"Mrs. Rose was the first woman who presented herself on a public platform in America as a speaker against Negro slavery. It was perilous in a man to do it when she did it. She even went into the slave states pleading for [N]egro freedom. She was threatened with tar and feathers. She answered that "for the sake of humanity she would risk the tar." More than comely in features which had the dignity of contour, Mrs. Rose had a voice which at once arrested attention by its strength and melody. She spoke with easy accuracy and with eloquence and reason. Robert Owen, on his visits to America, paid her great respect. From being an opponent she became the most influential advocate of his views in that country. There was genius in her sympathy with social improvement. In the words of a recent poetess, Mrs. Rose could say: -"I said it in the meadow path,/I said it on the mountain stairs -/The best things any mortal hath/Are those which every mortal shares." Her German education gave her intellectual intrepidity. In her youth her dark hair and gleaming eyes showed she had the fire of Judith in her; and her passion was to see women possess civil and social equality, and to inspire women and men with self-helping sense, not taking religion, politics, or social ideas secondhand from their "pastors and masters" but choosing principles of belief, government, and conduct for themselves. Like her great co-worker in the anti-slavery movement, Lucretia Mott, Mrs. Rose took truth for authority, not authority for truth. After forty years of agitation-the period of her public activity-her end was painless peace. In her closing days she would often say, "It is no longer necessary for me to live. I can do nothing now. But I have lived." The slave she had helped to free from bondage of ownership, and the minds she had set free from the bondage of authority, were the glad and proud remembrance of her last days. If any around her grave shall provide memories of good done to brighten the end of life, it will be equally well with them and better for all who have passed within their influence."
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Atheists from the United StatesAbolitionistsImmigrants to the United StatesWomen's rights activistsJewish atheists
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Ernestine Rose
Ernestine Louise Rose (13 January 1810 – 4 August 1892) was an atheist feminist, Individualist Feminist, and abolitionist. She was one of the major intellectual forces behind the women's rights movement in nineteenth-century America.
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