an English journalist wrote that "Mrs. Rose has a fine face and head, and although aged and suffering, retains the utmost interest in the Freethought cause."
That favorite cause brought its own difficulties. In this era, Christians tried to convert sick and dying atheists. Rose received hostile letters from those who assumed that suffering would lead her to Christianity. She arranged for the daughter of her good friend, the atheist Charles Bradlaugh, to be with her when she lay ill to prevent "religious persons who might make her unsay the convictions of her whole life when her brain was weakened by illness." She died, undisturbed, in 1892.
By the 1920s, however, she had been forgotten. "I doubt whether one American Jew in ten thousand has ever heard of her," the Forward wrote then. As a Jew, an atheist, a woman, and a foreigner who left the United States, Ernestine Rose did not fit into the narrative of U.S. history in the first half of the twentieth century. The Boston Investigator, an atheist newspaper that often wrote about her, predicted in 1871 that she would be appreciated "in about a hundred years." They were correct. In the 1970s, women's history, African-American history, and Jewish Studies restored her importance. She deserves to be remembered.
Every undemocratic element in the original Constitution of the United States has been repealed or amended except the Electoral College. Erected as a bulwark against popular choice -- to keep the relatively few men allowed to vote from selecting an inappropriate candidate -- the founding fathers created a system which gave "electors" the power to choose a president. Selected by state legislatures, who picked their own officials, these "electors" determined the entire state's vote for president. This system gives a state to a single candidate instead of allotting the popular vote on a numerical basis. The result has been presidents who have lost the popular vote, but won because of the Electoral College. In recent years, this has resulted in two Republican presidents: George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.
We tend to forget about this until a presidential election year rolls around, which is why it has lasted while slavery has been abolished, women have received the franchise, and other anti-democratic devices have gone by the boards. It is long past time to abolish it.
Ernestine Rose would certainly have been in favor of this. In the middle of the nineteenth century, she believed that everybody, "black and while, man and women," should have the vote. "The ballot is the focus of all other rights, she often declared, "it is the pivot upon which all hang."
To this end, I posted a petition to abolish the electoral college on my Facebook home page. I hope you will sign it, share it, and pass it on. The time is now!
I'll be speaking on Ernestine Rose and selling copies of my books at the Great Neck Public Library this Sunday, January 21 at 2 p.m. The library is located at 159 Bayview Avenue and will be open from 1 p.m. The talk is in the Community Room, to the left of the front door. Hope to see you there!
Each year the Jewish Book Council publishes an annual journal, called Paper Brigade named after the Jews who saved important documents during the Holocaust. They reprinted an article of mine first published in their Prosen People column called "How Jewish Was Ernestine Rose" in their 2018 edition. You can find my contribution here.
My piece, "Coping With The Election," is now up on the New School's Public Seminar site. You can read it here Once you are there, go to Bonnie S. Anderson, December 17, 2017.
First, CHOICE, the publication of the American Library Association, gave The Rabbi's Atheist's Daughter a "Highly Recommended" review and said it's appropriate "for all academic levels/libraries." This is a journal librarians read, so hopefully it will boost sales.
Second, the Jewish Book Council is republishing my piece, "How Jewish Was Ernestine Rose" in its 2018 journal Paper Brigade. You can read the original in my January 25th blog post. The new Paper Brigade should come out early next year.
On Thursday, October 19, I'll be speaking at Brooklyn College, in the Woody Tanger Auditorium in the Library from 2:15 to 3:30. On Wednesday, October 25, I'll be speaking at Rutgers University, in Van Dyck Hall, Room 301, from 4:30 to 6. Both events are free and open to the public. I'll have some copies of my book for sale. Come and enjoy!
Although she was one of the most famous women in the United States in the 1850s, Ernestine Rose had been almost completely forgotten by the turn of the twentieth century. History is written by the victors and between Rose's death in 1892 and the 1970s, American history focused on white men and their achievements. She and many others were written out of history. But her life and ideals are still vitally important now.
First, Rose worked ardently for "free thought," as atheism was called by its supporters. (Opponents stigmatized them as "infidels.") She was not just an atheist, but an "out" atheist who lectured frequently on this subject. Rose considered all religions to be "superstition," thought that churches were the chief agent of women's oppression, and criticized the Bible, among other reasons, for supporting slavery. Although 54% of Americans said they would vote for an atheist for president in a 2012 Gallup Poll, I really doubt that a candidate who proclaimed atheism would get far today. Even agnosticism is suspect, paradoxically at a time when many religious Christians and Jews backed a candidate who violated most of their beliefs' basic precepts.
Rose was also an out feminist, although in her day the term was a "woman's right woman." Despite the fact that "feminist" has recently become more acceptable, with Beyonce and others using the word, it's still suspect. Far too many people say "I'm not a feminist, but...." and then go on to support basic feminist principles, like equal pay for equal work. In Rose's time, women could not vote and would not receive the vote for almost thirty more years. In our day, many white women voted for a candidate who bragged of "grabbing women by the pussy," as well as committing serial adultery, and generally treating women as inferior beings who had "blood coming out of their whatever."
Rose was also an immigrant to this country. Always seen as a "foreigner" who accent was continually mentioned if not derided, she was considered Polish although she lived in New York City for 33 years. The recent rise of anti-immigrant sentiment here attests to the importance of recognizing the claims of those whose labors here have built this nation. I've written more about this subject in my previous blog, "Ernestine Rose and DACA."
Finally, Rose strenuously opposed slavery, at a time when abolitionism was supported by only a small minority of white Americans. The current opposition to "Black Lives Matter," exemplified by groups calling themselves "White Lives Matter" or "Blue Lives Matter," the outrageous delays by police forces over their unjustified shootings of black men and boys, and the continued prejudice which has removed white children from many public schools, not only in the south but also here in New York City, testifies to the need for continued work against racism here.
So Ernestine Rose's value and ideals are, unfortunately, still amazingly pertinent today. Her life has much to teach us and can be found in my new biography, The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter, available at a discount from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Please consider assigning it in your high school, college, or graduate school classes.
In 1887, near the end of her long life, Ernestine Rose declared that "For over fifty years, I have endeavored to promote the rights of humanity without distinction of sex, sect, party, country, or color." She herself experienced discrimination not only because she was female, but also because of her "country" -- she had been born in Poland. Although she lived in the United States for 33 years and was integral to the U.S. women's movement, she remained its only non-native born member and was always called a "foreigner." Even worse, during the 1850s, the anti-immigrant American Party arose. It demanded limits on their entry, a 21-year residence period before citizenship could be applied for, and the restriction of all political offices to the native born. The party's members said they "knew nothing" about it, giving rise to its nickname of the Know Nothing Party. A number of Rose's fellow participants in the women's movement voiced their agreement with its views in her presence.
As a historian, I'm leery of making comparisons between different eras, but the Know Nothings' tenets are amazingly parallel to those of Donald Trump and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. In his recent speech rescinding DACA, which gave persons brought here as children the right to stay for two years if they had not committed a crime, Sessions harked back to the distant past. He did not invoke the Know Nothings, but rather the severely restrictive 1924 Immigration Act. Designed by a congressional eugenicist, this bill sought to keep the United States "Anglo-Saxon" by outlawing the entry of most Jews, Italians and other southern Europeans, as well as all Asians. In 2015, then Senator Sessions, disparaging the prediction that in a few years "we'll have the highest percentage of Americans non-native born since the founding of the republic," praised this act since it "slowed immigration" and "created the really solid middle class of America." (Thanks to Rachel Maddow for this information.) Sessions also argued falsely this year that DACA was "unconstitutional," that it would take jobs from "hundreds of thousands of Americans," and that it would work against "national security" and "public safety."
After she left Poland, Ernestine Rose lived in Germany, France, and England before coming here. In London, she met Robert Owen, the industrial-turned-radical, whose expansive view of human rights became her own. "We have been told that Robert Owen was a dreamer," she asserted at a celebration of his life, "and what glorious dreams he dreamt!....It is said that he did not succeed. But where he did not succeed in the past, he will in the future. He shook the foundation of the old system, and left it to time to do the rest."
I believe that time is on the side of those of us who oppose the racism and prejudice exemplified by Trump and Sessions, but our Dreamers, as DACA recipients are called, cannot wait since they will be deported in six months. New York's attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, has already brought a lawsuit arguing that since almost 80% of the Dreamers are of Mexican origin, its rescinding is based on the anti-Mexican discrimination Trump expressed so often during his campaign. The rest of us must continue, as Rose so often urged, to "agitate, agitate" for the causes we believe in, starting with the protection of these involuntary young immigrants.