"How safe we all felt when she had the floor."
Title
"How safe we all felt when she had the floor."
Description
Spending a last day on Ernestine Rose: as great a speaker as Anna Dickinson, as radical as Lucretia Mott.
There were few Jews in the suffrage movement before the turn of the century, in part b/c Jews didn’t arrive in large # until the 1880s. Rose opposed organized religion--
...she wrote a book called A Defense of Atheism--but did not ignore anti-Semitism. When the editor of the Boston Investigator denounced Judaism as “bigoted, narrow, exclusive and totally unfit for a progressive people like the Americans” - Rose responded with a vigorous defense.
After the war she helped start the National Woman Suffrage Association, but then she and her husband moved to England. Susan B Anthony & ElizCadyStanton begged her to return, to no avail. English was Rose’s 4th or 5th language, and those who heard her speak described: oratory that “shakes, it awes, it thrills, it melts—it fills you with horror, it drowns you with tears.” Susan B reminisced: “They who sat with her in bygone days on the platform will remember her matchless powers as a speaker, and how safe we all felt when she had the floor.”
There were few Jews in the suffrage movement before the turn of the century, in part b/c Jews didn’t arrive in large # until the 1880s. Rose opposed organized religion--
...she wrote a book called A Defense of Atheism--but did not ignore anti-Semitism. When the editor of the Boston Investigator denounced Judaism as “bigoted, narrow, exclusive and totally unfit for a progressive people like the Americans” - Rose responded with a vigorous defense.
After the war she helped start the National Woman Suffrage Association, but then she and her husband moved to England. Susan B Anthony & ElizCadyStanton begged her to return, to no avail. English was Rose’s 4th or 5th language, and those who heard her speak described: oratory that “shakes, it awes, it thrills, it melts—it fills you with horror, it drowns you with tears.” Susan B reminisced: “They who sat with her in bygone days on the platform will remember her matchless powers as a speaker, and how safe we all felt when she had the floor.”
Creator
Daily Suffragist
Source
Date
13/12/2019
Files
Collection
Citation
Daily Suffragist, “"How safe we all felt when she had the floor.",” Daily Suffragist, accessed April 18, 2024, https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/186.