Rose Pastor Stokes (1879–1933)

Rose Pastor Stokes, née Wieslander, was born to a Jewish family in Augustów, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. Her parents separated shortly after her birth, and at age three, she moved to London with her mother. Living in the slums of the East End, she had to leave school at age eight to work. In 1890, her mother remarried to Israel Pastor, who took the family to the USA. They settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where Rose worked in a cigar factory. After her stepfather abandoned the family, she was the sole support of her mother and five half-siblings. Despite these hardships, Rose persisted in her love of reading and won a spot as a regular contributor to the Yidishes Tageblat (Jewish Daily News). Her column became so popular, the paper offered her a full-time position as a reporter in New York City. She settled on the Lower East Side in January 1903. In 1905, her unlikely marriage to J.G. (James Graham) Phelps Stokes, an Episcopalian millionaire philanthropist and member of elite New York society whom she met at the University Settlement, caused a sensation. The following year, they both joined the Socialist Party. Rose and her husband also became members of a national network of political thinkers, journalists, and activists. Their friends and house guests included Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene V. Debs, John Reed, Margaret Sanger, Jack London, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Rose was active in the labor union movement and women's rights movement, including promoting access to birth control. In 1919, she became a founding member of the Communist Party of America, which she helped develop into the 1930s. Rose's anti-war activism resulted in her arrest on 1918 in Kansas City, Missouri on the charge of violating the Espionage Act. She was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, but successfully appealed and was released in March 1920. Her marriage ended in divorce in 1925, and Rose remarried to Jerome Isaac Romain, a fellow immigrant from Poland and a Communist Party theorist. In addition to her numerous writings on politics, she also wrote poetry and plays. such as Shall the Parents Decide? (1916), with Alice Blache, and The Woman Who Wouldn’t (1916). Rose started writing her autobiography in 1924 but had not completed it at the time of her death; it was published in 1992 as "I Belong to the Working Class": The Unfinished Autobiography of Rose Pastor Stokes, edited by Herbert Shapiro and David L. Sterling.