Review of *The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter*

Americans don’t typically recognize Ernestine Rose as a prominent figure in the early U.S. women’s rights movement. Despite being one of the most well-known and influential speakers for women’s rights during the first half of the nineteenth century, Rose faced much contempt during her life and erasure after her death. This, argues Bonnie S. Anderson in The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer, is due to Rose’s status as outsider. She was an immigrant, a radical, and most egregiously in the eyes of her detractors, an atheist.

Anderson stumbled across Rose while researching a previous monograph, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830-1860. Despite Rose’s major role in the movement, Anderson found little scholarship on her. Profiles written about her in 1856 and 1881, and one book-length biography written in 1956 by Yuri Suhl, left Anderson needing to know more.

This desire to learn turned into The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter. Rose was reluctant to write about her personal life, so Anderson deftly draws from Rose’s own speeches, newspaper reports, the letters of allies like Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglas, and a host of other sources to reconstruct Rose’s experiences.^[1] What results is a chronological overview of Rose’s life that clearly shows her prominent role within the women’s rights movement, despite the hostility she faced as an outspoken atheist.

Rose was born in 1810 as Erestine Potowska in Piótrkow, Poland. The daughter of her small town’s rabbi, she enjoyed a privilege not available to most young Jewish women. Her father secretly taught her Torah, but forbade her from participating in the traditional learning method of interrogating the text. Instead, he forced her into an arranged marriage. Rose refused the marriage and instead took her fiancé to court to protect her dowry and inheritance. She won. It was a formative moment.

The victory propelled Rose toward seeking a better life unhindered by gender discrimination. She spent time in Paris and Berlin before settling in London in 1832, where she found Owenism. Created by Robert Owen, this philosophy asserted that inequalities were based in societal instabilities, rather than individual prejudices. Rose and Owen bonded quickly, especially over their shared desire to do away with the “distinction of sex” altogether. In Owenist movements, she also saw women participating in discussions and lecturing in public, just as the men did, for the first time.

Owen succeeded in implementing his philosophy by reforming a factory town and wished to create similar communities in the United States. So, Rose and her new husband, William Rose, immigrated to New York in the late 1830s. Although those communities failed, she soon became involved in the movement for women’s rights, and especially for the right of women to own property and vote. Despite facing harassment for being both a woman lecturing in public and an atheist, Rose stuck to her principles, advocating for emancipation in all forms and especially from sexism, slavery, and “superstition” (religion).

Rose became so popular that she was chosen to be the keynote speaker at the second meeting of the National Women’s Rights Convention in 1851. She had learned to make herself more palatable to audiences, such as by downplaying her support of free thought and avoiding the controversial “bloomer” outfit. But despite these efforts, she still faced prejudice for her atheism, which was compounded by nativist disdain for her accent and Jewish origins. Additionally, she struggled to navigate disagreements between the women’s rights and anti-slavery movements, such as over whether Black men or white women deserved the vote first. Rose believed that both groups, and Black women too, all deserved the vote equally. Nevertheless, Rose helped to normalize the idea of a woman lecturer, thus helping later activists establish larger platforms. She also influenced the women’s rights movement by persuading her fellow activists to defer a national movement in favor of organizing by state. As she grew older, Rose’s health suffered, and she and her husband moved back to London, where she became involved in the British women’s rights movement. She died in 1892.

Rose’s life, and her commitment to her ideals, present an inspiring narrative. Given Rose’s well-earned reputation as an accomplished writer and orator, Anderson frequently lets her speak for herself, employing copious excerpts from her speeches and letters and juxtaposing them against newspaper reports and other audience reactions. While this approach occasionally devolves into a list of speaking engagements, Anderson’s book really shines when it highlights specific examples of Rose using her wit to take down critics. Anderson also excels at navigating the contentious relationships between the women’s rights, anti-slavery, and free thought movements.

The book struggles considerably, however, in making sense of Rose’s encounters with Judaism. Throughout the book, Anderson acknowledges the complex role of Christianity in debates over suffrage and emancipation. Rarely, though, does she discuss Judaism beyond the context of antisemitism and nativism. It would have been interesting, for example, to juxtapose Rose’s atheism with Reform Judaism. Brought from Germany to America by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise in 1846, Reform Judaism addressed many of Rose’s criticisms of traditional Judaism, such as restrictive dietary restrictions and separate, inferior prayer spaces for women. Given Judaism’s liminal position between race and religion, and its emphasis on ritual over belief, Judaism and atheism are not mutually exclusive. Putting Reform Judaism and Rose’s atheism into conversation could have presented a more nuanced depiction of Judaism and allowed for a deeper exploration of Rose’s roots.

Additionally, while Anderson discusses many Christian, Quaker, and spiritualist activists who worked alongside Rose, we learn nothing about her Jewish contemporaries. How did Rose, one might wonder, relate to Rebecca Gratz, who cofounded the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, championed Hebrew supplementary education as a way to fight antisemitism, and advocated for sources of mutual aid outside of the Social Gospel movement? What did she make of the numerous rabbis who spoke out against slavery, such as David Einhorn, Max Lilienthal, and Sabato Morais? And how did she feel about Judaism’s general call for pursuing justice, as dictated in the Torah?[2] Did other nineteenth-century Jewish activists suffer historical erasure just as Ernestine Rose did? Ironically, the book’s omission of Jewish activism as a whole reinforces one of the ways in which Rose’s critics marked her as an outsider: a sole Jew amongst a sea of Christians.

Finally, while Rose’s story is compelling, it alone does not justify her significance today. What might be more convincing is a fuller consideration of Rose within the larger genealogy of women’s rights in America. Susan B. Anthony saw her, along with Mary Wollstonecraft and Frances Wright, as one of the three foremothers of the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement. While The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter concludes by dwelling on changing attitudes toward atheism, Anderson—who has worked as a rape crisis volunteer, lecturer on women’s rights, and progressive campaign supporter—could instead have ended by recognizing her own debt to Rose’s pioneering activism. This, in the end, is the real value of Anderson’s account. It shows us that gaps remain in our knowledge which, when filled, can expand our understanding of the women’s rights movement in America. And it reminds us that the people who fill those gaps are as fascinating and complex as the world they created.

^[1] For example, a diary entry by German immigrant Malwida von Meysenbug paints a picture of how Ernestine Rose might have felt about the weather in London.

[2] “Justice, justice, you shall pursue,” Deuteronomy 16:21.