Ernestine Rose

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Ernestine Louise Rose (January 13, 1810 – August 4, 1892) was an Individualist Feminist, abolitionist, freethinker, and atheist. She was one of the major intellectual forces behind the women's rights movement in nineteenth-century America.

She was born in Piotrków Trybunalski, Russia-Poland. Rose chafed at her parents' Judaism at an early age. She left home at age seventeen, first traveling to Berlin. There she petitioned the Prussian king and he granted her exception from the general rule , that every newcomer Jewish person had to have a Protestant sponsor. She also traveled to other countries in Europe, then to America.

Taking up residence in the United States, she traveled extensively and lectured on the various causes she espoused. A minister in Charleston, South Carolina, forbade his congregation to listen to "this female devil." The editor of a small newspaper in Maine wrote "It would be shameful to listen to this woman, a thousand times below a prostitute."

[edit] Quotes

"It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so."

"Do you tell me that the Bible is against our rights? Then I say that our claims do not rest upon a book written no one knows when, or by whom. Do you tell me what Paul or Peter says on the subject? Then again I reply that our claims do not rest on the opinions of any one, not even on those of Paul and Peter, . . . Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters." -- Ernestine Rose, responding to religious heckler at Seventh National Woman's Rights Convention, New York, Nov. 25-26, 1856 (History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 1: 661-663)

[edit] References

"Great Minds Ernestine L. Rose: Freethinking Rebel", Carol Kolmerten, Summer, 2002, (Volume 22, No. 3), p53-55, Free Inquiry
The American Life of Ernestine L. Rose, Carol Kolmerten, Syracuse University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-8156-0528-5