Fire and Grace: The Life of Rose Pastor Stokes

Recounts the life of the American poet, and traces her involvement in the socialist movement

Once as notorious as Emma Goldman or Margaret Sanger, socialist-feminist Stokes (1879-1933) is now a footnote in most histories. A Russian-Polish Jewish immigrant who spent 12 years working in Cleveland cigar factories, Rose Pastor married New York banker James Stokes in 1905. A year or so later, they joined Eugene Debs's Socialist Party. Though often dismissed as a "millionaire socialist," Rose Stokes, as limned in this vivid biography by two veterans of the socialist movement, played a prominent role in hard-fought labor struggles and in the battles for birth control and women's suffrage. She was also a playwright and poet, a founder of the U.S. Communist Party, a brief devotee of mystic Kahlil Gibran. Her conviction under the 1917 Espionage Act for anti-war speeches, followed by her stormy divorce and riches-to-rags remarriage at age 47 to 29-year-old communist intellectual Jerome Romain added dramatic twists to her unconventional life. Photos.
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