As a public speaker, Ernestine Rose was more famous—and notorious—than Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were, at least in her heyday, and she mentored them both. An immigrant from Poland, a communitarian socialist, an atheist, and a Jew, she was more “ultraist,” to use a then-faddish term, than anyone she shared a stage with. Anthony wrote in her diary in 1854: “Mrs. Rose is not appreciated, nor cannot be by this age—she is too much in advance of the extreme ultraists even, to be understood by them.”
