I’ve heard of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cody Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and even Reverend Antoinette Brown, but Ernestine Rose, Polish Jewish American crusader for women’s rights and for the abolition of slavery, was a new name in my personal pantheon of suffragettes and women’s rights pioneers. The story of her life is amazing, but rather sad in the end, because she died alone, without God, without her beloved husband of many years, and without many friends or followers about her.
“One after the other her friends were passing away—Garrison, Lucretia Mott, Wendell Phillips, editor Horace Seaver. And in her saddened state she would say to her friends, ‘It is no longer necessary for me to live. I can do nothing now. But I have lived,’ she would add thoughtfully, ‘I have lived.'”
At age sixteen, Ernestine Potowska went to a Polish court to secure the return of her inheritance money. The money had been given as dowry to a suitor to whom her rabbi father promised Ernestine’s hand in marriage. When Ernestine refused to marry the man, he refused to return her property. So Ernestine went to court, acted as her own lawyer, and won the case. It was the first time in the history of the Polish court that a sixteen year old Jewish girl brought suit before Polish judges.
Then, in 1827, when she was seventeen, Ernestine left her village and home in Poland to go to Germany. She spent a couple of years in Berlin, then to Holland, to Belgium, to Paris, and to London. She supported herself by giving language lessons and by selling “perfumed papers” (a kind of air freshener, Ernestine’s own invention). All of this traveling and supporting oneself while doing so sounds almost unbelievable; the nineteenth century was not a time when independent, self-supporting women were a commonplace thing.
In England, Ernestine met her husband, William Rose, she also became a disciple of social reformer and philanthropist, Robert Owen. The Owenites were what came to be called utopian socialists; they believed that man’s environment was to blame for all the social ills in the world and that evil could be defeated by social reforms and good education. Robert Owen was a deist who broke with orthodox Christianity and developed a belief system of his own. At some point in her journeying and her intellectual pilgrimage, Ernestine, too, became a “free thinker” and remained so until her death, as far as anyone knows. Others called her an atheist and an infidel, and she never denied, but rather appropriated, the appellations.
Ernestine and William Rose were married in England and then emigrated to New York. As an American citizen, abolitionist, and women’s rights crusader, she did do many other courageous and outrageous things:
She made an anti-slavery speech in Charleston, West Virginia and almost didn’t make it out of town safely.
In support of a bill in the New York legislature, she produced the first petition ever introduced in favor of rights for women. The petition had only five signatures on it, in spite of many weeks of hard work by Ernestine, and the bill to secure the property rights of married women failed.
She spoke at the First National Convention of Infidels, and she was a frequent attendee at the annual Thomas Paine birthday celebration, a gathering for freethinkers and atheists and social reformers.
She also gave public lectures all over New England, New York, and the rest of the Eastern seacoast on the subjects of the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, women’s suffrage, and any other subject that grabbed her attention. She spoke without notes.
She said, “It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so.”
And, “Do you tell me that the Bible is against our rights? Then I say that our claims do not rest upon a book written no one knows when, or by whom. Do you tell me what Paul or Peter says on the subject? Then again I reply that our claims do not rest on the opinions of any one, not even on those of Paul and Peter, . . . Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters.”
In short, she was eloquent, outspoken, persevering, unbelieving, and highly influential in the women’s suffrage movement, and I enjoyed reading and marveling at the story of her life, written by fellow Jewish Pole Yuri Suhl for the series of biographies for young people published by Julian Messner publishers.