From the best-selling author of King
Leopold's Ghost and Spain
in Our Hearts comes the astonishing but forgotten story of
an immigrant sweatshop worker who married an heir to a great American
fortune and became one of the most charismatic radical leaders of her
time.
Rose Pastor arrived
in New York City in 1903, a Jewish refugee from Russia who had worked
in cigar factories since the age of eleven. Two years later, she
captured headlines across the globe when she married James Graham
Phelps Stokes, scion of one of the legendary 400 families of New York
high society.
Together, this
unusual couple joined the burgeoning Socialist Party and, over the
next dozen years, moved among the liveliest group of activists and
dreamers this country has ever seen. Their friends and houseguests
included Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene V. Debs, John Reed,
Margaret Sanger, Jack London, and W.E.B. Du Bois.
Rose stirred
audiences to tears and led strikes of restaurant waiters and garment
workers. She campaigned alongside the country's earliest feminists to
publicly defy laws against distributing information about birth
control, earning her notoriety as "one of the dangerous
influences of the country" from President Woodrow Wilson. But in
a way no one foresaw, her too-short life would end in the same abject
poverty with which it began.
By a master of
narrative nonfiction, Rebel Cinderella unearths the rich,
overlooked life of a social justice campaigner who was truly ahead of
her time.