Ernestine Rose
Ernestine Louise Rose ( born January 13, 1810 Ernestine Louise Sigismund Potowsky in Piotrków; † August 4, 1892 in Brighton ) was a Polish- American women's rights activist and abolitionist. She was a central figure in the early women's rights movement in the United States.
Life
Ernestine Sigismund Potowsky was born in the ghetto of Piotrków. As the daughter of a rabbi, she received a better education than most girls of her environment. She learned Hebrew and read the Torah. At 14, she began to reject the teachings of the Jewish religion, as belittling their opinion women.
When her mother died in 1826, arranged Ernestine's father a marriage with a much older man who thus should fall to the legacy of his daughter. Ernestine, who was only 16 years old, sued the marriage contract and successfully fought in court the right to retain their own possession. A year later, she left Poland.
They first moved to Berlin, where they settled down in spite of the obstacles that the anti-Jewish legislation introduced to meet her for two years. They invented and produced a kind of air freshener, through whose sale they financed their further travels. From Berlin, she moved to the Netherlands, then to France and finally in 1831 to England. There she began to get involved in socio-political, and learned among other things, Elizabeth Fry and Robert Owen know. With Owen she founded in 1835 the Association of All Classes of All Nations. 1836 she married the silversmith William Rose, with whom she still moved to New York in the same year.
In New York, Ernestine Rose sat still for the right of married women to own property. Together with Paula Wright Davis and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she organized a campaign in favor of a corresponding draft law, which was, however, successfully until years later. They also began to get involved in the movement of free thinkers. She wrote for the Freethinker magazine Boston Investigator and held speeches in conferences critical of religion.
1850 she participated in the first U.S. women's rights conference in Worcester (Massachusetts), on which she earned a resolution to the political, legal and social equality of women and men. In the following years they often appeared as a speaker at conferences on similar.
During the American Civil War, Rose argued for the abolition of slavery. After the end of the Civil War, it pushed both women's suffrage and for the civil rights of former slaves with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
1873 Rose returned with her husband to England. William Rose died in 1882. Ernestine Rose died ten years later in Brighton at the age of 82 years. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery.