The Queen of the Platform: A Novel of Women’s Rights Activist Ernestine Rose by Susan Higginbotham

Buy this book at Amazon or for Kindle or at Bookshop

From the award-winning author of The Stolen Crown and Hanging Mary comes a novel based on the life of the indomitable Ernestine Rose, whose fearless advocacy helped bring about the rights women enjoy today.

Question everything, Ernestine vows while growing up in a Poland ravaged by the Napoleonic wars. Accept nothing blindly.

Rejecting her rabbi father’s religion and an arranged marriage, Ernestine strikes out on her own, arriving in New York in 1836. Distressed by the injustices around her, she takes to the public speaking platform, pressing for the abolition of slavery and for women’s rights alongside activists like Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But at a time when women are expected to confine themselves to the parlor and the hearth—and when an atheist is best advised to say nothing at all—is Ernestine’s adopted country ready to hear her?

Following Ernestine through triumph and heartbreak and across two continents, The Queen of the Platform brings out of history’s shadows a heroine who braved public scorn to fight for the values she held dear.

Year first published: 2024