Ernestine Rose
Ernestine Rose was an American suffragist, feminist, women's rights activist, and social activist born in Piotrków Trybunalski on January 13, 1810.
Over the course of her life, Rose held citizenship in the Duchy of Warsaw, the Russian Empire, and the United States, reflecting the shifting political circumstances of her birthplace and her own eventual emigration. She worked across languages, with Hebrew and German among those she used, and she pursued her activism as both a writer and an inventor alongside her public advocacy work.
Rose was associated with the movement of atheism, which distinguished her from many others active in nineteenth-century reform circles. Her contributions to the cause of women's rights were formally recognized through her induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame, an acknowledgment grounded in her sustained work as a suffragist and feminist.
She died on August 4, 1892, in Brighton. The recurring concerns that ran through her public life — women's rights and suffrage — connected her work from her origins in Piotrków Trybunalski to the recognition she received through the National Women's Hall of Fame.
Quotes by Ernestine Rose
Ernestine Rose's insights on:
Away with that folly that her rights would be detrimental to her character – that if she were recognized as the equal to a man she would cease to be a woman!
Carry out the republican principle of universal suffrage, or strike it from your banners and substitute ‘Freedom and Power to one half of society, and Submission and Slavery to the other.’
Ignorance is the evil – knowledge will be the remedy. Knowledge not of what sort of beings we shall be hereafter, or what is beyond the skies, but a knowledge pertaining to terra firma, and we may have all the power, goodness and love that we have been taught belongs to God himself.
The few bright meteors in man’s intellectual horizon could well be matched by women, were she allowed to occupy the same elevated position.
Agitate! Agitate! Ought to be the motto of every reformer. Agitation is the opposite of stagnation – the one is life, the other death.
Do you tell me that the Bible is against our rights? Then I say that our claims do not rest upon a book written no one knows when, or by whom. Do you tell me what Paul or Peter says on the subject? Then again I reply that our claims do not rest on the opinions of any one, not even on those of Paul and Peter, . . . Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters.
Whatever good you would do out of fear of punishment, or hope of reward hereafter, the Atheist would do simply because it is good; and being so, he would receive the far surer and more certain reward, springing from well-doing, which would constitute his pleasure, and promote his happiness.