1.19.2012
Abolitionist and Women's Rights Activist in the Civil War Era
Ernestine Rose (1810–1892) was an advocate for the abolition of slavery and the rights of women and an orator whose activism was recognized by contemporaries as one of the major intellectual forces behind the women's rights movement in nineteenth-century America. Although she met with discouragements, lack of acknowledgement of her achievements and hostility from women, she was described as "one of the best lecturers of her time."
Childhood
She was born Ernestine Louise Potowski in Peterhof Trybunalski, Poland, on January 13, 1810. Her father was a wealthy rabbi and her mother the daughter of a wealthy businessman. She was reared in strict accordance with the tenets and rituals of the Jewish religion. At the age of five, Rose began to "question the justice of a God who would exact such hardships" as frequent and severe fasts.
As she grew older, she began to question her father more and more on religious matters. Her intellectual development brought her to find many things in the Bible which she could neither understand nor approve. By the age of fourteen, she had completely rejected the idea of female inferiority and the religious texts that supported that idea.
When Rose was sixteen her mother died and her father betrothed her to his young Jewish friend. By the terms of the betrothal, she would forfeit a good share of the property which reverted to her at her mother's death if she broke the marriage contract.
Unwilling to accept the betrothal, she sued her father for her inheritance in the Polish courts. This meant a long and lonely journey in the dead of winter. The courts ruled in her favor, ruling that she could retain the full inheritance from her mother. She decided to let her father keep her fortune, but she was happily freed from the arranged marriage.
Rose returned home only to discover that in her absence her father had remarried, to a sixteen year old girl. The tension that developed forced her to leave home. By the time she was seventeen, she had established herself in Berlin, one of the foremost cultural centers of the day. There she lived alone, obeying the German restrictions placed on Jews as to their movements, the kinds of work they could do and how long they could stay.
To support herself, she invented and sold perfumed paper, remaining in Berlin for nearly two years. Then she traveled to Belgium, the Netherlands and France. In June 1829, she decided to go to England, but the ship in which she sailed was wrecked. She arrived in England safely, but all her possessions had been destroyed. She found work as a teacher in the languages of German and Hebrew and continued to sell her room fresheners.
