The American life of Ernestine L. Rose

by Carol A. Kolmerten

Ernestine L. Rose was one of the most important, but also one of the least-known, women's rights activists in nineteenth-century America. In the first comprehensive biography of Rose, Carol A. Kolmerten has recovered the most eloquent and persuasive speeches and letters of the movement itself. 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 anti-Semitism, their anti-immigrationist sentiments, their unconscious racism.