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.
