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At 16, Ernestine Rose went to court in her native Poland and won her inheritance from her mother, as well as the right to decline an arranged marriage.
Born in Piotrkow Tybunalski, Russia (now Poland) on January 13, 1810, she was the daughter of Jewish parents who named her Siismund Polowski. Later, as Ernestine Louise Rose, she would become one of the most driven feminist, abolitionist, and free-thinking members of the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement in America. Growing up in a wealthy family, she was a beautiful girl who lived a rather comfortable life. At a young age, she asked her father, a rabbi, why God would allow people to suffer. Her father simply replied with a father-like answer that she should just accept it and not try to understand it. At the age of fourteen, Ernestine also began to strongly reject anything that related to female inferiority. Suffering a loss at the age of sixteen, Ernestine mourned the death of her mother. Adding onto the hardship, her father arranged for her to marry a young Jewish man against her will. She did not want to marry a stranger she didn’t love and protested against it. However, her father and her promised fiancée denied her wishes. Being the strong, empowered girl that she was, she worked to make her voice be heard. In 1826, she traveled to a secular civil court, where she pled her case; unlike the local religious court, this judge allowed her to not only keep the inheritance her mother had left her, but also freed her from the arranged marriage. However, when she returned from her travels, she found that her father had remarried a girl the same age as her. Unable to handle the tense situation with the new stepmother, she left home at seventeen and traveled to Berlin. There, when told that all non-Prussian Jews were required to have a Prussian sponsor, she spoke out against the king and was allowed to stay in Berlin without a sponsor. She supported herself during further travels to Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and England by selling an innovative product that she created -- a homemade room deodorizer. While in England, she adopted the name “Ernestine Louise” and married William Rose. They moved to New York in May 1836, when she was age 26. She improved her English, and met Robert Owen, a popular utopian, and he encouraged her to speak for human rights regularly to large crowds of people. Together, they founded the Association of All Classes of All Nations. She also gave lectures on the abolition of slavery, religious tolerance, and education and equality for women. In 1845, she embarked on what most likely was the first major feminist lecture tour in the United States, going as far as frontier Michigan. She worked for women’s rights and abolition alongside many other influential leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth. Rose also regularly reminded these leaders that not all of their associates were Protestant Christians, and she especially debated Lucy Stone’s sister-in-law, the Reverend Antoinette Brown Blackwell. Some specific actions that Ernestine Rose took towards civil rights included starting a petition in support of improving the property rights of married women in New York. In 1838, it was sent to the state legislature, being the first petition to ever be sent in favor of women’s rights. Eventually, more people signed the petition and more rights were won in 1849. Rose was president of the National Women’s Rights Convention, attended conferences for women’s suffrage, and made many more contributions. She moved back to England in 1869. She died on August 4, 1892 in Brighton, having made a huge contribution to women’s rights and women’s equality. 1
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