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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>}}
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>}}
The Jewish Women's Archive website declares:
{{Cquote|From 1850 to 1869, when she and her husband returned to England (for reasons which scholars continue to debate), Rose attended and played a major role in nearly every New York and national convention on women’s rights. She toured with Susan B. Anthony, who adopted Rose’s slogan “Agitate, agitate.” In the 1840s and 1850s, when antislavery and women’s struggles overlapped, she worked closely with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Paulina Wright, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. After the Civil War, some political strategists urged that women delay their quest for the vote and focus on the rights of African Americans, but Rose consistently maintained that the struggles be conjoined, stating “emancipation from every kind of human bondage is my principle.”
Rose abandoned her Jewish religious practices, but she responded with immediacy when the editor of the Boston Investigator, a free-thought journal for which she frequently wrote, attacked the Jewish people. A ten-week letter exchange ensued, during which Rose presented a strenuous critique of antisemitism and a defense of Jews based on their historical contributions to secular as well as religious culture. This prompted the editor of the Jewish Record to write in an article on the controversy that Rose showed “some of the old leaven of the Jewish spirit.”
Rose’s eloquent advocacy of a sweeping agenda for social change produced mixed results. She failed to achieve her dream of a utopian socialist community in Skaneateles, New York, but was successful in 1869, after nearly fifteen years’ work, in securing New York legislation that allowed married women to retain their own property and have equal guardianship of children. Although American women did not gain the vote until more than a quarter-century after Rose’s death, Susan B. Anthony considered her, with Mary Wollstonecraft and Frances Wright, to have pioneered the cause of woman suffrage. In 1883 Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton traveled to London in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Rose to return to America.
Despite ill health, Ernestine Rose continued to work for social justice until her death in Brighton, England, on August 4, 1892. Although she left no personal memoirs or letters, her eloquent words, spoken in thirty-two states and abroad, justify the assessment of her as the “first Jewish feminist.”
Despite her fundamental contributions to the advancement of women’s rights, most historians have failed to sufficiently acknowlege Rose or the role she played in this struggle. Her fall into obscurity may have been because of her unusual social status—a Jew among Protestants, an immigrant in a period of increasing nativist sentiment, an atheist in a primarily religious society. It may also have been because she left no descendants.<ref>[https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/rose-ernestine ERNESTINE ROSE 1810 – 1892] by Janet Freedman</ref>
== Backlash/antipathy against Ernestine Rose and her current obscurity ==
== Backlash/antipathy against Ernestine Rose and her current obscurity ==