The American Life of Ernestine L. Rose / Edition 1

by Carol Kolmerten

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815605287
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	12/01/1998
Series:	Writing American Women
Edition description:	1 ED
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.02(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

A biography of one of the least known women's rights activists in 19th-century America. For over 30 years, Rose (1810-1892) attacked slavery and decried women's lack of political and social rights. Her atheism, her Jewish and Polish background, and her blunt appeal to reason made her an easy target for those opposed to her ideas, and an outsider even among the reformers, whose anti-Semitism, anti-immigrationist sentiments, and unconscious racism she aroused. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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