Elizabeth Gurley Flynn on Rose Pastor Stokes

“J. G. Phelps Stokes, recently married to Rose Pastor, a beautiful and talented working woman from the East Side of New York. There had been much publicity about this romantic marriage of a well-to-do Christian settlement worker and a Jewish cigarmaker, and quite a furor in orthodox Jewish circles.”

“We were horrified, too, at the conditions we had never met in our travels elsewhere the prevalence of pests in the old slum houses, mice, rats, cockroaches and bedbugs. My poor mother carried on a desperate struggle to rid us of these parasites. And then something horrible happened to us in school-pediculosis is the scientific term; "lousy" the children called it. One child can infect a whole classroom, as every teacher knows. Yet often you will hear a smug prosperous person say: "Well, at least the poor can keep clean." I remember my friend, Rose Pastor Stokes, answering a woman who said this: "Did your mother ever look at a nickel in her hand and decide between a loaf of bread and a cake of soap? Well, mine did!"”