“Just Between Ourselves, Girls”: Rose Pastor Stokes and the American Yiddish Press
By Ayelet Brinn
A photo of Rose Pastor Stokes from her time working at the Jewish Daily Forward with an article announcing her new column there in 1907
In 1918, socialist agitator and women’s rights activist Rose Pastor Stokes (1879-1933) was tried and convicted of espionage after making public comments criticizing America’s involvement in World War I. After an anti-war speech in Kansas City, Stokes had published a letter in the Kansas City Star criticizing the American government for aligning with war profiteers to the detriment of the American people: “No government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people, while the government is for the profiteers.”[1]
Stokes, however, did not begin her writing career as a radical. In fact, she got her start over a decade prior as a writer for the Orthodox, politically moderate Yiddish daily newspaper Dos yidishes tageblat, also called the Jewish Daily News—a fact that would become salient in the news coverage surrounding Pastor’s 1918 trial. During the proceedings, Pastor mistakenly stated, or newspapers mistakenly reported, that she had moved to New York fifteen years prior to becoming the editor of the Jewish Daily News. Worried about how Pastor’s notoriety and radical activism might reflect on their paper, the publishers of the Jewish Daily News felt compelled to distance themselves from Pastor, and sent a press release to the national English-language press: “The Jewish Daily News, of New York, deems it necessary to correct a statement made by Mrs. Rose Pastor Stokes to the effect that she was a one-time editor of that paper.” The editors asserted that, while she had worked for the paper, she was not an editor, but instead “a contributor to the girls’ page only.” In reporting this mistake, the Christian Science Monitor sympathetically (and somewhat condescendingly) noted that it was likely not Stokes’s intention to lie about her position. “It is quite a common thing for those who contribute to a department of a newspaper to mistake themselves for editors.”[2]
But in their rebuttal, the Jewish Daily News’s editors also missed the mark. Pastor had not, in fact, worked on “the girls’ page” during her tenure at the paper. The newspaper did not introduce a women’s page until over a decade after Pastor ceased working there. Instead, she worked in various capacities for the paper’s English Department, penning women’s columns, short stories, interviews, poems, and human interest stories anonymously, under pseudonyms, and under her own name, as well as serving as a secretary and assistant editor.
Though the Jewish Daily News’s statement represented an effort to minimize Pastor’s connection to the paper, likely because of her radical political agitation, it also reflected the paper’s female- and youth-centric approach to English content at the turn of the twentieth century. The Jewish Daily News—the first Yiddish daily in America to last more than a handful of issues—introduced an English Department in 1897, twelve years into its existence, in order to draw in a younger audience more in touch with English-language culture than the readers of their Yiddish-language pages, especially young women. In order to attract these readers, the newspaper filled its English Department with features taken from, or in the style of, the American popular press, and hired young writers to produce original content. Well before women writers were regularly featured on the paper’s Yiddish pages, there was a cohort of young women, including Pastor, working mainly as writers and secretaries for the paper’s English Department.
Pastor’s work for the Yiddish press shaped her early experiences of life in New York—introducing her to new acquaintances, institutions, political ideologies, and experiences, as well as cultivating her talents as a writer, educator, and public figure. And through her articles, Pastor also shaped the experiences and world-views of the readers who looked to her columns as sources of advice, information, and entertainment. Writing for an audience mainly consisting of the children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, or Eastern European Jews who had immigrated themselves at a young age, Pastor and her colleagues used columns to steer readers towards institutions on the Lower East Side that would guide their acclimation process to American life and to offer explicit and implicit advice on how young, American Jews should comport themselves. Through the process of advising young, Jewish women about how to navigate American life, the factory worker turned journalist developed her own political ideas—a process which often caused her to butt heads with the conservative editors for whom she worked. Therefore Pastor’s early life and career reflect the important role of Yiddish newspapers in shaping and curating the understanding and experience of New York not only for those who read them but for those who wrote for and edited them as well.
Rose Pastor Stokes, then called Rose Harriet Pastor, first began writing for the Jewish Daily News in 1901 at the age of twenty-two, after responding to a write-in contest asking readers to send the newspaper short essays describing their reading habits and daily lives. In her letter, Pastor recounted the monotony of her routine as a factory worker in Cleveland, Ohio. Having immigrated with her family to Ohio from Eastern Europe (via London) in 1890, Pastor often worked double shifts at local factories to help support her family. According to her autobiography, the paper’s editors were so taken with her response that they asked her to begin writing regularly for the publication: “I received a long missive in the editor’s own hand urging me to tell him more of myself, of the shop, of my life at home. I wrote again and he replied—inviting me, this time to contribute; preferably talks to the girls. The invitation pleased and excited me. Was I not a ‘confidential advisor’ to dozens of my shopmates? Ready for the ‘call,’ I acted without delay, and wrote my first talk that night.”[3] After almost two years of writing freelance for the paper on-and-off—while continuing to work double shifts at various Cleveland factories—the paper’s English editor, A.H. Fromenson, invited Pastor to move to New York and begin writing for the paper full time. Shortly thereafter, she left Ohio and moved to New York’s Lower East Side—then a center of Jewish immigrant life and culture in the United States and the home of the majority of major Yiddish publications, including the Jewish Daily News.
In her autobiography, Pastor described her first year living in New York and working at the Jewish Daily News as the “process of breaking me in.” From Fromenson and other colleagues, Pastor gained “practical newspaper and editorial training,” learning how to write articles, conduct interviews, respond to reader letters, and find “suitable materials” from other publications to include on the English page. She contributed a variety of kinds of writing to the publication, including a women’s column called “Just Between Ourselves, Girls” and a column of aphorisms called “Ethics of the Dustpan.” In addition, she often wrote the Department’s human-interest-focused “Observer” column and, on occasion, also contributed anonymous editorials when Fromenson was out of town.
Through her work at the paper, Pastor was also exposed to new facets of life in New York. She learned about the complicated, often corrupt machinations of New York politics by watching notable figures from the Lower East Side, as well as Democratic and Republican politicians, come to the Jewish Daily News office to consult or attempt to curry the favor of the paper’s influential editor, Kasriel Sarasohn. Through reporting assignments, and through friendships with her co-workers at the Daily News, Pastor also became acquainted with various settlement houses and other institutions on the Lower East Side, including the Educational Alliance and University Settlement. She would eventually begin teaching classes at these institutions as well as helping other young immigrant women acclimate to life in the United States through conducting reading groups and classes focused on home economics.
It was also through reporting on these local institutions for the newspaper that Pastor met her future husband, J.G. Phelps Stokes—a prominent, wealthy philanthropist and activist. Pastor and Stokes first met when Pastor was assigned to conduct a series of interviews with local figures associated with settlement houses, including Stokes. While Pastor was initially unsure about conducting this interview, worrying that her editors wouldn’t allow her enough free reign to conduct and write about these encounters as she saw fit, this initial meeting ultimately culminated in an inter-class, interfaith romance that would captivate the nation.[4]
Looking back on this period of her life, Pastor viewed her time working at the Jewish Daily News as one marked by both freedom and constraint. Though Pastor initially expected that moving to New York would be an emancipatory experience, she soon wondered whether the relentless pace of journalism was really any better than factory work. In order to make sure the paper had enough content, writers and editors like Pastor felt compelled to produce as much material as possible, publishing under their names and pseudonyms so it appeared as if the paper pulled from a broad pool of writers. While this allowed Pastor to practice different journalistic styles, it could also be incredibly taxing, especially as Pastor did not always feel like editors allowed her sufficient control over what or how she wrote. Not only was she asked to contribute articles on so-called “women’s” topics including “personal relationships; problems of the home” under her own name—topics she did not always feel passionate about—but her other duties consumed her life in ways she found overwhelming. “The paper is a devil-fish,” she wrote in her autobiography, “I feel its tentacles about me, no time to read, no time to think, no more books. I am sucked up into a maw hungrier than that of the factory.”[5]
This duality was also reflected in the type of advice she gave to her readers, especially in her longest-running advice column, “Just Between Ourselves, Girls.” Though Pastor would eventually become known as an outspoken radical activist and champion for birth control and women’s rights, in these early columns, Pastor often steered readers in more conservative, religious directions. Pastor’s columns admonished readers for not being kinder to their mothers, wearing ostentatious clothing, or reading cheap fiction. To make these arguments, Pastor often invoked religious examples, such as using the biblical story of Joseph as a morality tale about the dangers of gaudy fashion. Pastor sometimes featured letters from male readers as well, one of whom praised her for this conservative, religiously-tinged advice: “I follow your discourses under the title ‘Just Between Ourselves, Girls,’ and I think they are to the young generation what the ’toitch khumesh’ [a religious text in Yiddish specifically aimed at female readers, usually transliterated as Taytsh-khumesh] was to their mothers. You teach them to be good and ‘frum’ [religiously observant].”[6]
The type of advice doled out in these columns is not surprising given the Jewish Daily News’s desire to keep young readers connected to religious observance and communal concerns. But Pastor’s early advice diverged greatly from the views she espoused in her subsequent career as a socialist and later a communist agitator. In their biography of Pastor, Arthur and Pearl Zipser highlighted one column from 1903 as particularly incongruent with Pastor’s own life, wherein she counseled a reader against marrying a non-Jewish beau. Pastor argued that the fact that this girl had written in for advice demonstrated that she knew that marrying her beau was a bad idea. “It is because you know it would be wrong to marry him—it is because you are not so absolutely sure it is nice to marry a Christian… that is why you write and ask for advice.”[7] Only two years later, Pastor made national headlines by marrying the wealthy (and non-Jewish) Stokes, following a very different path than the counsel she provided to her readers.
Looking back on this period of her life, Pastor blamed her lack of experience and political awareness, and the coerciveness of Fromenson’s guidance, in leading her to espouse a traditional, religious view of Jewish womanhood in her columns for the Jewish Daily News: “Not being politically awake, I was unaware of being guided. I took every suggestion gratefully and in good faith. Reading back, I find my material dominated by the traditional viewpoint.”[8]
Nevertheless, as she found herself drawn to radical political causes, Pastor also found ways to infuse some of these ideas into her writing as well as into the classes she taught at settlement houses on the Lower East Side. In one poem she published in the paper, for example, Pastor pointed out to readers that those with wealth often gained their riches by exploiting the labor of others. According to Pastor, she was able to publish poems like this because editors did not always pay close attention to what she wrote: “Such deviations usually slipped through … only because of the carelessness on the part of the responsible editors.”[9] Though editors trained Pastor to infuse her writing with conservative messages, they did not always make sure she followed through. According to historian Alice Fahs, less rigorous attention to women’s writing was also a relatively common practice in the American popular press. Anglophone editors saw women’s features as important in attracting advertisers and readers, but not as important content in itself. As a result, “Editorial inattention allowed these women limited freedom. They often ‘flew beneath the radar’ in writing for the woman’s page precisely because in editorial terms it was the least important section of the newspaper.”[10]
Similarly, while progressive reformers often used educational endeavors in turn-of-the-twentieth-century settlement houses to inculcate middle-class norms about gender roles, cleanliness, and good citizenship in new immigrants, Pastor also found ways to infuse the classes she taught at the Educational Alliance with lessons about socialist ideology and working-class consciousness. Therefore the advice and guidance she provided to readers and students on-and-off the page consisted of a fusion between the messages espoused by the institutions she worked for and her own changing ideas about politics and immigrant life in the United States.[11]
A section of Rose Pastor Stokes’ initial write-in column to the Jewish Daily News that led her to be hired on the paper's staff
Pastor’s tenure at the Daily News lasted from 1901 to 1905. She resigned from her position on the staff shortly before marrying Stokes. For the first few years of her marriage, however, Rose continued her intermittent association with the Yiddish press, briefly writing an advice column for the successful socialist daily the Jewish Daily Forward. Unlike her previous advice column, this one was published in Yiddish, was aimed at both male and female readers, and espoused an overtly socialist perspective.[12] Though her professional relationship to Yiddish journalism lasted less than a decade, during that time she performed a variety of roles for two of the United States’ most prominent Yiddish publications and wrote hundreds of articles that shaped readers’ understandings of American life and their place within it. Though the Jewish Daily News later attempted to minimize Pastor’s role, during the years she wrote for the paper readers considered her the publication’s “best English writer” and one of the major reasons to read the paper’s English Department. According to Yosef Chaikin, a Yiddish-language journalist and early chronicler of the history of the Yiddish Press, the paper’s publishers worried so much about Pastor’s notoriety and strong association with their English Department that they decided to discontinue the Department soon after her departure, afraid that her decision to marry a non-Jewish man might serve as a source of inspiration for readers.[13] I found no other evidence corroborating Chaikin’s story, but this rumor suggests, if nothing else, the impact that Pastor’s short-lived career had on the development of the newspaper and its readers even after her departure.
Stories like Pastor’s highlight the important contribution of female journalists to the development of the Yiddish press, as well as the complicated relationship many female journalists had with these publications. While Pastor’s editors at the Jewish Daily News consistently underplayed the importance of her work, both during and after her tenure at the paper, they also relied heavily on her writing in order to appeal to the young readers they hoped to draw to the paper. And while Pastor resented the parameters placed on her while she was working at the paper, she also gained valuable skills, experiences, and life-long friendships from her time there, and over time found ways to infuse her writing with her own political subjectivity. Because she achieved prominence in her later life, Pastor left behind first-hand accounts and archival resources that allow us to better understand the experiences of women working for the American Yiddish press at the turn of the twentieth century—many whose lives and experiences would have otherwise been lost to history.
Ayelet Brinn is the Rabin-Shvidler Joint Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Fordham University and Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. She is currently working on a book manuscript about the central role of gender politics in the development of the American Yiddish press.
[1] “Letter to the Editor,” Kansas City Star (Kansas City, MO), March 20, 1918.
[2] “Notes and Comments,” Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA), June 1, 1918. For Stokes’s response, see “Letters,” (Boston, MA), June 22, 1918; See also Stokes, Rose Pastor To [Mr. & Mrs. Abraham H. Sarasohn], May 28, 191Abraham H. Sarasohn Papers. Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia University.
[3] Rose Pastor Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class: The Unfinished Autobiography of Rose Pastor Stokes, eds. Herbert Shapiro and David L. Sterling (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992), 80.
[4] Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 85-6.
[5] Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 86.
[6] Examples include: Zelda [Pastor] “Just Between Ourselves, Girls,” Jewish Daily News (New York, NY), September 26, 1902; December 14, 1902; April 3, 1903, April 9, 1903; June 19, 1903;
[7] Zelda [Pastor] “Just Between Ourselves, Girls,” Jewish Daily News (New York, NY), August 12, 1903; Arthur Zipser and Pearl Zipser, Fire and Grace: The Life of Rose Pastor Stokes (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 1-3.
[8] Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 86.
[9] Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 86; See also Rose Harriet Pastor, “The Builders,” Jewish Daily News (New York, NY), December 27, 1903 [English Department].
[10] Alice Fahs, Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 65.
[11] Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 91-2.
[12] For the announcement of this new column, see “Der sensayshon fun di englishe tsaytungn [The Sensation of the English Press],” Forward (New York, NY), August 8, 1907, she continued serving as an occasional advice columnist for the paper into 1908.
[13] Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike [Yiddish Papers in America] ([New York]: M. Shklarski, 1946), 320.