Ernestine Rose

On the evening of Saturday 4 June 1853, in a hall in Hartford, Connecticut, a woman of forty-three with a Polish accent stood up to speak at a convention called to discuss "the Origin, Authority, and Influence of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures."¹ She told the audience that "it has been a great mistake to say that God has made man in his image, for man in all ages and times has made his god in his image."² The gallery hissed and hooted, stamped its feet and drummed its canes. Then someone found the gas meter and turned off the lights.³ When the gas came back she went on. She ended with a sentence aimed at the women in the room: "do you wish to be free? Then you must trample the Bible, the church, and the priests under your feet."⁴

Ernestine Rose was a rabbi's daughter from Poland, the first person to petition the New York legislature for the property rights of married women, and for thirty years one of the best-known speakers in the American movement for women's rights.⁵ She was also, for most of that time, the movement's most open unbeliever. This chapter is about how she came to that position, what it cost her, and why she would not hide it.

"Little girls must not ask questions"

She was born on 13 January 1810 in Piotrków, in Poland, the daughter of a pious and learned rabbi who would take no payment for his office.⁶⁷ The two short accounts of her early life that survive were written by admirers decades later, without sources, and her own memory was no help: when Susan B. Anthony asked her for her life story in 1877, she replied that she had "made no memorandum of places, dates, or names."⁸ So the stories of her childhood are the stories she was known by, not documents.

They say that she was known in her family for her strict observance of the rites and ceremonies of the Jewish faith, and that she was also a child who asked questions. Reading the Hebrew Scriptures, she ran into difficulties about the creation of the world and the origin of evil, and was told that "little girls must not ask questions."⁹ She asked her father why he fasted so much. He told her it was to please God. "If God is pleased in making you sick and unhappy," she is supposed to have said, "I hate God."¹⁰ Whether or not she said it in those words, the story contains the argument she made all her life: that a God who wanted suffering could not be good.

At fourteen, her first biographer wrote, she renounced the Bible and the religion of her father, and the decision brought "great trouble and persecution alike from her own Jewish friends and from Christians."¹¹ A second biographer added that her father found her questions troublesome and that her open confession of disbelief strained their relations.¹²¹³

Then came a lawsuit, and the two accounts of it disagree. In the first, her mother died when she was sixteen, her father remarried, and "through misdirected kindness" he involved her in a lawsuit over property; she pleaded her own case, won it, and then left the property with her father, "declaring that she cared nothing for it, but only for justice."¹⁴ In the second, her father tried to end her doubts by betrothing her, without her consent, to a young man; when she asked to be released he refused, and reminded her that she would lose the property her dead mother had left her; so in winter she travelled to the court, presented her own petition, pleaded her own cause and won.¹⁵ Both versions agree that a girl of about sixteen went to court on her own behalf and won. Which version is true cannot now be settled from the free sources, and this chapter does not choose between them.

Berlin, London, Robert Owen

She left home young. She lived for nearly two years in Berlin, and her first biographer says she won from the King of Prussia the right to stay there in spite of the law against Polish Jews, preferring "to stand upon her natural rights as a human being."¹⁶¹⁷ She travelled through the German states, Holland, Belgium and France, and is said to have been in Paris during the July Revolution of 1830.¹⁸¹⁹ She reached England, by one account after a shipwreck, nearly destitute, and taught languages in London.²⁰

In 1832 she met Robert Owen, the Welsh manufacturer and socialist who believed that human character was made by circumstances and that the creeds of the churches were the chief obstacle to a rational society, and she "warmly espoused his principles."²¹ Owen's son remembered her as "a great admirer and follower of my father," and as a sceptic "as to any future beyond the grave."²¹²² Owen invited the young foreigner to speak in his hall to several thousand people, and they liked her in spite of her broken English.²³ In 1834 she presided over the founding of an Owenite society with a long and hopeful name: "The Association of all Classes of all Nations, without distinction of sect, sex, party condition, or color."²⁴ She married a silversmith, William Rose, before a civil magistrate, because, as a later writer put it, neither of them had any faith in creeds or priests.²⁵ In the spring of 1836 they sailed for New York.²⁶

Five signatures

In the winter of 1836 she took a petition from house to house in New York asking the legislature to let a married woman hold property in her own name. Under the law, everything a wife owned became her husband's. "I sent the first petition to the New York Legislature to give a married woman the right to hold real estate in her own name, in the winter of 1836 and '37, to which after a good deal of trouble I obtained five signatures."²⁷ The women she asked told her they had rights enough, and the men said women had too many already.²⁸ She kept at it, petitioning and speaking year after year, until the legislature passed the law in 1848.²⁹

She lectured, she said, in more than twenty states, from Michigan to South Carolina, on women's rights, on the abolition of slavery, and on religion; her husband paid her way, so that she could speak "without money and without price."³⁰³¹ "In spite of my heresies," she wrote in old age, "I had always good audiences."³² Not always. At a meeting in the Broadway Tabernacle a clergyman attacked "infidels," and when she rose to call him to order the crowd shouted "Throw her down!" "Drag her out!" "She's an infidel!"³³ In Charleston, South Carolina, a slave owner warned her that they tarred and feathered people who disturbed the slaves, and she is said to have answered, "get your tar and feathers ready," and given three lectures against slavery.³⁴

The convention movement

When the first national convention on women's rights met at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, she was there, and she attended nearly every national and state convention after it until she left America.³⁵ At Syracuse in 1852 she was introduced as "a Polish lady, and educated in the Jewish faith," and she called herself "a daughter of poor, crushed Poland, and the down-trodden and persecuted people called the Jews."³⁶ When others at the convention argued that the Bible supported women's rights, she said she saw "no need to appeal to any written authority."³⁷ The reporter summarised her account of her own past: she had "cut herself loose" from the sect she was born into, she knew what it had cost her, and she prized her freedom "too highly ever to put herself in the same shackles again."³⁸ She objected to any resolution that would make one interpretation of the Bible the convention's doctrine, because, she said, "belief does not depend upon voluntary inclination."³⁹

Hartford

The Hartford Bible Convention of June 1853 was called by freethinkers "To the Friends of Free Discussion," and it was the one place where she said everything she thought.¹ Her speech on the Saturday evening was an argument against the Bible's authority from its own pages: that it was the work of "different minds, existing in different ages"; that belief was formed in childhood by what children were taught; and that therefore "there can be no merit in belief, nor demerit in disbelief, for it is not in our power to believe or disbelieve by a mere effort of the will."⁴⁰⁴¹ That last idea was the root of her objection to damnation. If belief could not be chosen, no one could justly be punished for it. "I know but too well," she said, "what it is to go against the long-cherished and time-honored prejudices and superstitions."⁴² She dated her own first public stand to about twenty-five years before, when, she said, she had stood alone on a platform against the errors of the Bible, "without knowing that there was another human being in the wide world who thought as I did." Someone in the audience called out "Where?" and she did not answer.⁴³

The Bible's chief defender at the convention, a clergyman named Turner, answered her the next day, and his position deserves to be heard in his words. "I go for the rights of woman, and the Bible goes for the rights of woman," he said. The Bible had given woman "her place in the most tender department of human life," not putting her out "to breast the storms, dangers, sufferings, and turmoil of busy life," but making her "the bosom-companion of the man, to share his sorrows, double his joys."⁴⁴ He was, he said, a friend to woman's rights; and he called it "a blot on the wisdom of the nineteenth century" to hear a woman cry down the Bible because it did not make her a man.⁴⁴

She replied on the Sunday afternoon with a long answer about the Bible's cruelties, the slaughter of the Canaanites, Pharaoh's hardened heart, the Garden of Eden. "I care not whose word it is," she said of one passage; "most emphatically do I protest against it as an outrage on humanity, for my whole heart, mind, and soul revolts against such barbarity."⁴⁵ To the charge of blasphemy she said: "Blasphemy! oh, yes, blasphemy has ever been the cry against progress, and opposition to superstition."⁴⁶ The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, on the same platform, described her as a woman "educated in the Jewish faith, but emancipated from its yoke of bondage, and also from every sectarian fetter."⁴⁷ She closed the convention without bitterness. "I will carry with me no unpleasant remembrance on account of it; for my creed tells me to have perfect charity."⁴⁸

Not at the women's convention

Four months later, at the national women's rights convention in Cleveland, she did something that surprised those who had heard her at Hartford. When the Reverend Antoinette Brown, the movement's ordained minister, argued that the Bible supported women's equality, and another speaker argued that it did not, Rose said, "I agree with both, that is, I agree with neither." This, she said, was "no time to discuss the Bible," and to bring theological quibbles into a women's rights meeting was to throw in "a firebrand."⁴⁹⁵⁰ It was a choice of tactics, not a change of mind, and she held to it. She kept the movement's platform for the movement's cause, and said what she thought about religion elsewhere. When a clergyman at Cleveland blamed the infidelity of the French for the immorality of French women, she did answer him: "The French women are as moral as any other people in any country; and when they have not been as moral, it has been because they have been priest-ridden."⁵¹⁵²

The press did not separate her causes as carefully as she did. When she spoke at the New York convention of September 1853, a gallery mob broke up the evening until Horace Greeley and a policeman restored order; the New York Herald called the meeting "a gathering of unsexed women," and the National Democrat, edited by a clergyman, called the speakers "deistical fanatics."⁵³⁵⁴⁵⁵ In March 1854, after she addressed the New York legislature, the Albany Register attacked the speakers as women "who make a scoff of religion, who repudiate the Bible and blaspheme God; who would step out from the true sphere of the mother, the wife, and the daughter," and singled her out as "the ringleted, glove-handed exotic, Ernestine L. Rose."⁵⁶⁵⁷ Its editor also said she had fled her country. She answered that this was not true: "I have no desire to claim martyrdom which does not belong to me. I left my country, not flying, but deliberately."⁵⁸

That spring she toured Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia with Susan B. Anthony; Anthony remembered their meeting in Washington, in 1854, as the first suffrage meeting ever held in the capital, with twenty or thirty people.⁵⁹ In 1860 Rose spoke for easy divorce, arguing that "love must be free, or it ceases to be love," and Greeley's Tribune suggested renaming the meetings "Wives Discontented."⁶⁰⁶¹

"A Defence of Atheism"

On 10 April 1861, two days before the first shots of the Civil War, she gave a lecture at Mercantile Hall in Boston, and gave it a title no one else in the movement would have used: "A Defence of Atheism."⁶² She opened by claiming the right to ask anything: "I consider no place too holy, no subject too sacred, for man's earnest investigation."⁶³ She searched the sciences for God and found none. "The ignorance of man is certainly no proof of the existence of a God."⁶⁴ She repeated the line she had used at Hartford, more sharply: "It was a great mistake to say that God made man in his image. Man, in all ages, made his God in his own image."⁶⁵

Her central argument was the one in the story about her father's fasting, grown up. A God who had made the world and let evil into it must have failed in knowledge, in power, or in goodness. "If he did not know, then his knowledge was at fault; if he did, but could not prevent that calamity, then his power was at fault; if he knew and could, but would not, then his goodness was at fault. Choose which you please, and it remains alike fatal to the rest."⁶⁶ She held the Creator responsible as she would hold a parent: "The parent is responsible to his offspring, the Creator to the creature."⁶⁷ And she pointed to the evidence in front of her audience: four million human beings held in slavery in the South, "under the sanction of religion and of God."⁶⁸ She argued that children are born without belief in God and acquire it only by being taught.⁶⁹ She scolded the reformers who joined in attacking atheism because they lacked "the moral courage to avow their own sentiments."⁷⁰ And she ended with the sentence that sums up her life: "Though I cannot believe in your God whom you have failed to demonstrate, I believe in man; if I have no faith in your religion, I have faith, unbounded, unshaken faith in the principles of right, of justice, and humanity."⁷¹

England

In 1869, in poor health, she left America for England, and came back only once, in 1874, for a single convention.⁷² In January 1873 she spoke for woman suffrage at a meeting in Edinburgh.⁷³ In 1876, for the hundredth anniversary of American independence, she sent a letter from London to the women meeting in Philadelphia: "we must reassert in 1876 what 1776 so gloriously proclaimed."⁷⁴ Two years later, on the thirtieth anniversary of Seneca Falls, she wrote of the "wonderful change" since she had set out to free woman "from not only barbarous laws, but from what was even worse, a barbarous public opinion."⁷⁵ Stanton and Anthony visited her in London in 1883 and found her in delicate health but "pleasantly situated in the heart of London."⁷⁶ Her husband died about ten years before her.⁷⁶ She died at Brighton on 4 August 1892, in her eighty-third year, and was buried in the same grave as her husband.⁷⁷⁷⁸

The friends she worked with sometimes found her an embarrassment. In 1876 a newspaper described her as "called by some an Atheist, and by others an Infidel," and "considered as a dangerous character, a kind of Thomas Paine among her sisterhood."⁷⁹ Twenty years later, when the suffrage movement voted to disown Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Woman's Bible, Anthony reminded the delegates of her. "Forty years ago one of our noblest men said to me: 'You would better never hold another convention than allow Ernestine L. Rose on your platform;' because that eloquent woman, who ever stood for justice and freedom, did not believe in the plenary inspiration of the Bible. Did we banish Mrs. Rose? No, indeed!"⁸⁰

Did her unbelief change shape?

Ernestine Rose's unbelief is one of the steadiest in this book. It began, by every account, in childhood, with questions about suffering that her father could not answer; it was public by the time she was in her twenties; and the argument she made in Boston in 1861 is the same one the stories put in the mouth of a little girl in Piotrków. What changed was the word. For most of her life others called her an infidel and she called her opinions her heresies; only in 1861 did she call herself an atheist. What changed as well was her sense of where to say it. She learned to keep her religious arguments off the platform of the women's movement so that the movement would not be destroyed by them, and to say them in full everywhere else. No source shows her unbelief softening at the end. Her faith, as she put it, was in man.

An earlier woman who lectured in America against the clergy, Frances Wright, has her own chapter in this book.