History of Woman Suffrage, The, Vol. I.
Incsribed to Ernestine Rose
(Anthony, Susan B., co-editor) History of Woman Suffrage. Edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Illustrated with Steel Engravings. In Two Volumes. Vol. 1 1848-1861. New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881.
Large 8vo.; frontispiece portrait of Frances Wright; other illustrations throughout; red cloth stamped in gilt; rubbed and sunned; light wear to extremities. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of the first volume. Though the title page declares this will be a two-volume set, in fact it spawned a four-volume series. (See below for a copy of volume four, covering 1883-1900, inscribed by Anthony to benefactors of the suffrage movement.) This volume was dedicated to the memory of Frances Wright, Lucretia Mott, Harriet Martineau, Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Josephine S. Griffing, Martha C. Wright, Harriot K. Hunt, M.D., Mariana W. Johnson, Alice and Phebe Carey, Ann Preston, M.D., Lydia Mott, Eliza W. Farnham, Lydia F. Fowler, M.D., and Paulina Wright Davis, “whose earnest lives and fearless words, in demanding political rights for women, have been, in the preparation of these pages, a constant inspiration to the editors.”
A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: Ernestine S. Rose from her old friend and coworker Susan B. Anthony/ Rochester N.J. May 20, 1881. With an additional inscription by Rose: and sent with her love to her old and valued friend J. P. Mendum of Boston/ London July 4, 1886. With a handful of faint pencil marks in the margins bracketing occasional text. Rose also took a pencil to the four-page biographical sketch L.E. Barnard devoted to her ( 95-98), blacking out four lines of text on page 96—the italicized words as follows:
This idea of the cruelty of God toward her father had a remarkable influence upon her; and at the age of fourteen she renounced her belief in the Bible and the religion of her father, which brought down upon her great trouble and persecution alike from her own Jewish friends and from Christians…A year afterward her father married again, and through misdirected kindness involved her in a lawsuit, in which she plead her own case and won it; but she left the property with her father, declaring that she cared nothing for it, but only for justice, and that her inheritance might not fall into mercenary hands.
Following the short biography, Rose’s letter responding to Anthony’s request for information is printed; in part:
I have never spoken from notes; and as I did not intend to publish anything about myself, for I had no other ambition except to work for the cause of humanity, irrespective of sex, sect, country, or color, and did not expect that a Susan B. Anthony would wish to do it for me, I made no memorandum of places, dates, or names; and thirty or forty years ago the press was not sufficiently educated in the rights of women, even to notice, much less to report speeches as it does now; and therefore I have not anything to assist me or you. (98-99)
Polish-born Jewish activist Ernestine L. Potoski (1810-1892) was a significant crusader for human rights before her involvement in the woman’s movement, and had several accomplishments on record before she became known for her feminist activities. Today she is best remembered for her collaborations with Anthony, with whom she embarked on a speaking tour in 1854 throughout Washington, Alexandria, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Anthony, with her co-editors, devotes considerably more space to Rose in the chapter entitled “Reminiscences” than is now accorded her in standard references: A precocious girl raised by devout parents—her father was a dedicated orthodox rabbi—Rose left home at the age of seventeen, a year after her mother’s death, and “subsequently traveled in Poland, Russia, the Germanic States, Holland, Belgium, France, and England; during which time she witnessed and took part in some interesting and important affairs.”
While in Berlin she had an intervie
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