# Heroines of Freethought/Ernestine L. Rose

ERNESTINE L. ROSE.
ON Thursday, the 14th of May, 1868, I attended the second anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association, held in the large hall of Cooper Institute. I attended the morning session alone, and so had to depend upon myself for the impressions received regarding the different speakers. Addresses were made by the President, Mrs. Stanton; by Miss Anthony, Lucy Stone, Colonel Higginson, Frederick Douglass, Henry Blackwell, Reverend Olympia Brown, Reverend Henry Blanchard, and others. Among the (to me) unknown “others” was an elderly lady, whom I understood Mrs. Stanton to introduce as “Mrs. Roe, of Ohio.”
​“Well, and how did you like the meeting, and who, among the speakers, pleased you best?” queried a friend, whom temporary illness had detained at home—a friend who knew all the notables by sight as well as by reputation.
“Oh, I was very much surprised by some, and disappointed by others,” was my reply. “I find that it is not always those who have the highest reputation who are the best speakers. As, for instance, this morning, by far the best speaker among the ladies was one whose name I never recollect having heard before in connection with this movement — a Mrs. Roe, of Ohio, a woman of fifty, with a slight lisp, and foreign accent, yet possessing all the fire and eloquence of youth. She was radical, sensible, forceful, and earnest. I hope that she will speak again this evening!”
“I hope so, too,” rejoined my friend, smiling at my enthusiasm over the unknown.
My friend accompanied me to the evening session, and before the speaking com​menced pointed out to me the celebrities on the platform. Presently, as a lady entered, his eye brightened with sudden interest. “Look there!” he said, “at that lady just come in—that is Ernestine Rose, of the Investigator — you remember her articles?” I followed his glance, then turned to him in astonishment: “That Mrs. Rose!” I exclaimed; ‘‘why, that is my eloquent unknown—Mrs, Roe, of Ohio!”
I do not yet understand how I came to make the mistake as to her identity, but I was very glad that it had been made, as I had thus an opportunity to receive my impressions of her apart from my prejudices. And my first favorable impressions were deepened on hearing her speak again that evening, and on the following day, at the anniversary of the Universal Peace Society at Dodworth Hall.
Mrs. Rose was at that time apparently about fifty years of age, of medium height, of fine, matronly form, and thoroughly feminine in appearance—much more so than she ​appears in the only picture I have ever seen of her—a picture taken some years before I had ever seen her. Soft curls, iron-gray in color, drooped over the fair, pale cheeks, seeming to subdue by their shadow the flashing light of her beautiful eyes, and to soften the severity of the broad white brow. The face was sweet, calm, and queenlike, expressive of intelligence, dignity, and tenderness —the ideal type of the face of intellectual womanhood. In speaking, all the force and fire of her enthusiastic nature seemed to flash up from the still depths of her mind, and so electrified her hearers as to make them forget the slight lisp in her speech, and the foreign accent and pronunciation, or to remember them only as additional charms. No young girl in all the tender grace which youth and Nature give, or tricked out in all the dainty adornment which art bestows, was ever more lovely in my eyes than Mrs. Rose, in the beautiful ripeness of life’s autumn. ​When the book entitled “Eminent Women of the Age” appeared, in 1870, knowing, as I did, what services for liberty of all kinds Mrs. Rose had performed, I turned over page after page of that book, confidently expecting to find her name given the honorable mention it deserved. But I turned over the leaves in vain. She was, doubtless, too radical for any of those who contributed to that volume to venture to seem to countenance. But I have no doubt that another book of the same kind, compiled within the next ten years, will not be likely to make the same omission.
Mrs. Rose has been an earnest and indefatigable worker on behalf of all reforms for the greater part of her lifetime. She was born in Peterkoff Tribunalski, in Poland, on the 13th of January, 1810. Her full name, as given by her parents, was Ernestine Louise Susmond Polowsky. Her father was a learned Jewish Rabbi, and she was brought up and educated in strict ac​cordance with the tenets of that faith. She grew up beautiful and studious, and no pains were spared to make her education thorough, and such as befitted the daughter of a learned leader in Israel.
But Ernestine’s was an independent and thoughtful, as well as enthusiastic nature. She early gave evidence of rebellious criticism of the creed she had been taught to believe in as the true faith, and showed herself a worthy daughter of a scholar and thinker by plying her father with questions, which, as a teacher of the faith, he was bound to make clear to those who sought light of him, as did his daughter Ernestine. But her searching questions only troubled and annoyed him, while his answers failed to satisfy her in any degree. “A young girl,” he said to her, “does not want to understand the object of her creed, but to accept and believe it.”
But doubt once awakened, and without any reasonable evidence to silence and put it to rest, still continued its work in the ​young girl's mind, while the honesty of her nature was such that she could not make a profession of faith which she had not; and open confession of her disbelief brought her soon into unpleasant relations with her father, who was sorely exercised by this apostasy on the part of one of his own flesh and blood.
Her mother had died when she was a child, and therefore the whole care of her education and teaching rested upon her father. He was at a loss how to manage this strange young girl, who had developed such an inconvenient way of thinking for herself. With masculine sagacity he bethought him of a sure method of silencing the doubts and queries of girlhood. He would give her in marriage to one of his own faith. With the new duties and womanly aims inspired by marriage, she would no longer have time to devote to religious speculations. Without her consent or desire, he, in virtue of his power as father and spiritual teacher, betrothed her to a young ​friend who professed to love her, although she was still too young for marriage, even if she had found a congenial mate.
When Ernestine was informed of this step she was in despair. Her independent spirit revolted at this wicked exercise of parental authority. She was only sixteen, but already old enough to realize what a terrible thing marriage without love could be. She was at a loss what to do, but fully determined that nothing should force her into so hateful a contract.
She determined first to appeal to the generosity of her would-be lover. She went to him, and stated the plain truth of the matter; told him she did not, and could not, love him, and begged him to release her, and to say to her father that he would by no means wed an unwilling bride. But he laughed in her face, and reminded her of the fact that by the terms of their betrothal she would forfeit a good share of the property which reverted to her from her dead mother, if the contract was broken by her; ​for himself, he meant to prove faithful to the engagement.
Filled with anger and resentment at this refusal, Ernestine was all the more determined that she never would marry this man. She could still appeal to the law; but to the place where the case must be adjudged was a long and lonely journey, and it was in the depth of winter. Ernestine dared the journey, presented her petition, plead her own cause, and, to her happiness, won it, and went home to declare her triumph and freedom.
She had been detained somewhat longer than she expected to be on this journey, and on her return found that her father had solaced himself in his loneliness during her absence by taking to himself a wife, a young girl not much older than Ernestine. It may be that his own matrimonial designs had first suggested marriage as a suitable cure for the obstinacy of his daughter.
Ernestine soon found that she could not harmonize perfectly with her young step​mother, and home became distasteful and unpleasant to her. She longed also for a wider field of action, She had youth, good health, and abundance of energetic. daring. She determined to seek her fortune in the great world. So at seventeen we find her established in the city of Berlin, Prussia, living economically on the little capital she had brought with her, and adding to it by the sale of a perfumed paper, of which she was the inventor. She remained in Berlin for nearly two years.
In June, 1829, she embarked for England, being desirous of seeing as much of the world as possible. But this venture came near being her last, as the ship in which she set sail was wrecked, and she arrived in England nearly destitute of everything save her strength, health, energy, and education. All these stood her in good stead in this emergency. She immediately sought employment as a teacher of languages in London, adding to her income from this labor by the sale of her perfumed ​paper. It was not long, either, before she found friends, even in the great London, who were as radical and liberty-loving as herself. Of her first introduction to the public as a speaker, Moncure D. Conway writes as follows, in a letter to the Cincinnati Commercial:
“In the old days when Robert Owen was filling all England with his socialistic ideas, and had built here in London a huge forum of Radicalism, almost as big as the Crystal Palace, a young and remarkably beautiful girl, just from Poland, was introduced to him. Discovering that she was a precocious Radical, and possessed of considerable ability, he invited her to speak in his huge hall, on an occasion when several thousands of people had gathered there. Notwithstanding her slight knowledge of the English language, the good looks and the enthusiasm of the girl made a good impression on the audience. She was thenceforth encouraged to appear in public again and again.” ​According to her biographer, Mrs. Jenny P. D'Hericourt, it was during her residence in London that she became acquainted with Mr. Rose, an Englishman of broad, liberal views. They were married in due form, but by a civil magistrate, as neither of them had any faith in creeds or priests, and considered marriage to be a civil contract, founded on mutual esteem and love, rather than a religious ceremony.
In May, 1836, they left England for America, the land which has ever had a magnetic attraction for all lovers of liberty. Here she at first, and for many years, devoted herself to lecturing on those subjects which most interested her. She did not do this to the neglect of her home duties, but only as she found the time to spare from her household and maternal cares, Mr. Rose aiding and encouraging her by every means in his power.
There can be little doubt that if Mrs. Rose had been less true to herself than she has always been; if she had been content to ​conceal from the public her real views; in a word, if she had been less honest and conscientious—she would to-day occupy a far higher position in public favor than she does. Her name, in that case, would not have been omitted in the list of those “eminent women” who have distinguished themselves on the lecture platform, in their chivalric crusade against all forms of slavery; nor would she be assigned a second or third-rate place in public meetings devoted to the objects to which she has for long years given her time, her labor, her money, and her best energies. But her strong, fine nature would need to be dwarfed and circumscribed of its present symmetrical fullness to allow her to become coward enough to deny her honest, earnest convictions in regard to theological matters. And the day is not so far off as many imagine when she will be given full credit for the noble courage and purity of purpose which forced her to declare herself an Atheist, in days when that word was a ​bugbear to all religious people. The day has already gone by when such a declaration was apparently to declare oneself on the side of all immorality and wickedness. But it was not so in the days when she first avowed Atheism to be the conscientious conclusion of her intellect. In those days no one may know how much of scorn, contempt, and superciliousness she had to endure for her honesty.
Yet steadily, unrestingly, with calm undismay, Mrs. Rose has bravely faced all this coldness, this contempt, this contumely. Freedom, equality—for white and black, for native and foreigner, for king and subject, for priest and devotee, for male and female —that is the broad basis of her creed—a creed too all-embracing to be hampered or pandered to by the prejudices of others. To enlighten and to free all slaves—that has been the object of Mrs. Rose’s life and labors. Slaves of race, slaves of faith, slaves of sex—it mattered not—to each she preached from the same text, ‘Knowledge—Liberty.” ​Nor has she found the life of a disciple of liberty a rose-bestrewn path. She has met with discouragements, rebuffs, slights, sneers; insults, from those opposed to her; and has been misunderstood and maligned by even those who called themselves her friends and colaborers. But she has shown the steadfastness of her faith in the ultimate triumph of the cause she had espoused by her constant laboring for it, in the face of all these disheartenings. Her motto seems to have ever been that of the German poet—
"Haste not, rest not—calmly wait, Meekly bear the storms of fate; Duty be thy polar guide— Do the right, whate’er betide."
“In the winter of '37,” she says, in an article published in the New York Revolution, “when soliciting names for a petition to the Legislature to give married women the right to hold real estate in their own name, I was met with, ‘I have rights enough’; or, ‘The gentlemen will laugh at ​me,' from the women; and ‘They have already too many rights,” from the men. And so our first petition was graced by only five signatures; but perseverance, year after year, with increased petitions and names, obtained in 1849 the boon that gave married women the right to hold what belonged to them, in their own name.”
So from the first she never allowed herself to be discouraged in any undertaking by which she hoped to effect a reform. She fearlessly attached her full signature to the articles from her pen, which frequently graced the columns of the Boston Investigator, an avowedly infidel and atheistic publication; and in her lectures she as fearlessly attacked the clergy, and the pro-slavery men, as if her views were among the most popular and general of those held by the masses.
“Once,” M. D. Conway tells this of her, "she went down South, and after being there a little time, her soul was stirred at what she saw going on in the fair city of ​Charleston. So she advertised that she would publicly lecture the Charlestonians. The novelty of a woman appearing in public attracted a large audience, who were amazed and overwhelmed to hear her rate them about slavery in a way that could hardly have been surpassed by that Mr. Garrison on whose head they had set a price. It was due partly to her sex, and partly to the paralysis caused by her audacity, that she was not torn to pieces; as it was, it required considerable influence to get her safely out of the city.”
A letter written by John Wattles during the Woman's Rights Convention, held in the Tabernacle, New York city, September 10, 1853, mentions the presence of Mrs. Rose, and speaks of her in this wise:
“Ernestine L. Rose —eloquent, pungent, cogent, and clear-sighted; before her thought, oppression recoils like demons before the armies of light, shrieking for help, and crying ‘torment us not.'" ​In all her earnest labor for the liberty she loved, and the increase of that knowledge which she knew to be so essential to the dissemination of the first principles of that liberty, Mrs. Rose has yet never truckled to popular opinion, or tried to win popular applause at the expense of the cause she advocated. And this firmness has been with a full understanding of the results to herself, as the following words from her pen will show:
“All whose great desire is to ‘stand well with the people’ know full well that the secret of their success consists in swimming with the current—in not being too far in advance of society; and so in their writings and speeches they give the people, not what they most need and ought to hear, but what would be most acceptable to the pride, vanity, or interest of their hearers or readers. At times a step in advance is very desirable to attract by the novelty of the position, but they take good care not to go too far, lest existing preju​dices should throw them off the track. This is called, by many, good, worldly philosophy, and it may be, but I can give no other name than ignorance, or moral cowardice, which hinders far more than it advances the progress of the race.”
In 1855 or '56, Mrs. Rose made a short visit to England and France, where she renewed her acquaintance with many of the leaders of opinion in both countries, and formed many new and appreciative friendships.
For a number of years after her return to America her health was so poor and uncertain that she was obliged to forbear taking much active part in the reforms so dear to her. But she had the happy consciousness of having done much of the hard pioneer work which had helped to make those reforms practicable and attractive, And she was not forced into quietude until the shackles had fallen from the black race forever, nor until public attention was at last so widely awake to the wrongs inflicted ​upon woman that there was no fear of its again relapsing into lethargy on the subject until those wrongs were redressed. So, too, she has lived to see honest doubt treated with respectful consideration: argued with, and made concessions to, instead of being sneered at and anathematized.
About three years ago the state of her health required a change from this climate to the more congenial English climate. Before her departure from New York, a number of her friends testified their admiration and esteem for her, and their appreciation of her past services, by an offering, comparatively small, perhaps, in pecuniary value, but worth a great deal as an expression of sincere regard and appreciation.
Her health, since her residence in England, has steadily improved, and we again hear of the active part she has been taking in the causes of Freethought and Woman Suffrage. We hear of lectures, addresses, and speeches from her, which show that with the return of health the old fire ​and force of youth has returned, improved by the ripened wisdom of a matured intellect.
That she is still capable of rousing and interesting audiences by her graceful eloquence, her cogent reasoning, and powerful wit, the respectful and laudatory notices she wins on these occasions from the English press show conclusively. One of these says: “If we may accept her as a type of what the ladies will become when they have the rights in question conceded them, the men most assuredly will have to look to their oratorical laurels.”
"Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, of New York,” writes Mr. Conway from London to the Cincinnati Commercial, “has been staying with her husband in the dignified and fashionable old town of Bath. By a local journal I learn that a startling episode occurred at a public meeting concerning the new School Board held there. An amiable lady, who disapproved of women being on the board, sent up to the chairman, to have read, a silly letter, written by Miss Burdett​Coutts, reproving the female aspirants for places on the board. Whereupon a fine-looking, middle-aged lady arose, ascended the platform, and, with that practiced ability which those who know Mrs. Rose will easily imagine, made a speech on the woman question generally, which fairly revolutionized the meeting.”
The London National Reformer thus notices her address at a Conference of the Woman’s Suffrage movement in that city:
“The speech of the meeting was, however, made by a lady whose name will be familiar to all readers of the Boston Investigator. We mean Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, of New York. The good old lady with her white curls, her erect, healthy-looking body, her clear, distinct voice, her occasional quaint phrases, her stern determination, and her real genius as a speaker, won from those present a far more hearty and lengthened tribute of applause than was accorded to anyone else.”
In an article entitled “A Legend of ​Good Women,” appearing without signature in the Golden Age, but which, nevertheless, bears traces of the pleasant airiness of style peculiar to the editor of that paper, occurs this kindly tribute to the worth of Mrs. Rose:
"Ernestine L. Rose, who is now out of the country, is one of the ablest of female minds. Foreign by birth, and revealing her Polish extraction in her accent, she, nevertheless, speaks the English tongue with a rare force and eloquence, and handles her logic as deftly as her needle. Radical in her religious views — called by some an Atheist, and by others an Infidel—she has been considered as a dangerous character— a kind of Thomas Paine among her sisterhood. But as I am a believer in all honest religions, and have a profound reverence for all sincere souls, I have nothing to say against Mrs. Rose's Infidelity, which is itself a religion, nor against her character, which, in spite of her own testimony to the contrary, I know to be thoroughly Christian.” ​The editor of the Boston Investigator prefaces one of her latest and best speeches on Woman's Rights with the following words:
“In Edinburgh (Scotland), on the evening of January 27, 1873, a large public meeting, in favor of Woman's Suffrage, was held. On the platform were a number of distinguished personages, ladies as well as gentlemen. The Lord Provost presided, and among the speakers — we don’t know but that we may say the speaker — was our worthy and able Liberal sister and correspondent, Mrs. ‘Ernestine L. Rose. Her speech on the occasion, as reported in the Edinburgh Daily Review, abounds with all the pleasant wit, strong argument, and conclusive seasoning, that have long rendered her one of the best female orators of the day.”
In her own person, as one of the most truly womanly, and yet as one who is well calculated to take an active part in all public matters, Mrs. Rose presents a ​striking example of the truthfulness of the following part of her Edinburgh speech:
“It was a puerile and frivolous argument that woman, if she got the franchise, would cease to be womanly. Did a man cease to be manly when he got the franchise? She might become stronger in mind, more faithful to convictions; she might become more intellectual; she might take a greater and wider view of the duties and responsibilities of life; but would that unsex her? would that change her nature? would she be less a mother, less a sister, less a woman? No! Believe, trust in the right, do rightly, do justly, and leave all the consequences to themselves.”
Mrs. Rose has returned, or is about to return, to this country, the land of her love and adoption. She is now sixty-six years of age, and can only look forward to a few more years of active life. The prospect now looks bright that she may live, however, to see the dearest wish of her heart accomplished—the complete enfran​chisement of her sex in America. Let us hope that when that day comes, it will find her with the strong ‘intellect’ undimmed by the long years of waiting, and the brave heart as fresh in its love for liberty as it is to-day. When we remember that Mrs. Rose is by birth a Pole, and by descent and education a Jew—a people that has been wronged and trampled upon, and a faith which has been for ages persecuted and maligned—we can understand whence comes her ardor for freedom, her eloquent earnestness in the cause of liberty and equality. She is an ardent patriot, although she has long been absent from her beloved Poland, and I remember well how she startled and electrified the members of the Universal Peace Society, in the midst of their mild platitudes and millennial dreams, by her description of the sort of peace she advocated—a peace bought with the sword! And with eyes flashing, her pale cheeks flushing, and her voice thrilling, she declared how she longed to plunge with her own hand, if ​need be, the dagger to the hearts of the enemies of her country’s liberty and rights. Indeed, it is told of her that once when an insurrection broke out in Poland, soon after she first went to England, and while she was yet a young girl, she set out to return to Poland, hoping in her enthusiasm to find some way by which to aid her countrymen in their struggle; but she was stopped by the authorities at Coblentz, and was reluctantly obliged to return.