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Women Without Superstition



Women Without Superstition:
No Gods—No Masters!
The Collected Writings of Women Freethinkers of the 19th and 20th Centuries
Edited by Annie Laurie Gaylor
Freedom From Religion Foundation, 1997
Hd. 696 pp. 51 photos, indexed. $25.00

Reviewed by Sharon Presley

Knowing that The Truth Seeker was preparing to publish its 125th anniversary edition, I did some thinking about the history of freethought.  I’ve always been interested in the history and traditions of ideas that I like, as well as the writers who expound them. But time and time again, the women writers and activists have been ignored or slighted in historical accounts and anthologies. Though Men Against the State by James J. Martin, for example, is an excellent account of American individualist anarchism of the 19th century, its title tells the tale. Unfortunately, current freethought movement writers, with scattered exceptions (mostly women!) have been just as guilty of this kind of oversight. The anthology, Freethought on the American Frontier, published by Prometheus Press, for example, only includes one woman.

Yet historical accounts of the 19th century as well as observation of contemporary times makes it clear that women freethought writers have had and continue to have a great deal of influence. Many freethought writers of the 19th century, including the women, were on lecture circuits—the cable TV/PBS/Discovery Channel of the day—that pulled huge crowds. Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman, for example, were enormously popular speakers who offered arguments that were as lucid, logical and eloquent as any man on the circuit.

So I was delighted when I learned that Annie Laurie Gaylor was putting together an anthology of women freethought writers—and what an anthology it is! It contains 64 essays, which are mostly out of print or not easily accessible, by 51 women, including anarchists Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre, social reformers Margaret Sanger and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, women’s rights advocates Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Harriet Martineau, novelist George Sand (Marian Evans), contemporary feminist writers Katha Pollitt and Barbara Ehrenreich, contemporary freethought activists Anne Nichol Gaylor, Queen Silver and Meg Bowman, former Mormon Sonia Johnson, and Ayn Rand-influenced novelist Kay Nolte Smith. Are many of these names familiar? Yes, I thought you would recognize them. Does anyone have any doubt that these were and are influential people? Where have their contributions to freethought been hiding? Wherever it was, they are hiding no longer, thanks to Gaylor.

The  commentaries that accompany the articles are a rich source of information about the freethought movement and women’s role in it. The Truth Seeker, which was one of the most important vehicles for freethought expression in the 19th century, is liberally cited. Like the other freethought journals and the anarchist ones as well, it was an important forum for women to write not only about religion but women’s role in society.  The radical analyses offered by these women have unfortunately been ignored not just by contemporary freethought writers but feminist scholars too, another reason to be grateful for what this volume reveals.

Gaylor includes four selections from The Truth Seeker. What breathtakingly radical writers these women were!