Travels in America, 1851-1855

"If I could accomplish something useful for my fellowcreatures, I could gladly go on liv­ing, but if I must remain so powerless, so dependent, so tied downoh, then letme be allowed to die!" So strongly did Rosalie Roos ache for per­sonal independence that she set sail for the New World to escape the stifling caste of womanhood in the Sweden of the 1850s. As her diary and letters make clear, America im­pressed her as a land of contrasts: freedom and slaves, cold and heat, the fastest com­munications and the unendurably slowest, the greatest industry and total apathy. Although she had chafed under the con­straints in Sweden, she found the lack of cer­emony in America more than a little appall­ing: "I can't quite bring myself to accept the customs of American gentlemen: sitting and rocking in their chairs, putting their feet up on chairs, tables, benches, indeed even on window sills, chewing tobacco ceaselessly and then spitting. At dinner Monday there was a Dr. Sloan at the Hammarskolds' from Dallas, a little town three years old with three hundred inhabitants and he stayed the whole afternoon. He took his seat next to Tant on the sofa saving: 'I must sit next to you so I can spit through the window.'" When Roos returned to Sweden she had only scorn for the theories she had heard in South Carolina concerning the positive good of slavery. On several occasions when plead­ing for improved opportunities for Swedish women to obtain higher education she drew analogies between such theories and argu­ments for keeping womenfor their own goodwithin the confines of the home. "As little as the slave owner would want to change places with his slave, just so little are youwilling to change your condition for that of women," she said. Published for the Swedish Pioneer His­torical Society.Roos, Rosalie is the author of 'Travels in America, 1851-1855' with ISBN 9780809310180 and ISBN 080931018X.