"This revelatory biography revises the history of the 19th-century women's rights movement in America by restoring to center stage one of its key movers and shakers."—Publishers Weekly
Description
Ernestine L. Rose crisscrossed the country for over thirty years, attacking slavery and decrying women’s lack of political and social rights. With the brilliant. witty, and outspoken Rose on the stage, Susan B. Anthony wrote, “we all felt safe.” Yet, until now, she was virtually unknown.
Rose’s disappearance from history is telling. Scorned by newspaper editors, ministers, and politicians, she was also ignored by many of the very women and men with whom she shared reform platforms.
In a movement that drew much of its moral and intellectual energy from appeals to sentimental Christian piety, Rose’s atheism, her Jewish and Polish background, her foreign accent, and her blunt appeal to reason all made her a kind of barometer for the era’s reformers, registering their antisemitism, their anti-immigrationist sentiments, their unconscious racism. Carol A. Kolmerten has recovered here the most eloquent and persuasive speeches
and letters of the movement.
About the Author
Carol A. Kolmerten is professor of English at Hood College, where she teaches American literature and American studies. She is the author of Women in Utopia: The Ideology of Gender in the American Owenite Communities, the editor of Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-envisioned, and coeditor of Utopian and Science Fiction by Women.
December 1998
