Civil War Women Blog

Emily Blackwell

2012-02-07T17:16:00.000-05:00

Female Doctor and Educator in the Civil War Era

Emily Blackwell (1826–1910), physician and educator, was the second woman to earn a medical degree at what is now Case Western Reserve University, and the third woman to earn a medical degree in the United States. Dr. Blackwell, with her sister Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and their colleague Dr. Marie Zakrzewska, established the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, the first hospital for women and children in the United States.

Childhood
Emily Blackwell was born on October 8, 1826, the sixth of nine surviving children born to Samuel and Hannah Lane Blackwell in the seaport of Bristol, England. There Samuel prospered as the owner of a sugar refinery, which provided a comfortable existence for his large, close-knit family.

Both Samuel and his wife had fairly liberal views toward education. During an era when girls were expected to master only the subjects that prepared them to be good wives and mothers, the Blackwells saw to it that their daughters as well as their sons studied mathematics, science, literature and foreign languages.

Emily especially liked to roam the fields around Bristol, observing plant and animal life. This provided the foundation for her subsequent passion for botany and ornithology. Emily became an amateur expert on the subject of birds and flowers, mostly through extensive reading and observations made near the family home.

In 1832, an economic downturn in England all but destroyed Samuel's business. He and Hannah decided to make a fresh start in the United States. The family at first lived in New York City, where Samuel opened a sugar refinery. Within a year or so they moved across the Hudson River to Jersey City, New Jersey.

There they quickly became involved in the growing antislavery movement. Over the years family members developed close friendships with some of the country's most prominent abolitionists, including journalist and reformer William Lloyd Garrison, clergyman Lyman Beecher, his son Henry Ward Beecher and his daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Fire destroyed Samuel's sugar refinery in 1836, leaving the Blackwells deeply in debt. Two years later, Samuel moved his family to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he hoped to start a refinery operation that made use of sugar beets instead of cane sugar. But his health worsened, and he died in August 1838.

Once again, the Blackwells found themselves in dire straits. But by 1845, they had paid off most of their debts, freeing Elizabeth to pursue her goal of becoming a doctor. After applying to and receiving rejections from 28 different medical schools, she was finally accepted by Geneva Medical College in Geneva, New York in 1847.

Meanwhile, Emily was struggling to find her own way in life. Bookish and painfully shy, she led a quiet, solitary existence of work and study that masked her growing sense of frustration and unhappiness. She desperately wanted to follow in her sister's footsteps and enter the medical field but was plagued by self-doubt.

Instead, she tried teaching and found that she thoroughly detested it. As she confided to her diary around this time, according to writer Ishbel Ross in the book Child of Destiny:

I long with such an intense longing for freedom, action, for life and truth. I feel as though a mountain were on me, as though I were bound with invisible fetters. I am full of furious bitterness at the constraint and littleness of the life that I must lead...

Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from medical school at the head of her class in 1849, the first woman to earn a medical degree in the U.S. or Europe. After some additional study in Europe, she returned to the United States in 1851 and established a private clinic in New York City. A hard act to follow, but Emily was more determined than ever to become a doctor too.

Medical School
The fact that her famous sister had forged a path into medicine before her did not make Emily's entry into the profession any easier. Her application for admission was eventually rejected by twelve medical schools simply because she was a woman - including Geneva Medical College, her sister's alma mater.

However, Emily Blackwell was not deterred. In 1852 she was finally accepted at Rush Medical College in Chicago. During the summer before classes began, she lived with Elizabeth in Jersey City and obtained visiting privileges at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, where she was able to gain valuable experience just walking the wards.

However, when the trustees at Rush came under pressure by the Illinois state medical board to expel Emily because of her gender, they discontinued her studies at the end of her first year. But she persevered and was finally accepted at the Western Reserve University medical school in Cleveland, Ohio, where she earned her medical degree in 1854, becoming the second woman to earn an M.D. degree at that school and the third woman to earn a medical degree in the United States.

At Western Reserve, the medical education of women had begun at the urging of Dean John Delamater, who was backed by the Ohio Female Medical Education Society, formed in 1852 to provide moral and financial support for women medical students. Despite their efforts, the Western Reserve faculty voted to put an end to Delamater's policies in 1856, finding it "inexpedient" to continue admitting women.

After graduating with the highest honors, Emily went to Europe for two years to do postgraduate work in England, France and Germany. First, she went to Edinburgh, Scotland, to study obstetrics and gynecology for a year with Sir James Young Simpson. She so impressed him that he recommended her to several of Europe's most important clinics. Simpson noted in a letter that he had rarely met a young physician as well versed in literature, science and medical practice.

Medical Career
In 1856 Dr. Emily Blackwell returned to New York City where her sister Elizabeth was still fighting to gain acceptance among her fellow physicians and potential patients, most of whom looked upon female doctors with a great deal of suspicion, if not outright hostility.

Elizabeth had established a dispensary to treat poor women and children, but her ultimate dream was to expand it into a full-fledged hospital where women could consult a doctor of their own sex about female health problems and where training was available for women interested in becoming doctors.

In 1857 the Blackwell sisters, along with another Western Reserve graduate Dr. Marie Zakrzewska, established the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in a poor neighborhood that was home to a large immigrant population of Germans, Italians and Slavs. It was the first hospital dedicated to serving women and children in the United States and the first hospital staffed entirely by women.

The doctors worked diligently to maintain the highest medical standards while quietly overcoming the prejudices and fears of those they had vowed to serve as well as those who were keeping a close eye on their project. Before long, other women with an interest in medicine were coming to the infirmary to work as interns, nurses and pharmacists.

While Elizabeth served as the director and Dr. Zakrzewska was the resident physician, Emily devoted herself entirely to patient care. By all accounts, she was an excellent physician and surgeon. Emily also performed surgery, because her sister's vision had been badly damaged by an eye infection. Patients were charged according to their ability to pay; four dollars a week if they could afford it, less if they could not. The most destitute paid nothing at all.

Emily also proved to be an able administrator and fundraiser. In 1858, the elder Dr. Blackwell went to Europe for a year and Zakrzewska moved to Boston, leaving Emily to run the Infirmary. During this time she was successful in getting state funding for their hospital, and the number of patients increased to the point where the operation had to move to larger quarters in 1860.

After Elizabeth's return, the sisters also expanded the scope of their efforts by launching the first in-home medical social work program in the United States, visiting the poor where they lived to offer basic health care and lessons in proper sanitation.

In 1859, after a brief tour in England to campaign for the medical education of women, Blackwell raised $50,000 toward starting a medical school. In 1860 the Infirmary began to train a few young women as assistant physicians. Since established hospitals would not allow female doctors onto the wards, the Infirmary was almost the only place female physicians in training could get any practical experience.

And when the Civil War erupted in 1861, Dr. Emily Blackwell helped organize the Women's Central Association of Relief, which recruited and trained women who had volunteered to serve as nurses for the Union army. She and Mary Livermore also played an important role in the development of the United States Sanitary Commission.

After the war ended, the Blackwells attempted to convince medical schools to admit women who had had some training at the Infirmary. In 1868, when it became clear that would not happen, the Blackwell sisters established the Women's Medical College for the education of female physicians in New York City. Elizabeth was professor of hygiene, while Emily taught obstetrics and women's diseases.

In 1869, Elizabeth moved back to England permanently to continue the work she had begun there a decade earlier. Emily then took charge of both the infirmary and the school, serving not only as a physician but also as dean of the college for the next thirty years. In 1871, she accepted membership in the New York County Medical Society.

During the 1870s, having finally gained confidence in her abilities as both a physician and a hospital administrator, Dr. Blackwell became more visibly active in the growing social reform movement. In that role, she tackled issues such as prostitution, sex education and alcohol abuse.

During that time, Dr. Blackwell also managed the infirmary - overseeing surgery, nursing and bookkeeping. She traveled to the state capital of Albany to convince the legislature to provide the hospital with funds that would ensure long-term financial stability. She transformed an institution housed in a rented, sixteen-room house into a fully fledged hospital. By 1874 the infirmary was serving over 7,000 patients annually.

The Women's Medical College quickly rose to the front rank of America's medical institutions. Known for its exceptionally high standards among medical schools in general, the college expanded from a two-year program to a three-year institution in 1876, and Dr. Blackwell moved the school into more spacious quarters.

In 1893 it became the first four-year medical program in the nation. Many male medical schools at the time were still offering only two years of study. A year later, a comprehensive training course for nurses was established.

In 1899, after Cornell University Medical College began accepting female students on an equal basis with men, Dr. Blackwell arranged for the transfer of her students to Cornell. During its thirty-one year existence, the Women's Medical College trained 364 women doctors.

Later Years
Dr. Emily Blackwell then retired from the college and practice of medicine and left the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in the hands of its very capable staff. Some 150 years after its founding, the facility continues to operate as the NYU Downtown Hospital.

Since 1883, Dr. Blackwell had been living with her partner Dr. Elizabeth Cushier, another doctor at the Infirmary. In 1900 at the age of 74, Blackwell traveled with Cushier in Europe for eighteen months. Blackwell then divided her time between her winter home in Montclair, New Jersey, and a summer cottage in York Cliffs, Maine, both of which she shared with Dr. Cushier.

Emily saw her sister Elizabeth one last time during the summer of 1906 when Elizabeth visited the United States. The following year, the elder Blackwell fell down a flight of stairs while vacationing in Scotland; she never fully recovered from the accident and suffered a stroke in May 1910.

Emily Blackwell survived only a few months longer, dying of enterocolitis (inflammation of the small and large intestines) on September 7, 1910 at her summer home in York Cliffs, Maine.

By carrying on the work she and her sister Elizabeth had begun together, Dr. Emily Blackwell helped pave the way for countless other women who were interested in pursuing careers in medicine. Those who knew her described her as a superb practitioner and an inspirational teacher. The high standards Blackwell set for herself and her students were in large part responsible for opening the medical field to women and convincing a skeptical public to accept female physicians.

SOURCES
Wikipedia: Emily Blackwell
Gale Encyclopedia of Biography: Emily Blackwell
Changing the Face of Medicine: Dr. Emily Blackwell

Maria Mitchell

2012-01-29T21:29:00.000-05:00

Vassar Professor and Astronomer in the Civil War era

Maria Mitchell (1818–1889) was an American astronomer who discovered a comet in her telescope in 1847, which became known as the Miss Mitchell's Comet and brought her international fame. She was the first professor appointed at the new Vassar College and the first acknowledged woman astronomer in the United States.

Childhood
Maria (pronounced ma-RY-ah) Mitchell was born August 1, 1818 on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, daughter of Quakers William and Lydia Coleman Mitchell. She had nine brothers and sisters. Her mother's side of the family traced its ancestry to Benjamin Franklin.

The Quaker religion taught intellectual equality between the sexes, and the island of Nantucket was unusual for its time in regard to equality for women. Nantucket's importance as a whaling port meant that wives of sailors lived in relative independence for months and sometimes years, managing the family's affairs while their husbands were at sea.

Like other Quakers Maria's parents valued education and insisted on giving their daughters the same quality of education their sons received. Not many girls born in the early 1800s were lucky enough to have a father like William Mitchell, a dedicated amateur astronomer and teacher.

Mitchell rated chronometers for use by the Nantucket whaling fleet in celestial navigation, and was delighted with the early talent his daughter demonstrated for science. Instead of considering such interests useless for a girl, he taught her mathematics and astronomy, using his own telescope at home. At age twelve, Maria helped her father calculate the exact moment of an annular eclipse.

After attending Elizabeth Gardener's small school in early childhood, Maria attended the North Grammar school where her father William Mitchell was the first principal. Two years later, when Maria was eleven, her father built his own school. There, she was a student as well as a teaching assistant.

After William Mitchell's school closed, Maria attended Unitarian minister Cyrus Peirce's School for Young Ladies. Later she worked for Peirce as his teaching assistant. Maria left in 1835 at the age of 17 to open her own school to train girls in science and mathematics. She rented a room and put an advertisement in the newspaper.

Maria decided to close her school a year later in 1836 after she was offered a job as the first librarian of Nantucket's Atheneum Library where she worked for eighteen years. This job was perfect for her - she was earning a good salary and had time to study and read many books, further developing her passion for knowledge.

While Maria spent her days at the library, she spent her nights observing the sky with her father. William Mitchell had been hired as cashier of the Pacific Bank, which came with living quarters attached to the bank. He built an observatory on the roof and installed a brand-new four-inch telescope, which he used to make star observations for the United States Coast Guard and Maria helped him with the measurements.

Career in Science and Education
On a clear night in October 1847, at the age of 29, Maria stood on that roof, focusing her telescope on a faraway star, five degrees above the North Star where there had been no star before. She had memorized the night sky and was sure of her observation. It occurred to her that this might be a comet, and recorded its coordinates. The next night the star had moved, and Maria was sure it was a comet.

Maria Mitchell became the first person to record a comet sighting in America. Not only was this a first in American science, she used a mere two-inch telescope, which illustrates her skill as an astronomer. Her father wrote to Professor William Bond at the Harvard University observatory, who submitted Maria's name to the king of Denmark who had offered a gold medal to anyone who discovered a comet that could only be seen through a telescope.

Maria Mitchell's quiet life on Nantucket immediately changed. The discovery of a comet was rare enough in nineteenth century America, but a woman astronomer was unheard of. She received international fame, and the gold medal from King Frederick VII of Denmark, which reads: Not in vain do we watch the setting and rising of the stars. Her discovery became known as Miss Mitchell's Comet.

Mitchell continued working as a librarian, but she began receiving letters of congratulations from scientists, and tourists were coming to take a look at the lady astronomer. She became the first woman member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1848. Only 30 at the time, she would be the only woman thus recognized for almost a century into the future.

Maria Mitchell was the first American woman to work as a professional astronomer, and probably the first woman employed in a professional capacity by the federal government. Although women had been hired as cooks, laundresses and other domestic jobs, her 1849 employment appears to be the first case of a woman earning an annual salary for work based on knowledge of an academic field.

Mitchell worked at the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office, calculating tables of positions of the planet Venus. The U.S. Coastal Survey paid her $300 a year as a celestial observer. Much of the project's purpose was to develop the science of weather forecasting, and it involved computing distances. She also started traveling to attend scientific meetings, and was the first woman elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1850.

In 1856 Mitchell received an offer from a rich man named General Swift to accompany his daughter Prudence on a trip to the South and to Europe. She accepted and took her almanac work with her. They went south to New Orleans, then to London, where Mitchell visited the Greenwich Observatory. She went to France on her own, then continued on to Rome with Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family.

She met with other astronomers, including Sir John Herschel, whose aunt, German-born Caroline Herschel, who had discovered a comet in 1788, and had been a pioneering astronomer prior to her 1848 death. Mitchell also visited Scotland's Mary Somerville, who published The Mechanisms of the Heavens in 1829 and went on to innovative work on ultraviolet rays and molecular structure.

Boston feminists were extremely proud of Mitchell's achievements. It was botanist Elizabeth Agassiz who had persuaded her husband to nominate Mitchell for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. After her return from Europe, Mitchell was presented with a new telescope bought with money collected from wealthy friends by innovative educator and publisher Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.

Before and during the Civil War, Mitchell was an outspoken opponent of slavery and stopped wearing clothes clothes made of Southern cotton. She continued her pursuit in the scientific field through the Civil War, when she also was involved in the anti-slavery movement.

The Civil War transformed the roles of American women, and many eastern states that had not provided colleges for women began to do so. One of the most prestigious was Vasser College, which was founded in Poughkeepsie, New York, by Matthew Vassar in 1865. Vassar persuaded Mitchell to join its faculty, where she was the first person (male or female) appointed to the faculty of the new school.

Mitchell was appointed Professor of Astronomy at Vassar College in 1865. She was also named Director of the Vassar Observatory. Mitchell and her father moved into the Vassar Observatory, the first building of the college to be completed, in the summer of 1865, and the college opened that fall.

At Vassar she had access to a twelve-inch telescope - the third largest in the United States - and continued her own study of the surface features of Jupiter and Saturn and photographing stars. She later learned that her salary was less than that of many younger male professors. She insisted on a salary increase, and was given one.

Equally important, she refused to enforce the petty rules of female behavior that were expected at that time. She often invited her students - all females - to come up to the observatory at night and watch meteor showers or other astronomical events. But the college initially insisted that her students were not allowed to go outside at night!

Mitchell edited the astronomical column at Scientific American. She made astute early observations about sunspots, the surface of Saturn and the composition of its rings, the double nebulae in the Great Bear constellation and an 1869 solar eclipse. She concluded that color variations between stars were probably caused by their varying chemical compositions.

After the war Mitchell concentrated her political actions on women's rights, co-founding the American Association for the Advancement of Women in 1873. Mitchell had known of Nantucket-born Quaker and feminist Lucretia Mott all of her life, and she later befriended other women's rights activists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

In 1873 Mitchell attended the first meeting of the Women's Congress, which was also attended by Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and Antoinette Brown Blackwell.

Mitchell used her observatory dome at Vassar not only for the study of science, but also as a gathering place for the discussion of politics and women's issues and her annual "dome party." On May 10, 1875, Julia Ward Howe, (composer of the Civil War anthem "The Battle Hymn of the Republic") lectured in the observatory on "Is Polite Society Polite?"

When the nation celebrated its first centennial in 1876, Mitchell chaired the Women's Congress held in Philadelphia. She was one of the first women elected to the American Philosophical Society. She was also an exceptionally good teacher, and many of her students went on to achievement in astronomy.

Mitchell never married. Throughout her career she encouraged young women to be anything they wanted to be, in the same way her father had encouraged her. Always a powerful advocate of women's potential, she became increasingly feminist as she aged.

Mitchell retired from Vassar in 1888 because of poor health, but continued her research in Lynn, Massachusetts, where her sister lived.

Maria Mitchell died of a brain disease on June 28, 1889 in Lynn, Massachusetts, at the age of 70. She was buried in Lot 411, Prospect Hill Cemetery, Nantucket.

In 1902 friends, family members and former students founded the Maria Mitchell Association to preserve the legacy of Nantucket astronomer, librarian and educator Maria Mitchell. It operates the Maria Mitchell Observatory, a Natural History Museum, Maria Mitchell's Home Museum, the Science Library and her home, which is open to visitors.

In 1905 Mitchell was elected to the Hall of Fame of Great Americans at New York University (now at Bronx Community College). In 1994, she was elected to the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. She was the namesake of a World War II Liberty ship, the SS Maria Mitchell. The crater Mitchell on the Moon is named after her.

Maria Mitchell quote:

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but is somewhat beauty and poetry.

SOURCES
Maria Mitchell
Wikipedia: Maria Mitchell
Maria Mitchell, Astronomer
Distinguished Women: Maria Mitchell
National Women's History Museum: Maria Mitchell

Ernestine Rose

2012-01-19T18:46:00.000-05:00

Abolitionist and Women's Rights Activist in the Civil War Era

Ernestine Rose (1810–1892) was an advocate for the abolition of slavery and the rights of women and an orator whose activism was recognized by contemporaries as one of the major intellectual forces behind the women's rights movement in nineteenth-century America. Although she met with discouragements, lack of acknowledgement of her achievements and hostility from women, she was described as "one of the best lecturers of her time."

Childhood
She was born Ernestine Louise Potowski in Peterhof Trybunalski, Poland, on January 13, 1810. Her father was a wealthy rabbi and her mother the daughter of a wealthy businessman. She was reared in strict accordance with the tenets and rituals of the Jewish religion. At the age of five, Rose began to "question the justice of a God who would exact such hardships" as frequent and severe fasts.

As she grew older, she began to question her father more and more on religious matters. Her intellectual development brought her to find many things in the Bible which she could neither understand nor approve. By the age of fourteen, she had completely rejected the idea of female inferiority and the religious texts that supported that idea.

When Rose was sixteen her mother died and her father betrothed her to his young Jewish friend. By the terms of the betrothal, she would forfeit a good share of the property which reverted to her at her mother's death if she broke the marriage contract.

Unwilling to accept the betrothal, she sued her father for her inheritance in the Polish courts. This meant a long and lonely journey in the dead of winter. The courts ruled in her favor, ruling that she could retain the full inheritance from her mother. She decided to let her father keep her fortune, but she was happily freed from the arranged marriage.

Rose returned home only to discover that in her absence her father had remarried, to a sixteen year old girl. The tension that developed forced her to leave home. By the time she was seventeen, she had established herself in Berlin, one of the foremost cultural centers of the day. There she lived alone, obeying the German restrictions placed on Jews as to their movements, the kinds of work they could do and how long they could stay.

To support herself, she invented and sold perfumed paper, remaining in Berlin for nearly two years. Then she traveled to Belgium, the Netherlands and France. In June 1829, she decided to go to England, but the ship in which she sailed was wrecked. She arrived in England safely, but all her possessions had been destroyed. She found work as a teacher in the languages of German and Hebrew and continued to sell her room fresheners.

In London she was introduced to Utopian socialist Robert Owen after hearing him speak. Then about sixty years of age, he was impressed by her intellect, and invited her to speak in the huge hall he had furnished for radical speakers. In spite of her limited knowledge of English, the audience was so impressed that from then on she appeared regularly.

Owen referred to her as "his daughter," and their friendship lasted for years. She helped him to found the Association of All Classes of All Nations, a group that espoused human rights for all people of all nations, sexes, races and classes. The group accepted no formal religion; it was at this time that she made her full break with religion.

During her time there she also met William Ella Rose, a English jeweler and silversmith three years her junior and a fervent disciple of Robert Owen. They were soon married by a civil magistrate, and both made it plain that they considered marriage a civil contract rather than a religious one.

Women's Rights Activist
In May 1836, the Roses emigrated to the United States and later became naturalized citizens. They settled in New York City, where they opened a small shop in their home the following year. William repaired jewelry, watches and ornaments; Ernestine made and sold perfumed toilet water.

Rose learned that a bill proposed to the New York legislature would grant married women the right to control their own property and earnings. Rose drew up a petition, gained supporters, and submitted the first petition on this topic to the legislature in 1838. She persevered during succeeding years and New York's Married Women's Property Act was passed in 1848.

Others who participated in the work for that bill included Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Frances Wright and Susan B. Anthony. These same women were responsible for inaugurating the women's rights movement in the United States, which led to the famous Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.

Rose declared herself an Atheist and joined a group of freethinkers who had organized a Society for Moral Philanthropists. This group sponsored public lectures and debates, which sometimes drew as many as 2,000 people, and Rose became one of the most popular lecturers. Her topics included the advocacy of abolition of slavery, women's rights, equal opportunities for education and civil rights.

Rose was much in demand and began to travel for lectures, first in New York state, then in the Northeast and as far south as Kentucky and South Carolina. She worked also in association with William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. Together they traveled endless miles, wrote and delivered speeches, debated, argued, pleaded and organized on behalf of their causes.

All of these lectures and debates were regularly reported in the Boston Investigator, to which Rose was a constant contributor. The Investigator was an avowed infidel and Atheistic publication, and Rose fearlessly attacked the clergy in it. She was independent, thoughtful, critical and inquiring.

In March 1854 she went with Susan B. Anthony on a speaking tour to Washington, DC. Later, in October, Rose was elected president of the National Women's Rights Convention at Philadelphia, overcoming the objections that she was an Atheist. Anthony was her champion for this fight, declaring that every religion - or none - should have an equal right on the platform.

On May 5, 1856, Ernestine Rose and her husband set sail for England and Europe. She tried to visit her native Poland and was denied admission. After a six-month sojourn, they returned to the United States. She attempted, thereafter, because of her health, to stay away from the platform and from controversy.

But within six months she attended the National Women's Rights Convention, where she made the closing address:

The wisest of all ages have acknowledged that the most important period in human education is in childhood. This most important part of education is left entirely in the hands of the mother... With an imperfect education... can she impart a spirit of independence in her sons?... The mother must possess these high and noble qualities, or she never can impart them to her offspring.

In 1860 New York State passed a law that granted women nearly everything for which they had petitioned. It recognized the right of a married woman to be sole owner of any property she had inherited prior to or during marriage; it gave women power to make investments, sign contracts, sue or be sued, and to have equal control over her children. In New York she could do almost anything - except vote.

Rose appeared in Albany, New York at the State Women's Rights Convention in early February 1861, the last convention to be held until after of the Civil War. On May 14, 1863, she shared the podium with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone and Antoinette Blackwell when the first Women's National Loyal League met to call for equal rights for women, and to support the government in the Civil War, "in so far as it makes a war for freedom."

Rose became an American citizen in 1869, and was in attendance at the Equal Rights Association meeting in which there was a schism and on May 15, 1869, she joined with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone to form a new organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association, taking a position on the executive committee.

Ernestine Rose had remained in poor health for a number of years. On June 8, 1869, suffering from severe neuralgia and rheumatic pain, she retired to England. Her farewell party in America was arranged by Susan B. Anthony. Rose and her husband both received gifts, including a substantial sum of money collected from colleagues and admirers, since the couple was then in reduced circumstances.

By 1873 Rose's health did improve and she began again to take part in the causes of freethought and Women's Suffrage in England, attending a Conference of the Woman's Suffrage movement in London, reported in the National Reformer. She was a speaker in Edinburgh, Scotland, on January 27, 1873, at a large public meeting in favor of Woman's Suffrage and later spoke at the Universal Peace Society.

Ernestine Rose was described by her compatriots as beautiful, even in old age. She was of medium height, matronly form, thoroughly feminine, soft curls - iron gray in color - fair, pale cheeks, beautiful eyes, a slight lisp, and a foreign accent.

William Rose died in 1882, after which Ernestine seldom left her London flat.

Ernestine Rose died at Brighton, England, on August 4, 1892, at age eighty-two and was buried beside her husand.

SOURCES
Ernestine Rose
Wikipedia: Ernestine Rose
Ernestine Rose: A Troublesome Female