Mistress of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine Rose, Early Women's Rights Leader

Foreword

xvii Foreword There are many great women in the early history of the American women ’s rights movement, but not all continue to invite a kind of personal connection over history and across time. Ernestine L. Rose is one of these few. Paula Doress-Worters characterizes Rose as ahead of her time, meaning that her words, ideas, and life speak to us in modern times, even more perhaps than to her own contemporaries. Indeed, Rose saw the position of her sex from an angle different from other thoughtful women of her own time. Her speeches and writings, her life and experiences, offer oblique yet illuminating insights into the past and on the present. Paula Doress-Worters has chosen to let Rose’s words speak largely for her, providing, for the first time, virtually a complete record of Rose’s public life, her speeches and writings, and the reactions of friends and critics to her words. By combining Rose’s own words with the acute biographical and critical observations of the modern editor, Mistress of Herself brings to mind a similarly innovative volume published thirty years ago, also by The Feminist Press, Bell Gale Chevigny’s The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings (1976). Although Fuller was a contemporary of Rose, the only place they met was inside the first volume of the History of Woman Suffrage, in which Elizabeth Cady Stanton paid tribute to them as forerunners of the women’s rights movement (1881). Rose and Fuller are similarly intriguing historical figures. Like Fuller, Rose’s life, combined with her insights and writings, remain so inviting and multifaceted that each generation of biographers, feminists, and general readers has found something unique, some new lesson about a woman’s effort to make sense of, live through, dissent from, and change history. Ernestine Rose offers the feminist historian a compelling combination of an heroic, path-breaking life dedicated to the well-being of all humanity, made palpable through an action-packed life of social commitment . Doress-Worters’ Introduction provides an account of the limited information available about her early life. Here let me note elements which conform to the not uncommon romance of the rebellious daughter , who appears often in the history of women’s rights. There is also the motherless child of a stern father, who educates his girl child because he has no son on whom to lavish his love of learning. This is much like the xviii story that Fuller told of herself, and to some degree, Stanton’s as well. There is also the loveless marriage arranged by the father, a particular element in the history of young women fleeing from traditional society into modernity. Somehow the young woman finds the strength to break away from a confining patriarchal society to search for a personal freedom that she knows exists for her somewhere. This is the story that Emma Goldman and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have told of themselves. The girl that would become the woman named Ernestine Rose found herself in these feminist autobiographical traditions. Rather than remain a reproach to more conventional lives, however, Rose turned the freedom of action she won for herself toward the pursuit of greater freedom for all. Why did she choose social action and the pursuit of justice—rather than, for instance, cosmopolitan living or literary distinction—as the purpose of the life she had secured through her individual acts of courage and vision? One answer may be that in so doing she could seek a community of other visionaries and boundary-breakers like herself. To break free of one’s inherited social restraints often secures broader vistas at the considerable cost of loneliness and alienation. Rose sought to escape such consequences within a series of alternative communities : of Owenite socialists, Paine’s freethinkers, and women’s rights feminists. In these contexts, she took the impulses which had led her to forge her own unconventional life, and joined them with others who also wanted to change social conditions and political possibilities for all. Ultimately, as Rose’s life testifies, freedom of belief and action should not require outstanding individual heroics. Individual freedom should be the condition of all, not only of those forced by irresistible internal discontent to seek it. The breadth of Rose’s vision for radical social change is important to emphasize. She believed in women’s rights and she believed in other causes as well. Popular and scholarly judgment too often miscasts feminism as an...