Ernestine Rose

Ernestine Louise Rose (January 13, 1810 – August 4, 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.

Life and work

She was born on January 13, 1810, in Piotrków Trybunalski, Congress Poland, as Ernestine Louise Polowsky. Her father was a wealthy rabbi and her mother the daughter of a wealthy businessman.

At the age of five, Rose began to "question the justice of a God who would exact such hardships" as the frequent fasts that her father performed. As she grew older, she began to question her father more and more on religious matters, receiving only "A young girl does not want to understand the object of her creed, but to accept and believe it." in response. By the age of fourteen, she had completely rejected the idea of female inferiority and the religious texts that supported that idea.

When she was sixteen her mother died and her father, without her consent, betrothed her to a young Jew who was a friend of his. Rose, not wanting to enter a marriage with a man she neither chose nor loved, confronted him, professing her lack of affection towards him and begging for release. However, Rose was a woman from a rich family, and he denied her plea. Rose traveled to the secular civil court, where she pleaded her case herself. The courts ruled in her favor, not only freeing her from her betrothal, but ruling that she could retain the full inheritance she received from her mother. Although she decided to relinquish the fortune to her father, she gladly took her freedom from betrothal. She returned home only to discover that in her absence her father had remarried, to a sixteen-year-old girl. The tension that developed eventually forced her to leave home at the age of seventeen.

Ernestine Rose (librarian)

Ernestine Rose (March 19, 1880—1961) was a librarian at the New York Public Library responsible for the purchase and incorporation of the Arthur A. Schomburg collection.

Early Life and Education

Ernestine Rose was born on March 19, 1880 in Bridgehampton, New York and named after Ernestine Potowski Rose, a nineteenth-century feminist. She studied at Wesleyan University and the New York State Library School in Albany, New York, where she graduated in 1904. During her study at the New York State Library School, she worked a summer at a branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL) on the Lower East Side during her college education where she was exposed to Russian-Jewish immigrants and their culture. She emphasized programs that would help immigrants adjust to a new country rather than programs design to “Americanize” then, as was the norm at the time.

Career

During World War I, Rose served as director of hospital libraries for the American Library Association (ALA). Returning to New York, in 1915, she served as head librarian at the Seward Park Branch, located in a Jewish immigrant community of New York City, until 1917. At Steward Park, she encouraged her assistants to become well versed in Jewish, Yiddish and Russian holidays, customs, and literature, intending to make them sensitive to the surrounding community.