Rose Pastor Stokes (c. 1910, Library of Congress 
Eugene V. Debs, Max Eastman and Rose Pastor Stokes, 1918 (Library of Congress) Born: July 18, 1879
Died: June 20, 1933
Married: J. Graham Phelps Stokes
Birch Island dining room 1906. Mr. Stokes, Carol, Anson, Rose, Graham, S.B. Thorne, Mildred, Mrs. Stokes, John, Ethel, Harold, Helen, Carrie, Newton, Edith. Stokes Records, vol III, after p. 128 Rose Pastor Stokes was a Jewish-American socialist activist, writer, birth control advocate, and feminist who was a founding member of the Communist Party of America in 1919. From age thirteen, she worked in a cigar factory; for a time, she was the sole support for a family of six. Her marriage to millionaire socialist J. Graham Phelps Stokes was front page news.
She was born Raisel Harriet Wieslander into a poor Orthodox Jewish family in Augustów, then part of the Russian Empire (present-day Poland) on July 18, 1879. When she was three, she and her mother moved to England to escape the anti-jewish pogroms then sweeping Russia. There they lived with her uncle's family in the slums of London's east end. At some point in this period, Rose acquired a year and a half of school, her only education. But in that time she learned to read and acquired a love of poetry. After living with other relatives for six years, Rose's mother married Israel Pastor, who soon lost what little money he had, and decided to go to Brazil to earn money. When that didn't work out, he moved to America, where he was eventually able to send for Rose and her mother.
The family wound up in Cleveland, Ohio, and Rose, 11, took a job in a cigar factory, where she worked as a cigar maker for the next eleven years. Pastor helped support her six siblings and mother. She submitted some stories to the New York based Jewish Daily News, the nation's oldest Yiddish newspaper and was invited to send more. This led to her being offered a job as a reporter in the city. She was 23.
She lived at first with the family of her employer in the extremely crowded Lower East Side. After six months, she was able to rent a small apartment so that she could bring her mother and four siblings to New York; two children were left behind in an orphanage. In 1903, she met J. Graham Phelps Stokes when the paper asked her to interview him. He, like a number of offspring of wealthy families, had become interested in social justice, and had joined the University Settlement house in the Lower East Side. Over the next two years they grew fond of one another, and in 1905, they were married, over the objections of his socially prominent family. The press was delighted, not only over the difference in wealth, but especially by the marriage of a high Episcopalian with a Jew. The marriage was front page news, and the couple remained newsworthy for the next twenty years. Rose handled the publicity gracefully.
In September 1905, together with Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Clarence Darrow, and Florence Kelley, Graham Phelps Stokes helped found the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS) to encourage study and discussion of socialism in colleges. Over the next decade, both Graham and Rose lectured frequently on socialist themes on behalf of the ISS on US college campuses. Rose proved to be a very compelling speaker.
In 1906, Graham's mother gave the couple a three-acre island off of the coast of Connecticut, on Long Island Sound. Graham built a house there and two couples they had become close to at Settlement House built houses as well. They also joined the socialist party
In Progress
Sources:
Jewish Women's Archive: Rose Pastor Stokes
