"We were horrified, too, at the conditions we had never met in our travels elsewhere the prevalence of pests in the old slum houses, mice, rats, cockroaches and bedbugs. My poor mother carried on a desperate struggle to rid us of these parasites. And then something horrible happened to us in school-pediculosis is the scientific term; "lousy" the children called it. One child can infect a whole classroom, as every teacher knows. Yet often you will hear a smug prosperous person say: "Well, at least the poor can keep clean." I remember my friend, Rose Pastor Stokes, answering a woman who said this: "Did your mother ever look at a nickel in her hand and decide between a loaf of bread and a cake of soap? Well, mine did!""
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Activists from the United StatesJews from the United StatesSocial activistsSocialists from the United StatesFeminists
Original Language: English
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Sources
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography, My First Life (1906-1926)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rose_Pastor_Stokes
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Rose Pastor Stokes
Rose Harriet Pastor Stokes (née Wieslander; July 18, 1879 – June 20, 1933) was an American socialist activist, writer, birth control advocate, and feminist. She was a figure of some public notoriety after her 1905 marriage to Episcopalian millionaire J. G. Phelps Stokes, a member of elite New York society, who supported the settlements in New York. Together they joined the Socialist Party. Pastor Stokes continued to be active in labor politics and women's issues, including promoting access to bi
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