Why heroines of freethought matter

Andrew Copson 0:01

Welcome to Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast brought to you by Humanist UK. I'm Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of Humanist UK.

Madeleine Goodall 0:09

And I'm Madeleine Goodall, head of the Humanist Heritage Project.

Andrew Copson 0:13

We're the hosts of this new podcast series where we will be speaking with experts about Britain's humanist history.

Madeleine Goodall 0:18

Uncovering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped both humanist thought and our national life. When many people think of influential figures in humanist history, they think first of well-known men, philosophers, scientists, social reformers, whose names have often been celebrated loudly and widely. But throughout history, women have been leading voices for reason, equality, human progress, even if their stories have too often been overlooked. The title of this episode, Heroines of Freethought, draws from an 1876 collection written by Cumbria-born writer Sarah Underwood, who was celebrating eleven women who defied religious and social convention, from Mary Wollstonecraft and George Eliot to Ernestine Rose and Emma Martin. And she began with the striking line that the word free thinker in times past has implied a censure of the person so designated, and especially if the one chanced to be a woman. So why was it especially scandalous to be a woman free thinker? Who were these women? What were they fighting against and for? And how did their ideas shape the humanist movement that we know today? In this first episode of Unholy Histories, the new podcast series from Humanists UK, we're delighted to be joined by two remarkable free thinkers of the modern day to discuss the impact and legacies of these heroines of free thought. Nan Sloan is a historian, trainer, and author whose books have included Uncontrollable Women, Radicals, Reformers and Revolutionaries, which focused on the women who wrote, spoke, marched, organized, and fought for change between the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832. Annie Laurie Gaylor is the co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, co-host of Free Thought Radio, and author and editor of, amongst other titles, Women Without Superstition, which is a collection of writings by women free thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries. And we're also joined by our co-host, Andrew Copson, the Chief Executive of Humanists UK. Over to you, Andrew.

Andrew Copson 2:38

Thanks, Maddy, and welcome Annie Laureate and Nan. As we just heard from Maddy, the heroines of Free Thought book by Sarah Underwood was a project really to highlight the bravery of those women, but also an anthology to display their prominence, the prominence that had been denied them in the humanist tradition. You've both authored books that are not direct anthologies, or in one case, yes, but nonetheless have brought together characters of many women. I thought we could start with asking the both of you what it was that motivated you towards that, whether it was the same motivations that Sarah Underwood had in her own work or something else. Start with you, Nan.

Nan Sloane 3:12

It's sometimes difficult to pin down exactly what it is that makes you write a particular book or do a particular piece of research. And I had just written a book about women in the found unvolved in the foundation of the Labour Party, which was very definitely not about the suffrage movement, and started from an idea that people actually find quite difficult to accept, which is that during the period of the suffrage campaign, lots of women were actually doing different and sometimes ultimately more important things. And in the course of that, I stumbled across women who had been active in movements before the suffrage movement or in the very early days in the 1860s and 70s. And so that led me into what were women doing? Women can't have all been placidly sitting at home mending shirts and rearing children. Not that rearing children is a placid activity. Some of whom are completely unknown, and some of whom have no names, but still deserve a place in the story. And so uncontrollable women grew out of that feeling that women have always been politically active and not just queens and elite women, but women at every level of society.

Andrew Copson 5:05

And Annie Laurie, what about your anthology? Why did you what motivated you to put that together?

Annie Laurie Gaylor 5:11

I wrote, I edited and compiled Women Without Superstition for the reason the same reason that many people research and write books. There wasn't a book like it. It was the kind of book I wanted. And for years I had been hearing about all of these famous women free thinkers, but they were footnotes in other histories. Almost all of the histories out there of free thought would mention them in passing, but there was so little information. I also realized that many of the women, the leading women feminists, both in the UK and the United States, tended to be free thinkers. So I was reading little fascinating bits about their free thought views in some of the feminist histories, but nothing was putting them all together. So I decided to research this, and this was almost 30 years ago. I did not have the advantage of the more mature internet. I was mostly going into dusty corridors and historical societies. I was relying on borrowing things from around the world, which I did not always get. I'd like to revisit some of the people in the book that I couldn't even find photographs of, like Emma Martin. I don't know if any of you know whether this famous British pamphleteer, I wasn't able to get a photograph of her for the book. So I wrote bios on them and we ran photos of them, and then I would do snippets or excerpts of their writings. So in order to be included in this book, and there were 50 women from the 19th and 20th centuries, and also Mary Wollstonecraft from the 18th century, they were all somebody that we that I could find writings on their free thought views. And there certainly were many more who were free thinkers, and I did include a compendium of them at the end, including Sarah Underwood, whose book I did have, but there was so little to biographical information about her that I could find at the time. And most of the women in her book I ended up including in women without superstition, but not all of them. For example, Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, didn't have writings on free thought. I was looking for the writings on Women Without Superstition is the name of the book. No gods, no masters is the subtitle. So it was concentrating on these atheist or agnostic or simply unaffiliated people who were criticizing religion, women who were criticizing religion, and many of them from a feminist point of view.

What women wrote about religion

Andrew Copson 7:52

So we're going to come on to some of the specific women I know in a moment, but in general, what were the women writing about? Were they always writing about free thought as it affected specifically women? Or were they writing for a more general audience? Who were they writing for and what were they writing about to the extent that you can summarize a big theme like that in the abstract?

Annie Laurie Gaylor 8:12

Aaron Powell Well, the women wrote about a diversity of things, but I think most of them did look into the treatment of religion toward women. Many of them, I think, became free thinkers because of that, or else they became public figures criticizing religion or advocating for women's rights simply because they were free thinkers. They were not bound by the biblical strictures that said women be in silence. Women be subservient. They were rebels, they were heretics. I think that did permeate their writings, but I did tend to research many of the feminists on their religious point of view. So but we are there's also philosophical, it's the range of philosophical ideas.

Andrew Copson 8:57

And Nan, the women in your book are not, of course, just fighting for sex equality or focusing on religion and power as it affects just women. There you you chose to look at women who were all striving to create better lives, better worlds for everybody. But still as a part of their free thought.

Nan Sloane 9:15

Yes, and because uh most of the book covers the first half of the 19th century, although, like Annie, uh including Mary Wollstonecroft, but also the French Revolution, because obviously there are women like Alain de Gouge in there, but also the women of the mob who are largely nameless, but who had an absolutely critical influence. And it is quite striking that whether it's the French Revolution or the campaign, the early 20th century, early 19th century campaign for the vote, or women who in the 1820s were specifically fighting for free thought, that all of them were kicking against the very narrow expectations of not just what women would think, but how would they arrive at that thought so that they would not think independently, they would think as their father's thought or as their husband's thought. And very often the outrage doesn't spring from the from the opinion that the woman holds, but by the method by which she has arrived at that opinion. And that runs through all of them. Most of the women that I wrote about were working class women, so they were not engaged at elite levels where sometimes there was a bit more leeway, but they were expected just not to think at all.

Annie Laurie Gaylor 10:56

So that was why Mary Wallstonecraft said, treat women like rational creatures.

Andrew Copson 11:01

Maddy, I know you're an expert yourself on women, so I know you you want to get into the details on these amazing women, so I'm gonna, you know, I can sense that you're you're ready.

Madeleine Goodall 11:10

Well, I'm thinking about both actually Emma Martin, who Annie Laurie mentioned, and then also on the back of what Nan Sloan was talking about, about Susanna Wright. And the the two, they're two of the women that have most captivated me when I've been looking at these subjects in in the writings of these women. I think I was just reading something by Emma Martin, an amazing lecture she did at the Hall of Science in 1843 in Manchester, called God's Gifts and Man's Duties. And what's really interesting about that is that she's absolutely doing all of the things that you're you're both saying, where she's taking this argument against the Bible, against the strictures emplaced on women by the Bible. But what she's arguing for is for people to take things into their own hands, um, men and women, for people who are oppressed, for people who don't have enough, for people who are suffering from lack of distribution and lack of fairness in terms of food and all of that kind of thing, and to start questioning for themselves and to kick back against that. So that idea of both what women were expected to do, uh, how they thought about what their role was, and then also those wider concerns, I think, are really encapsulated by Emma Martin and I love her, and Nan's spoken about her and in in very inspiring ways as well. And then somebody like Susanna Wright, Nottingham-born lace worker who fought for freedom of the press and for the rights of people to discuss religion in order to get to the truth as freely as they could. And those are both really important kind of causes over history. So that is what I've been thinking about as you've both been talking. But I would love to hear. So we've we've talked about Emma Martin a little bit, talked about Susanna Wright

Transatlantic trailblazers of freethought

Madeleine Goodall 13:00

a little bit. I'd love to hear from both of you, I suppose, whether there are some other figures that you would consider maybe personal heroines of Free Thought or particular favorites for want of a better word. Maybe Annie?

Annie Laurie Gaylor 13:15

Yes, I definitely, I guess I have a lot of favorites, but I think the earliest ones were so brave. And I would start with Frances Wright, who is a Scottish heiress, who came over to North America and turned into the first woman lecturer to address what they called promiscuous crowds, men and women together, which was a verbotent no-no because of the Bible. And she was in the Ohio area and happened to see a bunch of evangelists holding salvation tent revivals. And she was so dismayed by how they were manipulating women and how they were treating women as people who should never be educated. And so she went on a lecture tour and shocked the country going around talking about don't listen to these clergy and think for yourself. And she urged that we should turn our churches into halls of science, where and some of them did, as Emma Martin later was able to do. And she also said, fill the vacuum of your mind. Don't fill it with junk. And so she was so brave, and she was a first. And then there was Ernestine L. Rose, another immigrant, who was the daughter of a rabbi in Poland who lived, you know, she was kind of like in a wall behind a wall as a young woman. And she liked to tell the story of how she was about five and she was brushing her hair, which was very curly and tangled, and her rabbi father came in and said, Ernestine, drop that comb at once. You're committing a sin against God. It was the Sabbath. And she left the room and came back a minute later and told her father, I asked God if it was a sin, and he didn't say a thing. And she had this amazing journey before she got, she was in England for a while, she was in Germany for a while, and she finally ended up with her husband in New York, just in time to become the first lobbyist for the first bill that had been introduced for women's married property rights in the United States by a free-thinking state legislator in New York. And she knocked on doors for five months and in that time only got five signatures. But that was 1836, and she didn't give up, and she started a movement in 1848. The first Married Women's Property Act was adopted in the United States. So that was another first. And these women stick out in my mind. And then, of course, Elizabeth K. Stanton, who was the first woman, as far as I know, it's certainly in North America, to call for the woman's right to vote. And when she suggested that before the famous first woman's rights convention in 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention, her friends all told her, no, you mustn't do that. You must, that's too radical. But she persisted. And of course, that started the whole suffrage movement in the United States. And she became ever more fiercely critical of religion to the point where she edited the woman's Bible in the 1890s and then was repudiated by the women's movement that she had basically started because that was too radical. And she wrote immensely on many issues that were not collected together on religion. And I have a 75-page section just on her. And of course, they're more famous, but their writings were not available. Ernestine L. Rose lectured on atheism. She did a famous lecture in 1860, a defense of atheism, in which she said every child is born an atheist. Very they were very fierce critics of religion.

Madeleine Goodall 17:04

There are also really good examples, both Ernestine Rose and Francis Wright, definitely of that transatlantic and international element to lots of these women too. Both of them had careers and lives and were active in both, you know, in Francis Wright's case in Scotland and then in America and Ernestine Rose in lots of different places, starting with Poland, and she died in Brighton. And so I think there's it's quite fitting actually to have a transatlantic panel for this podcast to think about that, that they were, and it's kind of amazing that they were traveling quite so much and and having these impacts on, you know, multiple countries in some cases.

Annie Laurie Gaylor 17:47

And I was reading, and there were some biographies about Francis Wright and Ernestine El Rose, and there have been more since then. You can't make this stuff up. If you were to write a fictional book about women in the 19th century describing what they did, you go, oh come on. This is like science fiction. They were so courageous and so uh gallant, and they did these amazing things. So um, you know, very admirable.

Madeleine Goodall 18:15

And as you said, sometimes at the expense of their reputation, of their friendships, of their allies, um, you know, some they were in many cases, especially the more extreme end, really repudiated, like you say, by the people that were notionally on their side or at least on their side in some things. I mean, it was Ernestine Rose, wasn't it, that people, some fellow suffragists wouldn't share a platform with her because they thought that her atheism was uh, you know, would turn people against the cause and would make people less likely to respect them, which is again a theme that runs through so many of these women, doesn't it?

Annie Laurie Gaylor 18:50

I do have to say Susan B. Anthony ably defended her. And they also went on an abolition tour, and Ernestine Ellrose was barred from lecturing in the U.S. Capitol. So they were vilified, especially by the male clergy and their publications and called all kinds of names. Ernestine or Francis Wright was voluptuous harlot, that kind of thing.

Madeleine Goodall 19:16

It was they put up a lot of abuse. That's something I noted down actually before before this, the kinds of names that they were given in the press and the she python of the temple or or she champion of impiety or pythoness of the temple, these names that were just designed to incur this absolute horror of the women and their kind of don't know, betrayal of femininity, I suppose. Um on that subject, uh Nan.

The Carlyles and blasphemy prosecutions

Madeleine Goodall 19:44

Uh not of course as uh as yes.

Nan Sloane 19:48

The women that I would uh have a particular admiration for are Jane and Marianne Carlyle, who nobody has ever heard of, except through Jane's husband, Richard Carlyle, who is of course a great hero, etc. etc. Though not to me, because he ran a radical bookshop in London, and he had a cat and mouse running battle with the both the state and the an organization called the Vice Society, uh, which was for the suppression of vice, but the main vice they wanted to suppress was any kind of independent or irreligious thought. And he eventually was arrested, tried for blasphemy, and imprisoned, but also had a huge fine imposed. And he was a fairly stubborn individual, and he went off to prison with all these books and his papers and continued to write and to publish from prison. And his wife Jane, who also had several children to look after, took over the bookshop and was then herself arrested and prosecuted. And then his sister Mary Ann took the bookshop over and in turn was arrested and prosecuted. And they all three ended up in one cell in prison, which cannot have been pleasant, particularly since Richard Carlyle banned the women from speaking because he was busy writing and publishing and had important thoughts to think, and he did not want worse. Uh Jane was pregnant within weeks of arriving in said prison cell. And so they also had a baby and then a toddler in the prison cell with them, and the conditions were not good. And because Richard Carlisle couldn't pay the fine, he was not released at the end of his term. Jane also had a huge fine, which she couldn't pay. She was not released at the end of her term. And this went on until eventually they public opinion and all the rest of it got them out. And the in Mary Ann promptly went off and got married and said, I'm not having anything else to do with that. I've done my bit. But Jane became quite independent-minded. Obviously, after all that, Richard abandoned her for a younger woman, to be precise, for Eliza Sharples. Yes. And she then opened her own bookshop round the corner from his, took half his stock as settlement of the uh separation, and just set up in competition with him. And the thing about her, I always think is she didn't ask to be in any of it. And she said at one point, if the treatment they had in prison was so bad that if she wasn't a free thinker in the beginning, she certainly was by the end. She wasn't there by choice, she was dragged in it because she owed a debt of obedience to her husband. When she argued that in court it was disregarded because however obedient you were to your husband, this was some blasphemy was somehow something apart. And yet she persisted with it in the end. She didn't give up, she wasn't browbeaten by him, she refused his authority ultimately in the same way that they were all refusing the authority of the state to tell them what to think. And so I know nobody else is ever going to see her as the sort of heroine of free thought because she didn't come to it through an intellectual position or a thinking through. She came to it through the experience of a working class woman who just got dragged into something by virtue of being married to what was an extraordinary man and ultimately sticking with it and making something of both of her life but also of her position on all the issues she'd had to grapple with at various points. Yeah. I I'm not a huge fan of Richard Carlyle, not a great fan of Eliza Sharples either, if the truth were known.

Madeleine Goodall 24:47

She tried to make a living through her radical coffee house with room for discussion, but the mind how she just wasn't very good at coffee and running a business in spite of her best hopes.

Nan Sloane 25:01

She's an interesting woman, and in later on, in the run-up to the 1832 Reform Act, she very publicly attacked Queen Adelaide over all the issues around reform, both political and spiritual, and then went very quiet again. You had to be an interesting woman, really, to survive the sort of thing you were likely to come up against us. And he says the outrage and the the way in which women were treated for having an opinion of any kind was just you had to be resilient.

Madeleine Goodall 25:38

Absolutely.

The women speaking up on abolition

Madeleine Goodall 25:40

So just thinking, I suppose partly, and it's interesting you mentioned someone like Adiza Sharples making these kind of later interventions and then going back down. And Annie Laurie, you mentioned it a bit earlier when you talked about Ernestine Rose and the efforts for abolition as well. I think that's an interesting thing too about the the kind of other things that that they were doing, these wider causes they were involved in. There is obviously often interplay with the suffrage movements and things like that, but they were doing other things too. Are there people, and maybe again Annie Laurie start with you or return to you, are there kind of other things that they were involved in, efforts that they were working on that have drawn your interest or admiration?

Annie Laurie Gaylor 26:29

Yes, many of them had very wide-ranging progressive views. But there was a connection between abolition and the US suffrage movement, which was that it was their treatment as activists, as women activists, as women abolitionists, that really was why Elizabeth Cady Stanton convened the Seneca Falls Convention. She was at an abolition movement in London on her honeymoon with her husband, where the women had to be behind a curtain in the balcony and couldn't be heard. And she got together with some other women at that time, and that gradually led to that first famous women's rights convention. But this was their routine experience. And there were other people, some of the Quaker activists ran into this too, that there were free thinkers and atheists, but there were also simply iconoclastic women who didn't fit in with their religion who were also part of this movement. And they were all being silenced because the Bible says you have to be. You are to be subservient and in subjection to your husband. And this was literally what they were hearing. And this was literally why you couldn't speak in public. And you it was really shocking if you were a writer, certainly a writer on nonfiction. And even Jane Austen had such a difficult time as an early pioneer fiction writer. This was all new stuff. Harriet Martineau, I would mention too, as a UK writer and sociologist. They wanted to shut women up. And so that was really the suffrage movement experience was what led them to realize they were oppressed too, and who was oppressing them.

Madeleine Goodall 28:19

It's probably worth saying, actually, seeing as we're talking about abolition and abolitionists that were talking about the abolition of slavery. I know that, again, that might be an assumption that we're making that people would know, but actually it was a a cause that people, and Harriet Martin is a personal favourite of mine as well, really did take up, write about, and that did very much link in with their, as you say, their free thought, their ideas on oppression, on fairness.

How voices were suppressed but not silenced

Nan Sloane 28:46

If I can just interject slightly, I think we need to be slightly careful about assuming that women were silent or even were encouraged to be silent. If you look at the period when Mary Wollstonecraft was writing, so the last couple of decades of the 18th century, there were 800 women publishing in London. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, even religious works. And they sold very well because otherwise they wouldn't have been published. The publishers in those days were no more altruistic than they are now. Some of them much better than the men. Yes, indeed. Some of them were hugely famous in their time, much less so now. And when you read some of their novels there, you can see why the ones that have survived. But I think it's also true that most of them understood the parameters within which they were expected to write and stuck to them. So certain types of poetry, certain types of novels, you know, domestic novels or gothic novels and that kind of thing. And they were widely read, but the expectation of them was that they wouldn't cross boundaries into topics that were unsuitable for women. And the women who did found themselves very quickly the subject of either scandals or a lot of comment. Lots of men as well as women used pseudonyms and pen names because Walter Scott did it, who was the most famous author of that period, did it all the time because he got two hits at the publicity. He got the publication of the book, and then he got the reveal of who the book was really by. And so we just have to be slightly careful about assuming that women didn't have a voice, didn't use it. They were restricted in how they used it. One of the most famous at the time books and most scandalous books was Anne Bronte's into the 19th century, Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which doesn't strike us as scandalous at all now, but which at the time was because the wife closed the bedroom door on the husband, and that was considered so appalling. People wrote about it as the slamming of that bedroom door echoed around Europe because women suddenly thought, I can say no. But also Charlotte Bronte thought it was so appalling and so far beyond what she was prepared, the confines within which she was prepared to write, that she refused to allow it to be reprinted during her lifetime. And Anne Bronte died very young, was the first of the three to die. And The Ten to Wild Fir Hall was not reprinted until much later, and then caveated. And so I think we women were writing, they were saying things, they were doing things, but as soon as they strayed beyond what were considered the correct and acceptable territories, then they found themselves in difficulties. One of the problems with accepting the narrative of women didn't write and use pen names and so on all the time. In other words, they were all lesser Jane Austen's in one way or another, is that we then ceased to hear their voices. And so because we don't hear their voices, we assume they never existed. And they did. And what they said was some sometimes much more startling to their own age than it now seems to ours.

Madeleine Goodall 32:45

And but I think that is a it's a really valuable point as well, in terms of thinking about, again, coming back to that, why these women were so uh or shocked so much, the societies that they were writing in or speaking in, when they did, as you say, stray beyond the bounds of what was seen to be acceptable. And I think those free-thinking women, atheist women who were challenging religion and challenging Christianity, were, as all of these uh examples prove, they were so much the victims of that extreme backlash once they did be seen to be doing something, writing something, saying something that was uh a betrayal of them as women, a betrayal of women as a whole, um, in the sense of what they were saying about whether it was the kind of biblical patriarchy or or religion itself. And yeah, again, to return to those some of those names they got given and the the horrified responses in the press, people like Emma Martin, I think it always strikes me that sometimes she would be written about in the press, especially before she became an Owenite lecturer, and when she was still lecturing within the confines of her religious faith, and she was really admired by the people that wrote about her as being so good. And then a bit later on, when she started lecturing about these things that were awful, the reorganization of society and the inequality of men and women and the fact that the Bible maybe had some inconsistencies in it, everybody was horrified and the press were wishing that she was putting her skills to better use because she was such a good speaker, and it was just a shame that she was choosing these subjects to do it about. So I think that's it's all part of the I guess the complexity of this history, isn't it? That it's not as simple as just saying that they weren't writing, they didn't have a voice, and then they did. It's much more complex than that.

Andrew Copson 34:42

It seems they were often like silenced and concealed in other ways. I remember you telling me, Maddy, about how, in so many of the obituaries of the women who are involved in free thought or humanist organisations in the 19th or 20th century, that when they were when their obituar were written and published, it would always refer to the religion of their fathers or the religion that they'd been brought up in, like she was the child of a Quaker father or she was the children and it th her action might have given twenty or thirty years of voluntary organizing labour to humanist or ethical organisations or completely silenced even in death. So there does seem to be a a sort of deliberate attempt to suppress and silence the radical views of women in particular, because they didn't put that in the obituary of men. You know, if when Lord Snell died, his participation in humanist groups wasn't written out of the history. So even in death, it seems, as well as in life, they're targeted for this sort of suppression.

Madeleine Goodall 35:37

It's a similar kind of silencing and a similar kind of removal, as man was saying, of their agency, isn't it? That idea that they did hold these views or arrive at these views uh themselves and act on them.

Law reform and votes taken away

Annie Laurie Gaylor 35:50

I think it's useful to uh look at that big picture of women's legal rights in the 19th century, which was the backdrop where these women were working or agitating or advocating, because at least in the United States, and I think this must have been true in the UK, they were classed with children really when the early women's movement started in the United States. Women didn't have the right to custody of their own children, they didn't have the right to control their own money. There was only one university in the, I think it started in the 1840s, where women could go to college. That that opened up. Things started opening up after that generation. But when Elizabeth Cady Stanton was young, she couldn't go to college, for example. You couldn't serve on juries, you couldn't sue or be sued, much less vote. It was in the parlance of the day, they were really legally classed with idiots. If they were the they were the daughters of their fathers, and then they were married to men who controlled things. So when they were, everything they did, it was in that backdrop. And of course, if they came from wealth, that was helpful, but they were really fighting so much. And when you asked, were there other reforms that these free-thinking women were working on, so many because of this. And as the movements grew stronger and women had more rights, they were writing for the rights of to control your own body. The early contraceptive movement was almost exclusively from the free thought movement. They were writing about prostitution. Elizabeth Cady Stanton promoted divorce reform, which was considered so shocking to many of her colleagues, and marriage reform and the right to personal autonomy, which was setting the scene for the birth control movement and ultimately abortion movements of the last century. So they were really involved in so many reforms, especially about women.

Nan Sloane 37:54

And in a sense, there were points in British history where women actually went backwards. So the 1832 Reform Act was the first piece of the legislation which specifically forbade women to vote. And women prior to that had the right to vote if they met property qualifications. And they very rarely used it. They usually either gave their vote to their husbands, or if they were single women, got their steward or their factor or their whoever managed their property to use the vote on their behalf because elections were so, apart from the house, extremely rowdy, usually full of people who were drunk whilst voting, and not at all like elections nowadays, but they had the vote, and there were cases of women who had voted in person. And 1832 put a stop to that. Women were literally married for their votes. The women who were going to inherit votes, it was part of their marriage, part of their dowry. So in 1832, that went backwards. That's what made the the suffrage movement necessary in this country, because if that hadn't happened, we would have been in a different legal position, and the fight for the vote would have remained based more around class than anything else because of the property qualification. Whereas I think in the States the property qualification went quite early. It was in New Jersey where women were able to vote and were then deprived of it.

Annie Laurie Gaylor 39:35

There were some women who were successful in voting in local elections, and women who did vote, but then the vote was disqualified, and that included people like Susan B. Anthony. Way into the 1880s and 90s, it that the first state that legalized the right to vote in state elections was Wyoming. That was thinking in the 1890s. I think the first country was New Zealand. Yes. In the 1890s. But in it it did vary, and women were successful in some cases in doing more local voting. But not at the federal level.

Lasting legacies from dress to divorce

Andrew Copson 40:10

We've already started to touch on it, but what was one of the things we could think about was the long-term impact of these women. We've already heard how, like a lot of other humanists, these women were also active in some of the causes which have been foundational for our modern freedoms. I mean, divorce law is an obvious one, as we were saying, but also the right to control our own reproductive freedoms. But they were also foundational to the humanist movement full stop. My first predecessor as chief executive of Human Shouke in 1896 was a woman. I think I'm more whenever whenever they have these gatherings of UK religion and belief leaders, I always say to them, I'm definitely the only one whose first uh predecessor was a woman, none of the religions ever were. And a very amazing woman who's one of my favourites, is Ona Valence, a great suffragist. There's more information about her on the Human Shake page. So I mean, these women, they have blazed a trail, but they've cast a long shadow of influence over so many progressive causes as well, haven't they?

Annie Laurie Gaylor 41:06

The right to vote. That was Elizabeth G. Stanton and the early women who were willing to brave the wrath of the religions condemning them. She wrote the Bible was hurled at us from every side. And some of their meetings would be closed by conferences of male clergy hounding them and jeering at them and booing them. In some cases, they would turn the lights off. They were really hounded and they were very brave. And without those women willing to challenge religion, who knows how long it would have taken for someone to suggest that women got the right to vote and to work for it. I mean, that's just a very basic right that we are indebted to, these early free-thinking feminist women in the United States. And the same goes for birth control, abortion. So many of these people were hounded, some of them to death, by Anthony Comstock, who was our U.S. Answer to the Vice squad, I guess you had there in Great Britain. They were the ones who pioneered it. And Market Sanger, who actually commissioned the first pill, who traunced Comstock in the Supreme Court in the 1930s, finally.

Madeleine Goodall 42:47

And not just doctrines of subservience, either ideas about what was proper or moral or, you know, all of those things. I think that has so much to do with ideas around divorce, law reform, contraception, abortion, all of these things where religious privilege was really guiding how laws were made and how these ideas or progressive ideas were resisted. So it took people who were questioning the basis of those ideas and the ideas about what was, as I say, correct or proper or moral or immoral to really challenge them, which I think it is an amazing humanist legacy.

Annie Laurie Gaylor 43:30

Yeah. Even dress reform, which of course is a big issue now in the Islamist world, but you know, we can wear pants. This was against, this was an abomination according to the Bible. And many of the early women experimenting with the pantaloons were reviled. If they weren't free thinkers, they were still being reviled because this was an abomination. And this is something that we are all we who wear slacks and can be comfortable are all indebted. To those early activists.

Andrew Copson 44:02

In the UK, we had the Rational Dress Society, which was in the 19th century, which is a perfect example of this.

Nan Sloane 44:10

I think it's also worth remembering sometimes that some of the people that that it's quite shocking to find some of the people who opposed women and women's movements. And the one I always that always comes to mind is the Vice Society, which was founded and funded by William Wilberforce, who in a in another context is heroic, but in this context is anything but and that people are more complicated and complex than we sometimes give them credit for, and that the fact that people like Wilberforce had a felt a religious duty to do what we would clearly all agree was absolutely the right thing in one direction, found himself propelled by the same religious duty to something we think is execrable in another direction. And the same is true of humanists and of everybody else. People are heroic in some directions and not in others. And I think one of the things that marks out some of the women is that they were more complicated than we sometimes think. So if you take birth control, working class women in this country were very much opposed to birth control for a very long time because they thought that if they were not having large numbers of children, many of whom died, there would be no impetus to improve the quality of care that would be available to them and that they would uh men would be able to limit their families, women would have still have no say over it, because at that time they were not talking about female-led contraception. And so they they felt it was handing over to men a power over their bodies that they didn't want to do, and that there would not be anything done about the very high levels of infant mortality, and it was only as new ideas about women's bodily autonomy and as people as there was became a possibility of women controlling contraception started to come in that certainly working class women began to feel this might be something they were prepared to accept. But it's quite shocking when you read the very early responses to birth control campaigns to realise where some of it was coming from, not all of it, of course, and most different most of it from clergy and churches.

Why they were erased

Andrew Copson 46:55

But why at the end do we think that these women are so little known today outside of the George Elliott's, although even she's not known for her worldview or her campaigning necessarily? Why are they little known today and why is it important to remember them now?

Annie Laurie Gaylor 47:14

I guess I would say that a lot of it was sexism. Some of it was that the whole free thought movements could get erased. In his day, Elizabeth Robert Ingersoll was the most famous free thinker in North America. And now it's only the free thinkers and humanists who remember him, but everybody who heard him and many famous people, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, were rhapsodized over him. So it's not just the women who got forgotten, but when the free thinking anthologies were put together, it was only men who were in them. Or maybe there might be a chapter to Annie Bessant and Elizabeth Katie Stanton. You might get some token coverage. But some of it they just became, they disappeared. And like I said, it was very hard when I was researching women without superstition back in 1994, 1995 to find so much stuff. And it was all on microfilm or in books that I couldn't even get loaned. I mean, I think this happens to it's happened to women in other aspects, not just free thought. And they were also very much controversial. Look at Thomas Paine. He's our forgotten founder in the United States, and I'm on a committee to try to get a memorial to him in DC. And there have been many attempts in the past, and um it's a huge uphill battle. And he is increasingly forgotten by people in the United States. He wrote The Age of Reason, and that was like that, I think he got wiped out of history. President Teddy Roosevelt called him a dirty little atheist. You know, it was it's that kind of thing. It's partly free thought gets wiped out and partly the sexism within these movements.

Nan Sloane 49:05

I

Ongoing struggles for rights

Nan Sloane 49:06

think that's very true. I think the other thing is that because we live in what remain officially very religious societies, the history that doesn't fall within a religious framework is parked somewhere else. And however small ale liberal we've got in this country, it has never extended to including the idea that the major ceremonial parts of life don't have to be religious, and it's like, you know, how long has it taken to to get the state to allow humanist marriages? And yet it would seem to be something perfectly simple and straightforward in a country where the majority of people do not identify as religious, and yet they do expect all the formal occasions of public life to be religious, and they are, and so I think there is a sort of thing about the we remain a profoundly religious society, but oddly hollowed out because only a small proportion of certainly the British population are religious. I do think that is changing and that religion is beginning to occupy a new position in society, but I don't think that includes humanism, it doesn't include atheists, it doesn't include free thinkers, and I think we're going to have some of these fights to have over again, just to stand still where we are now, and having all those people, and in particular all those women who had a double fight to fight, both as free thinkers and as women, as examples of what has happened in the past and how we got to this stage, ought to inspire us, and we ought consciously to use those to try and inspire other people to keep holding to the ground we have achieved and to just not accept that religion is the only way of organizing a society or framing the way in which society expresses itself.

Annie Laurie Gaylor 51:32

Well said, Nan. And the United States is a cautionary tale where we are really fighting Christian nationalism in our federal government and in many states. And I'm sure you all know there's a more than 20 states where abortion is basically banned now or almost unavailable. And the new abolition movement is anti-abortionists who want to ban all forms of abortion, and they are working really hard to do everything they can to ban medication abortion, which is what is making it available, even in the banned states. They know that. And it is the Christian nationalists who are behind this movement to deprive women of reproductive freedom. They also going after contraception. They, of course, are going after not just trans rights, but marriage equality is very much endangered. So we are reliving or having to refight so many of these battles that have already been won. And what it the lesson to be learned is that we have to keep religion out of government or no individual liberties will ever be secure. And that's really why my mother and I started the Freedom from Religion Foundation. We were aware that there should be no religion in our civil laws. And we saw that in the 70s with campaigning for legal abortion at that time, that it could be any other reasons that could have opened our eyes, whether it was science, creationism, and so on, that religion does not belong in government and it will always be impeding human rights and human progress if it is in our government.

Nan Sloane 53:17

I often say to women that every right that her that we have has been granted to us, including the right not to be killed by our husbands, has been granted to us by male legislatures, and what has been granted can always be withdrawn. And up until recent years, people just used to look at me and think, oh, she's over the edge again. And then starting really in Europe with Poland, people have begun to see that actually this is true. And as you say, what's been happening in the United States really re-inforces that almost all of the rights that they're trying to roll back, not all of them, but a great many of the rights that they're trying to roll back are women's rights.

Annie Laurie Gaylor 54:02

There's even a very powerful minister who set up a new church in DC that our Secretary of War now goes to, who has openly called for taking away the vote from women, which is almost unbelievable. But there are increasing calls that women should not have the vote. I don't expect that to be um be lost. It isn't an amendment in our constitution, but it shows you how extreme this movement is.

Madeleine Goodall 54:35

And how much, as Nan said, it is really important to remember that these battles have been fought, in some cases won, but aren't secured without continuing that fight. I think that's a big takeaway from and I guess reason to as again as Nan said to take these women to heart and tell other people about them, share their examples in terms of the all of the things that they did and the fact that yeah, progress is not linear and guaranteed.

Annie Laurie Gaylor 55:09

And I would also add that one of the refrains that I read in so many of the writings of these early women free thinkers is that we I think it was Emma Martin who said we cast our eyes up to the heavens instead of looking at the earth here, instead of working to make this life the best it can. We shouldn't worry about some unknown, unprovable afterlife. We should be worrying about leaving our planet, our descendants a secure and pleasant future. And this is just a constant refrain, and another refrain, especially among the feminist rethinkers, is that they believe that salvation was found in the freeing of women, that equality was going to save the human race.

Where to learn more and support

Madeleine Goodall 55:59

As we come to the end of the episode, we'd love you to tell people where, if they would like to, they could find out more about your work, what you've written, what you're doing now. So if we start with you, Nan, where could people find out more?

Nan Sloane 56:14

On my website, which is www.nan Sloan or one word dot com. Through my books, which obviously have written about the women I've talked about and the various activities that I have. I've also got a biography of Margaret Balkfield, who's the first female cabinet minister out in February, and that's a really good example. She wasn't a free thinker, but there is it is a really good example of a really prominent woman that nobody's ever heard of, because other aspects of her life were unconventional, shall we say.

Madeleine Goodall 56:51

And you have actually spoken for us before, which I believe is on YouTube, about uncontrollable women. So if people would like to hear more about some of the women covered in that book, they can also check out our YouTube and find you there.

Annie Laurie Gaylor 57:06

Annie Laurie? I'm definitely going to order uncontrollable women. I haven't read that yet. It sounds wonderful, man. You can find out more about the Freedom from Religion Foundation or me or the book Women Without Superstition at the Freedom From Religion Foundation's website, which is simply FFRF.org. And there is a shop link that lists books that we carry, including some of the books that FFRF has published, and including Women Without Superstition. And there is a digital version available.

Madeleine Goodall 57:39

Brilliant. Thank you both so much. This has been fascinating, at times depressing, uplifting, inspiring, motivating, like all good conversation should be. So thank you very much, both of you, for joining us. And I hope we really can take these women's legacies and run with them. Thank you. Thank you, Maddy and Andrew.

Andrew Copson 57:58

Cheers. Thank you for listening to Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast, brought to you by Humanist UK. To join, support, or find out more about Humanist UK's campaigns and services, visit humanists.uk or you can follow us on social media at Humanistsuk. This podcast was produced by Humanize Live. Find out more about creating content for compassionate communities at www.humanize.live.

Madeleine Goodall 58:22

And you can find out more about the rich history and influence of humanism on the Humanist Heritage website at heritage.humanist.uk,