a biography of the day-ernestine rose
Ernestine Rose
Ernestine Louise Rose (January 13, 1810 – August 4, 1892) was an atheist feminist, individualist feminist, and abolitionist. She was one of the major intellectual forces behind the women's rights movement in nineteenth-century America.
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At the age of five, Rose began to "question the justice of a God who would exact such hardships" as the frequent fasts that her father performed. As she grew older, she began to question her father more and more on religious matters, receiving only, "A young girl does not want to understand the object of her creed, but to accept and believe it." in response. By the age of fourteen, she had completely rejected the idea of female inferiority and the religious texts that supported that idea.
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Rose soon began to give lectures on the subjects that most interested her, joining the "Society for Moral Philanthropists" and traveling to different states to espouse her causes of the abolition of slavery, religious tolerance, public education and equality for women. Her lectures were met with controversy. When she was in the South to speak out against slavery, one slaveholder told her he would have "tarred and feathered her if she had been a man". When, in 1855, she was invited to deliver an anti-slavery lecture in Bangor, Maine, a local newspaper called her "a female Atheist... a thousand times below a prostitute." When Rose responded to the slur in a letter to the competing paper, she sparked off a town feud that created such publicity that, by the time she arrived, everyone in town was eager to hear her. Her most ill-received lecture was likely in Charleston, West Virginia, where her lecture on the evils of slavery was met with such vehement opposition and outrage that she was forced to exercise considerable influence to even get out of the city safely.
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In the winter of 1836, Judge Thomas Hertell submitted a married women's property act to the legislature of New York city to investigate methods of improving the civil and property rights of married women, and to allow them to hold real estate in their own name. When Rose heard of this resolution, she drew up a petition and began to solicit names in support of it. In 1838, this petition was sent to the state legislature in spite of it only having five names. This was the first petition ever introduced in favor of rights for women. During the following years, she increased both the number of petitions and the number of signatures. In 1849, these rights were finally won.
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Rose was elected president of the National Women's Rights Convention in October, 1854, in spite of objections that she was an atheist. Her election was heavily supported by Susan B. Anthony, who declared that, "every religion – or none – should have an equal right on the platform".
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernestine_Rose
A Feminist Pioneer
The mission of the Ernestine Rose Society is to revive the legacy of this important early 19th-century reformer by recognizing her pioneering role in the first wave of feminism.
Susan B. Anthony recognized Ernestine Rose as one of the three foremothers of the 19th-century women's rights movement in the United States: "Mary Wollstonecraft and then Frances Wright and Ernestine Rose...All spoke about women's rights before Lucretia Mott, Stanton and others."
Anthony kept a large photo of Rose on the wall of her study and described her as "that noble worker for the cause of women's rights."
Anthony and Rose most likely first met in 1852 when Anthony attended her first Woman's Rights Convention. At the time, Rose had been advocating for women's rights in the United States since 1836.
Read excerpts from Rose's speeches on women's rights issues (many of which still remain relevant). Also, read her stirring address to the second National Women's Rights Conference in 1851.
http://www.brandeis.edu/wsrc/affiliates/ernestinerose/index.html