Rose, Ernestine (1810–1892)

views updated

Rose, Ernestine (1810–1892)

Polish-born reformer who was an early advocate of women's rights and for the abolition of slavery in the United States. Born Ernestine Louise Siismondi Potowski on January 13, 1810, at Piotrków, Russian Poland; died on August 4, 1892, in Brighton, England; only child of Isaac Potowski (a rabbi); mother's name not recorded; had no formal education; married William Rose, in 1835; no children.

Selected writings and lectures:

Speech of Mrs Rose, a Polish Lady, at the Anniversary Paine Celebration, in New York, January 29, Year of Independence, 74th-Christian Era (1850); An Address on Woman's Rights Delivered Before the People's Sunday Meeting, in Cochituate Hall, on Sunday Afternoon, October 19, 1851 (1851); Review of Horace Mann's Two Lectures Delivered in New York, February 17th and 29th, 1852 (1852); "Speech of Mrs. E. L. Rose at the Woman's Rights Convention, Held in Syracuse, September 1852," in Woman's Rights Commensurate With Her Capacities and Obligations: A Series of Tracts (1853); A Defense of Atheism, Being a Lecture Delivered in Mercantile Hall, Boston, April 10, 1861 (1881); Two Addresses Delivered at the Bible Convention, Hartford, Conn., in June 1853 (1888); various newspaper articles in the Boston Investigator (from 1831).

Ernestine Rose was born on January 13, 1810, in the small Polish village of Piotrków which was then part of the Russian Empire. Her father Isaac Potowski was a prominent local rabbi and a strict adherent of a particularly rigorous and austere interpretation of Judaism. He raised his only child on the basis of a belief that the only proper place for a woman was in the home and that her only function was to obey her male elders. What Ernestine's mother (whose name does not appear in any contemporary record) thought about this situation is not known. It is probable, however, that she acquiesced with her husband's position and did her best to raise her daughter in accordance with traditional Jewish customs and mores.

Not surprisingly, given his beliefs, Isaac saw no purpose in sending Ernestine to school. On the other hand, he did encourage her from an early age to study the Torah and the Talmud, the two principal Jewish religious texts. This was unusual inasmuch as such instruction was normally given only to male children. Moreover, Isaac soon complemented this instruction by hiring a private tutor to teach his daughter Hebrew. Rose would later recall, with some pride, how she would often drive her tutor to frustration by incessant questions about various aspects of her studies. Clearly, she had a sharp and enquiring mind which was further evidenced by her own attempts to teach herself foreign languages (particularly German) so that she could read works of literature in their original form.

Rose continued her religious studies until she was 14 years old. Then, for reasons that remain obscure, she rebelled and formally abandoned her Judaic beliefs. Isaac's reaction to this development is unknown, but relations with Ernestine appear to have continued normally for the next two years. It was then that he decided, in accordance with rabbinical custom, to choose a husband for his daughter. When Ernestine was informed, she was outraged and refused to have anything to do with this proposal.

The situation was further complicated when Isaac promised the prospective husband a substantial dowry, money which actually belonged to Ernestine, who had inherited it from her recently deceased mother. According to Jewish custom in Poland at the time, if no good reason could be adduced for breaking a betrothal then the dowry would still revert to the bridegroom. Whether Ernestine liked it or not, Isaac assumed his responsibility to pay the dowry and was determined that she should hand over her legacy.

For her part, Rose realized that her only recourse would be an appeal to secular law. Accordingly, she set out for the town of Kalisz where, remarkably for a 16-year-old, she acted as her own attorney in a successful defense of her rights. Then, in order to demonstrate that she had fought the case as a matter of principle and not for reasons of personal gain, Ernestine voluntarily turned all of her inheritance over to her father.

Shortly after, Isaac married a woman little older than Ernestine. Stepmother and stepdaughter quickly developed a mutual antipathy for one another and, in these increasingly difficult domestic circumstances, Ernestine decided to leave home. She traveled first to Berlin (the capital of the kingdom of Prussia) where she discovered that, as a Polish Jew, she was subject to certain restrictive laws that effectively limited her ability to find employment as well as the length of time she could remain in the country. Rose refused to accept these constraints and decided to appeal to the highest authority. In an act of remarkable audacity, she asked for and received an audience with King Frederick William III. The latter was so impressed by the young woman before him that he granted her a special exemption from these laws.

Ernestine's next problem was to earn a living. Once again, she utilized her sharp intelligence by inventing a process by which some specially treated chemical paper, when burned, dispelled cooking odors. This turned out to be a great commercial success and provided Ernestine with enough money to live comfortably as well as to travel widely throughout Germany. It was in the course of these frequent journeys that she first became aware of the full extent of poverty and misery to which the working class (particularly women and children) was then subject.

In 1829, Rose left Germany and continued her travels in Belgium and Holland. The following year, she visited France and was in Paris to witness the July revolt which overthrew King Charles X. Ernestine was so impressed with the revolutionary movement that, when a parallel uprising broke out in Poland a few weeks later, she made plans to return and take part in the attempts to free her own country. She only got as far as the Polish frontier, however, where the police refused to permit her (and other potential revolutionaries) to travel farther. In any case, it was too late; the Polish uprising had been firmly crushed by government authorities.

Three years later, Rose moved to London, England, where she supported herself through the sale of her chemical paper and by giving lessons in Hebrew and German. There she met several of that country's most famous social reformers, such as Elizabeth Fry (whose work in alleviating prison conditions was becoming internationally known) and Thomas Paine (the great democratic theorist of the American and French revolutions). The person who made the greatest impact on her, however, was Robert Owen, who was then in his early 60s, and who subsequently referred to Ernestine as his daughter.

Owen's career had been based on the theoretical principle that human character is the direct product of its surrounding environment. Human wickedness is the result of the milieu of poverty and misery in which individuals live, but this can be reversed by providing such improvements as better working conditions, good housing, as well as educational and recreational facilities. Owen had attempted to implement this principle on several occasions—at New Harmony in Indiana in the mid-1820s and, a little earlier and more successfully, at New Lanark in Scotland—but few of his model communities lasted for long. Nevertheless, his basic principle had a significant impact on the emerging trade-union movement in Britain as well as on various other associations for social reform.

When Ernestine met Owen, the latter was principally engaged in traveling throughout Great Britain giving lectures to workers on his theory of social improvement. In 1835, he asked Rose to address one such meeting in London. Despite her yet hesitant command of the English language and thick foreign accent, she proved a considerable success. Later the same year, Ernestine met William Rose, a thoughtful and cultured man who made a modest living as a jeweler and silversmith and who considered himself a follower of Owen. Shortly after, the couple were married in a civil ceremony and, early the following year, emigrated to New York where they established a small business (a combined jewelry and perfumery store).

In the mid-1830s, married women in the state of New York enjoyed few, if any, legal rights. All their property effectively belonged to their husbands who were also permitted to appropriate any wages they earned; they had no standing to sue or be sued in the courts; and they were denied the opportunity to vote. Not all men accepted this situation and, in May 1836, Thomas Hertell introduced a bill into the New York state assembly that contained provisions designed to address these injustices. That legislation was defeated, and it took another 12 years before a greatly amended and much-diluted bill was eventually enacted recognizing a woman's right to keep her own property.

Emancipation from every kind of bondage is my principle.
—Ernestine Rose

Throughout these 12 years, Rose traveled the length and breadth of the state gathering signatures on petitions designed to keep the issue before the legislature. At the same time, she kept an increasingly busy schedule of speaking engagements at which she addressed various issues of social reform, particularly the abolition of slavery. Throughout her life, Rose refused to accept any fee for her public appearances and insisted on paying her own traveling expenses. Fortunately, their business provided sufficient financial means for this while her husband William generously extended his moral support. Despite her youth, religious background and marked foreign accent, Rose quickly became a popular speaker. She was known as the "Queen of the Platform," and one newspaper noted approvingly, after a particularly successful meeting, that "she handled her logic as deftly as a needle."

In July 1848, the first Woman's Rights Convention held in the United States was convened in Seneca Falls, New York, "to discuss the social, civil and religious rights of woman." During the convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton , a prominent women's rights activist, moved that the convention support the franchise for women. At that time, this was a radical proposal, and the motion was only passed after a heated and divisive debate among the delegates present. Although Rose did not attend this meeting, she was a featured speaker at the first National Woman's Rights Convention held in Worcester, Massachusetts, two years later, where she was elected to the organization's central executive committee. For the next 19 years, she attended every New York state and national convention on women's rights in her capacity as organizer and speaker. Despite furious attacks in the popular press and their frequent interruption by outraged clerics and drunken mobs, these conventions gradually attracted increasingly larger and more enthusiastic audiences.

Throughout these years, Rose continued to gather and present petitions to the New York state assembly in Albany pressing for extensions of women's rights. Due to her growing reputation, she was granted the rare distinction, on several occasions, of being allowed to address the main assembly, or one of its legislative committees, in person. By 1855, she reached the height of her popularity as a public speaker in towns and cities throughout the United States. In the same year, however, the constant strain finally took a toll on her health. When her doctor advised a change of scene, she traveled to England to visit her old friend Robert Owen. On returning to New York six months later, Rose found that her continued association with Owen made some of the more conservative female reformers uncomfortable; this, in turn, made her position in the women's movement more tenuous.

In 1860, two important events occurred. First, in March, the New York assembly finally passed an act Concerning the Rights and Liabilities of Husband and Wife. This bill granted many of the demands which Rose and her colleagues had been making for the previous 12 years, with the important exception of the right to vote. Unfortunately, the victory was short lived because, two years later, the legislation was amended in a manner distinctly unfavorable to the women's cause. The second major event that year was Abraham Lincoln's election as president of the United States.

Although Rose identified herself with the Democratic Party and Lincoln was a Republican, she strongly supported him for his stance against slavery. She did not believe, however, that the president's position went far enough. Lincoln argued that there should be no further extension of slavery into those territories then seeking to become full states of the union. On the other hand, however, he was willing to tolerate it in those Southern states where it currently existed. The latter position was unacceptable to Rose who believed that slavery was an intrinsic evil that should be abolished everywhere as quickly as possible. Just as all American women should enjoy the same legal and social rights as their male counterparts, so, similarly, all African-Americans should enjoy the same privileges as other citizens.

Although Rose championed the Northern cause during the Civil War, she was frequently critical of the manner in which Lincoln's administration handled the conflict. Despite this, she served on the policy-making committee of the Women's National Loyal League, an organization created in 1863 with the aim of collecting one million signatures on a petition expressing support and solidarity with the aims of the federal government.

Following the end of the war, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was proclaimed which formally outlawed slavery throughout the United States. Though Rose and her fellow reformers were pleased, they were disappointed that their own demand for suffrage was rejected at the same time. Their frustration was increased shortly afterwards by the 14th and 15th amendments which were intended to grant (male) African-Americans the right to vote. Both the federal government and the mainstream abolitionist movement rejected the women's demand for suffrage on the grounds that many states would not accept this radical proposal. It was believed that any attempt to include female suffrage in the proposed amendments might result in their complete rejection and hence the continuation of slavery.

This decision left Rose and many other female reformers bitter, especially in light of the support they had previously afforded the abolitionist cause. Their subsequent attempts to come to terms with this situation and formulate a new strategy of reform only served to precipitate a major split in their ranks. In 1869, Rose joined the executive committee of the markedly more radical National Woman's Suffrage Association, while the conservative faction formed the rival American Woman's Suffrage Association (these organizations would not merge again until 1889). Rose took little part in running the new organization. She was now close to 60 years of age and neuralgic and rheumatic pains had left her a semi-invalid.

Later that year, the Roses decided to leave America and retire in Europe. They visited France and Switzerland (where Ernestine attended the Congress of Peace in Lucerne) before settling near London. For the next few years, she continued to speak occasionally on the subject of women's rights but, after a short trip to New York in 1873 to settle her outstanding financial affairs, she retired from public life.

In latter years, Rose's health continued to decline, and she was largely confined to her home. She still read avidly and often sent letters to her old colleagues in the United States, advising them on various issues of concern to the reform movement. In 1882, her husband died. Despite entreaties from friends in America to return, Rose stubbornly refused to leave England. Her last years were spent in increasing poverty in the seaside town of Brighton, not far from London, where she died on August 4, 1892, at the age of 82.

sources:

Barnard, L.E. "Ernestine L. Rose," in History of Woman Suffrage. Vol. 1. Edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (reprinted, NY: Arno Press, 1975).

O'Connor, Lillian. Pioneer Women Orators: Rhetoric in the Ante-Bellum Reform Movement. NY: Columbia University Press, 1954.

Suhl, Yuri. Eloquent Crusader. NY: Julian Messner, 1970.

——. Ernestine Rose and the Battle for Human Rights. NY: Greenberg, 1956.