America’s Most Unusual Marriage: Adam Hochschild on Rebel Cinderella in conversation with Monika Bauerlein

Trust bestselling author and historian Adam Hochschild to unearth one of history’s forgotten heroines and give her story the page-turning treatment it deserves. Russian immigrant Rose Pastor Stokes spent her first twelve years in America in a sweatshop, only to skyrocket to the upper class when she married an heir to a massive mining and real estate fortune. It’s a classic Cinderella story: that is, if Cinderella converted her prince to socialism, became an antiwar and labor activist, caused a scandal by promoting birth control access, and was dubbed “one of the most dangerous influences of the country” by a sitting President.

This tale of a volatile, bright-burning Gilded Age marriage could only exist in the America of Jay Gatsby, bootleggers, and the Lost Generation: an era of glamour and privation, of big dreams and bigger inequities. An era, as Hochschild reveals, with far more parallels to our own than anything in the Brothers Grimm. Only Hochshild could do justice, in words and images, to a crusader who was far ahead of her own time, but strikingly relevant to ours. Hochschild will be joined by Monika Bauerlein, CEO and award-winning editor of Mother Jones.