The American Life of Ernestine L. Rose

Ernestine L. Rose crisscrossed the country for over thirty years, attacking slavery and decrying women’s lack of political and social rights. With the brilliant. witty, and outspoken Rose on the stage, Susan B. Anthony wrote, “we all felt safe.” Yet, until now, she was virtually unknown. Rose’s disappearance from history is telling. Scorned by newspaper editors, ministers, and politicians, she was also ignored by many of the very women and men with whom she shared reform platforms. In a movement that drew much of its moral and intellectual energy from appeals to sentimental Christian piety, Rose’s atheism, her Jewish and Polish background, her foreign accent, and her blunt appeal to reason all made her a kind of barometer for the era’s reformers, registering their antisemitism, their anti-immigrationist sentiments, their unconscious racism. Carol A. Kolmerten has recovered here the most eloquent and persuasive speeches and letters of the movement.