The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter

Ernestine Rose became a major figure in the nineteenth-century woman's rights movement in the United States and played an important role as a forceful delegate to conventions and as a popular public speaker and writer. She was, however, unique among the activists in her political milieu: a Polish immigrant, a Jew, a freethinker, and a self-proclaimed infidel. These identities come together seamlessly in this highly engaging biography by Bonnie S. Anderson, a scholar rightfully renowned for her stellar work on the international woman's movement and feminism. As the title of the book indicates, Anderson's subject began life as the daughter of a well-to-do rabbi, but, while still a young woman living in Poland, she began to question her faith. During a sojourn in England, she found both spiritual solace and rational enlightenment within the freethinking circles of the socialist Robert Owen. In 1836, at age twenty-five, she married a fellow Owenite, William Rose, and accompanied him to New York where she determinedly breached etiquette, first as woman audacious enough to lecture in public and second as a lecturer and essayist on free thought. Soon, Rose became equally passionate about woman's rights and antislavery. Anderson shines a spotlight on the significance of this distinctive and unusual blend of commitments

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