“Infidel,” the “Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter,” and Other Names for a Freethinking Woman

For Women’s History Month, remembering Ernestine Rose

It’s not that my mom shoved religion at me. It was more like food left out on the counter—there if you wanted it. We went to church every Sunday, but she didn’t care at all what I believed. I trotted home books from the library on every faith tradition I could find. She didn’t care. So long as I was reading, I wasn’t doing drugs or getting pregnant. Occasionally, on our way out the door to church, my father would say to put in a good word for him, and it always felt like a needless extra chore. Couldn’t he just do that himself from the living room?

Still, mystery and meaning mattered deeply to me, and as a small kid, God was where I could find those things. I have childhood memories of prayer, but mostly, I wanted answers. I’d dig around in my Bible or find my breath catch as I read some scrap in Krishnamurti or Love Signs or Jung—I was a very shy kid with an overly developed appreciation for synchronicity—and wondered if I’d uncovered some truth about the universe.

Those memories now leave me considering how common the impulse toward religion is for children, and what sorts of kids have it and which don’t. How much of it for me was the product of environment versus natural curiosity?

And what happens when people have childhood faith and then, lose it?

As Women’s History Month winds down, I want to turn to a woman with opinions on this front, and someone whose self-actualization makes me feel a step closer to an answer.

Ernestine L. Rose has been called America’s first women’s rights canvasser and was one of the nineteenth century’s most outspoken atheists. She once wrote, “all children are Atheists, and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so.” I’d venture that whatever lens we use to evaluate our childhood religious instincts comes bent by our adult perceptions and all the hope and hurt that shaped us along the way.

Rose was born the only child of an orthodox rabbi in Piotrkow, Poland’s Jewish ghetto. As the legend goes, Rose rejected faith simply as a young woman after she was rebuked by her father for combing her hair on the Sabbath. She left the room for a few minutes to consult the divine, and returned to announce “I asked God if it was a sin and He didn’t say anything.” By fourteen Rose rejected the Bible and Judaism and became an apostate.

Tales of Rose’s early life—and they are rich with drama, if not a certain outsized fictionalization by either Rose or her admirers—often forget the years of questioning that began at age five, the years of argument with her father and his response as she questioned his religious proofs: “a young girl does not want to understand the object of her creed, but to accept and believe it.” 

Consistent within her story is a theological upbringing that diminished women. Her mother died when she was a teenager, and her father betrothed young Rose against her will to a man she had no interest in marrying. Rose fought the issue in court and won. But when Rose left home at 17 (after her dad married a girl younger than she), her father kept Rose’s inheritance. Later, as the stories go, when Rose found herself hindered by anti-Semitic laws in Berlin, she challenged them with a direct appeal to its Prussian king and was granted an exemption. As biographer Carol A. Kolmerton notes, Rose likely even chose the name we know her by today (she was surely named something else by Jewish parents in Poland in 1810). But whether Rose embellished her grandiose personal narrative or even made up parts, writes Kolmerton “the very tales she invented, coupled with the fact that she must have named herself, suggest a power not available to or used by many women in the early nineteenth century.”  

In later life Rose would go on to travel the American South speaking against slavery and was the first to petition for the Married Women’s Property Act of New York, a watershed for the women’s suffrage movement. She was president of the National Women’s Rights Convention, despite protests against her due to her atheism. She drew rowdy bands of affronted seminary students.

She’s likely among the less commemorated figures in the suffrage movement due to her controversial lack of faith. She boldly spoke at what at the time were called Bible Conventions, describing how women had been “enslaved” by the Bible and suggested “churches have been built upon your subjugated necks.” While Bonnie S. Anderson, in The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter notes it was common for freethinkers to debate the veracity of the Bible with believers at these Bible Conventions, it was a rare sight to see a woman freethinker do so. Being a female atheist made Rose a blasphemer, an infidel—and certainly her Jewish heritage also provoked prejudice from many of her contemporaneous reformers.

Before an appearance in Bangor, a clergyman once wrote in a local paper that there was “no object more deserving of contempt, loathing, and abhorrence than a female Atheist… We hold the vilest strumpet from the stews to be by comparison respectable.”

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I remember years back, I got it in my head that I’d better understand my own crisis of faith by interviewing as many women atheists as I could. I spoke to an anthropology professor raised Jewish in the forties and fifties in an overwhelmingly Catholic town. One year, Easter and Passover overlapped, and all the kids were given little chocolate Easter bunnies.

She was only allowed special chocolate without leavening during Passover.

She’d been having doubts for a long time.