Rose Pastor Stokes

Rose Harriet Pastor Stokes (née Wieslander; July 18, 1879 – June 20, 1933) was an American socialist activist, writer, birth control advocate, and feminist. She was a figure of some public notoriety after her 1905 marriage to Episcopal millionaire J. G. Phelps Stokes, a member of elite New York society, who supported the settlements in New York. Together they joined the Socialist Party. Pastor Stokes continued to be active in labor politics and women's issues, including promoting access to birth control, which was highly controversial at the time.

In 1919, Pastor Stokes was a founding member of the Communist Party of America and helped develop it into the 1930s. In addition to her writing on politics, she wrote poetry and plays; one was produced in 1916 by the Washington Square Players. She started her autobiography in 1924 but had not completed it at her death; it was published in 1992.

Rose Harriet Wieslander was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in a tiny shtetl, Augustava Suvolk, in the Russian Empire (present-day Poland) on July 18, 1879, the daughter of Jacob and Hindl (later known as Anna) Wieslander. Her mother had loved a Catholic man, but her father refused to allow her to marry him. After Rose's parents separated, her father went to America. In 1882 when the girl was three, her mother emigrated with the family to London. There Anna married Israel Pastor, who gave his surname to Rose. They had six children together. The family lived in the East End, a neighborhood of poor immigrants. Rose Pastor attended classes for a time at the Bell Lane Free School. Israel Zangwill was once a pupil there and later an instructor.

In 1891, when Pastor was twelve, her family emigrated to Cleveland, Ohio. In 1892 she took a job in a Cleveland cigar factory, where she worked as a cigar maker for the next eleven years. According to a 1910 New York Times article, her stepfather was reported as having died a few years after the family arrived in Cleveland, and Pastor helped support her six siblings and mother. A 21st-century source says that he suffered depression and alcoholism, and abandoned the family after his struggle to support them.

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