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Potowski lived in Berlin for the next two years and then in the Netherlands and Paris before settling in England at the age of 21. There she joined a circle of reformers and philanthropists that included jeweler and silversmith William E. Rose, whom she married in 1836. The couple soon immigrated to the United States, where Ernestine Rose began to spearhead the drive for equal rights for women. She strongly opposed the law of the day that deprived married women of the right to control property they had owned before marriage, and in the 1840s she led a drive in New York state to reverse that law. In 1848 the state legislature enacted a measure permitting married women to keep control of the property that had been theirs as single women. (See Married Women’s Property Acts.) By 1850 Rose had become involved in the new women’s rights movement that had been born two years earlier at the Seneca Falls Convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y. An effective speaker, Rose promoted not only women’s rights but also the abolition of slavery and a ban on the manufacture of alcoholic beverages. In 1869 she cofounded, with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the National Woman Suffrage Association, whose chief aim was a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote.<ref>[https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ernestine-Rose Ernestine Rose]</ref>}}
Potowski lived in Berlin for the next two years and then in the Netherlands and Paris before settling in England at the age of 21. There she joined a circle of reformers and philanthropists that included jeweler and silversmith William E. Rose, whom she married in 1836. The couple soon immigrated to the United States, where Ernestine Rose began to spearhead the drive for equal rights for women. She strongly opposed the law of the day that deprived married women of the right to control property they had owned before marriage, and in the 1840s she led a drive in New York state to reverse that law. In 1848 the state legislature enacted a measure permitting married women to keep control of the property that had been theirs as single women. (See Married Women’s Property Acts.) By 1850 Rose had become involved in the new women’s rights movement that had been born two years earlier at the Seneca Falls Convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y. An effective speaker, Rose promoted not only women’s rights but also the abolition of slavery and a ban on the manufacture of alcoholic beverages. In 1869 she cofounded, with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the National Woman Suffrage Association, whose chief aim was a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote.<ref>[https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ernestine-Rose Ernestine Rose]</ref>}}
Brandeis University indicates
{{Cquote|Stories about Ernestine's early life are largely anecdotal, often based on stories she told to friends and interviewers. It is only when she arrives in America that we have a substantial historical record of her public life:
Born Jan. 13, 1810 in Piotrkow, Poland, Ernestine Susmond Potowski, grew into an intellectually precocious young woman. As a rabbi's daughter, she was offered more education than women commonly received at that time. She studied Hebrew scriptures and Talmud with her father.
Her intelligence was more given to questioning than accepting received wisdom. Very early, she began to raise questions about the texts that led to gossip in the community and conflict with her father over her 'heresies.'
After her mother's death, her father, hoping thereby to keep her in the fold, arranged a marriage without her consent. Ernestine, then 16, refused the match and fought to retain her inheritance from her mother, successfully defending against a claim for damages in a secular court by the spurned suitor. At 17, she left home for Berlin, successfully suing for entry to the city where draconian regulations severely limited Jewish settlement.
Arriving in Berlin, Ernestine supported herself by tutoring and marketing perfumed papers of her own invention to deodorize crowded tenement housing. Seeking enlightenment, she studied the texts of all the great religions, and concluded that all were irrational and oppressive to women. Her goal for herself and for society was intellectual freedom, freedom from the constraints of religious creeds and dogma.
While disavowing Judaism as irrational, Ernestine nonetheless refused conversion to Christianity. "Shall I leave the tree to join a branch?" Her reply is particularly notable given that it was the path chosen by so many desperate German Jews of the time. The German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine referred to baptism as the 'entry ticket to Western civilization,' in ironic justification of his own conversion to Christianity which he later regretted.
The following year Ernestine Susmond traveled around Europe in search of colleagues who cared as much as she did about justice and equality. (She seems to have dropped Potowski as a surname, perhaps because of the break with her father.) She spent time in Holland and France, then arrived in England in 1830.
There she became a follower of Robert Owen, a wealthy industrialist turned social reformer who preached a form of community-based socialism. Owenite socialism emphasized improving the conditions of people's daily lives, rather than blaming them for shortcomings which were the product of deprivation.
An active feminist wing in the Owenite movement provided Ernestine with opportunities to hone her public speaking skills and improve her English so that by the time she left for America, she was quite fluent, though still with a noticeable accent. Before leaving England, Ernestine married Englishman and fellow Owenite, William Ella Rose in a civil ceremony.
Their marriage was a harmonious and lifelong relationship based on love and shared commitments in which William provided the moral and financial support for Ernestine to travel and speak on behalf of the social reforms they both cared about so deeply.
No sooner did Ernestine Rose arrive in New York in May of 1836, than she was out knocking on doors with a petition for married women's property rights. Rose was one of the first to speak publicly in America on women's rights, and the first to petition for women's rights.
After 12 years of activism, in 1848, New York State passed the first married women's property law in the United States (Other states followed.) The New York campaign led to lifelong connections between Ernestine Rose, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Paulina Wright Davis who, together with growing numbers of women, would build a women's rights movement in America.
Susan B. Anthony, who joined the movement in 1852 and became its best known leader, often acknowledged Rose's pioneering role and kept her photograph on her study wall. Elizabeth Cady Stanton acknowledged the value of this early victory to the building of a national movement that is often assumed to have started with the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.
For the next 30 years, Ernestine Rose was an active campaigner on the lecture circuit attending every National Women's Rights Convention between 1850 and 1869 and many state and local conventions as well. She was hailed as "The Queen of the Platform," for being the best female orator of mid-19th century America.<ref>[https://www.brandeis.edu/wsrc/affiliates/ernestinerose/shortbio.html ABOUT ERNESTINE ROSE], Brandeis University website</ref>}}
== See also ==
== See also ==