The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer by Bonnie S. Anderson (review)

In her generous biography of Ernestine Rose, Bonnie Anderson refocuses attention on this freethinker and feminist "more famous than either Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony in the mid-nineteenth century." (5) Renowned on both sides of the Atlantic, Rose immigrated to New York City in 1836, after earlier stops in Berlin, Paris, and London, each place one move further away from the life she was born into in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland as the daughter of a rabbi. Her father granted his only child the opportunity to learn Hebrew, but not to ask questions. This inherent contradiction led young Ernestine to see how her mind—and that of all women—could not "expand under bolts and bars," and how religion dampened her free will. (13) Rose's first act of defiance—brushing her hair on the Sabbath—foreshadowed her later choice to pen the widely circulated A Defence of Atheism in 1861; she wrote this pamphlet after more than a decade on the speaking circuit promoting women's rights, abolitionism, free thought, and socialism.

A consummate orator, Rose's words leap from the page at Anderson's hand. Anderson is upfront about the difficulties she faced getting at Rose's interiority, and makes up for an incomplete personal archive by quoting her subject's speeches and writings at length, contextualizing each turn of argument with care. Readers can imagine audiences hundreds thick, at the edge of their seats, listening to "Mrs. Rose" delivering hours-long speeches alongside more remembered luminaries such as Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, and mentor Robert Owen, an influential British socialist. Rose consistently delivered "the speech of the afternoon," carried debates, faced off hecklers, replied to men's toasts, and concluded with force, "Agitate, Agitate!" (74, 78) Her leading fault, according to Anderson, was she "invoked her familiar stance of preferring to be right than to unite." (157)

More than a journey of the mind, The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter reads like a travelogue. Anderson, who wrote Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement (2000), is perfectly suited to carry readers on this kind of voyage. She expertly traces Rose's transnational influences, friendships, conference appearances, and impact. As an immigrant working among primarily native-born activists, Rose injected a global perspective in the U.S. women's movement. At the first National Women's Rights convention in Worcester in 1850, she remarked, "This Convention was not for the women of New England, not of Old England, but for the world." (72) Rose imagined the United States to be on the precipice of social advancement that would serve as a democratic model beyond its borders. At the same time, as a student of the Enlightenment and follower of Owenite socialism, she helped introduce these European movements to an American audience.

Anderson casts Rose as a "minority of one" who traversed social movement boundaries. (98) Among feminists and abolitionists, she remained an outsider as an atheist, immigrant, and Jew. In the company of freethinkers, she stood out for her antiracist attachments. Rose promoted a multifaceted women's rights agenda from married women's property rights—she enjoyed an egalitarian marriage to fellow Owenite William Rose—to economic independence in the workplace—she sold her own line of perfumes. Yet, above all else, she believed suffrage to be the gateway to the full realization of human rights. As Rose explained, "The ballot is the focus of all other rights, it is the pivot upon which all others hang." (83) In other words, full political citizenship was necessary to bring women into public view, improve their private lives, and increase their economic standing. Rose made this case widely to both U.S. and European audiences, framing "women's rights as human rights" well before the introduction of this refrain.

Rose lived a transnational life, but in what ways did she self-identify as a...