Heroines of freethought with Annie Laurie Gaylor & Nan Sloane

Welcome to Unholy History, the Humanist Heritage Podcast brought to you by Humanist UK. I'm Andrew Coxon, Chief Executive of Humanist UK, and I'm Madeline Goodall, Head of the Humanist Heritage Project. We're the hosts of this new podcast series where we will be speaking with experts about Britain's humanist history, 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, and if their stories have often been overlooked. The title of this episode, heroines of free thought, was from the 1876 collection written by Cumbria Bourne writer Sarah Underwood, who was celebrating 11 women who defied religious and social convention from Mary Walstoncraft and George Elliott to Ernestine Rose in Emma Martin. 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 chance 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 History, the new podcast series from Humanist 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. Nance 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, organised 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 Gala 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 Humanist UK, over to you Andrew. Thanks Maddie and welcome Annie Laurie and Nan. As we just heard from Maddie, the herons 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 have been denied them in the humanist tradition. You've both authored books that are not direct anthologies, one case yes, but none there's to 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 to start with you Nan. 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 founder, own vault in the foundation of the Labour Party, which was very definitely not about 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 kind of all being classy bleesitting at home, bending shirts and rearing children, not that rearing children is a placid activity. They must have been involved in all kinds of things and of course as always once you start looking, you start to turn people up. Some of whom are actually moderately well known, some of whom are completely unknown and some of whom have no names but still deserve a place in the story. As an uncontrollable woman 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. And Annie Laurie, what about your anthology? Why did you, what made you do to put that together? 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 they were 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 I could find writings on their free thought views. And there sent me many more who were fee 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 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 apiastoric, gnostic or simply unaffiliated people who were criticizing women who were criticizing the legend and many of them from a feminist point of view. 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? 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 structures 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 and their religious point of view so but there's also philosophical, it's the range of philosophical ideas. And then the women in your book are not of course just fighting for a sex equality or a folk focusing on religion and power as it affects just women there. 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. Yes because most of the book covers the first half of the 19th century although like Annie included Mary Walsdencraft but also the French revolution because obviously there are women like Alampt de Gauche 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 early 20th century campaign for the vote or women who in the [BLANK_AUDIO] 1820s were specifically fighting for pre-thought that all of them were kicking against the very narrow expectations of not just what women would think, but how would they would 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 opinion that the woman holds, but by the method by which she has arrived at that opinion. And that runs through all of the 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. So that was my Mary Walsh don't craft her, it's the two women like rational creatures. All I'm thinking about both, actually Emma Martin, who Annie Laurie mentioned, and then also on the back of what Nance Lone was talking about Susanna Wright, and the two, near two of the women that have most captivated me when I've been looking at these subjects and 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 Juties, and what's really interesting about that is that she's absolutely, she's doing all of the things that you're both saying where she's taking this argument against the Bible, against the strictures in place on women by the Bible. But what she's arguing for is for people to take things into their own hands, men and women, for people who are oppressed, the 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's the idea of both what women were expected to do, 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 Nance spoken about her in very inspiring ways as well. And then somebody like Susanna Wright, Nottingham Bourne, 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 both really important 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 talked about Emma Martin a little bit, talked about Susanna Wright 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 favourites for one of a better word, maybe Annie. Yes, I definitely, I guess, I have a lot of favourites, but I think the earliest ones were so brave, and I would start with Francis Wright, who was a Scottish aress, who came over to North America and turned into the first woman lecturer to address what they called promiscuous crowds, men in women together, which was a verboten, no, no. 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 to 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 Alrose, 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 it 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. 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 woman's property act was adopted in the United States. So that was another first, these women stick out my mind, and then of course Elizabeth Kaye Stanton, who was the first woman, as far as I know, it's certainly 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 Senate 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 woman'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 Elrose lectured on atheism, and she did a famous lecture in 1816, a defensive atheism in which she said every child is born in atheists. They were very fierce critics of religion. There are also really good examples, both Ernestine Rose and Frances White, definitely of transatlantic and international element to lots of these women too. Both of them had careers and lives and were active in both, so in Frances White'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 it's quite fitting actually to have a transatlantic panel for this podcast to think about that, and it's kind of amazing that they were traveling quite so much and having these impacts on multiple countries in some cases. And I was reading in the worst biographies about Frances White and Ernestine Elrose and here 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 gallant and they did these amazing things, so you know, very admirable. And as you said, sometimes at the expense of their reputation, of their friendships, of their allies, you know, some they were in many cases, especially the more extreme and 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, you know, would turn people against the cause and would make people less likely to respect them, which is a game a team that runs through so many of these women, doesn't it? I do have to say Susan B. Anthony Abley defended her and they also went on an abolition tour and Ernestine Elrose was barred from lecturing in the US Capitol. And they were vilified, especially by the male clergy and their publications and called all kinds of names. Ernestine, our Francis Wright was, the lupch was harlot. That kind of thing, 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 she Python of the temple or she champion of impiety or Python S of the temple, these names that were just designed to incur this absolute horror of the women and they're kind of don't know the trail of femininity, I suppose. On that subject, Nann, not of course. Yes, the women that I would have a particular aberration for are Jane and Mary Ann Carlisle, who nobody is ever. heard of, except through Jane's husband Richard Kala, who is of course a great hero, etc., though not to me, because he ran a radical bookshop in London, and he had a cat and mouse running battle with both the state and the, an organisation called the Vice Society, 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 newspapers 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 Kala, of banned the women from speaking, because he was busy writing and publishing and had important thoughts to think. And he did not want worse. 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 Kala 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 or rest of it, got them out. And 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 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, the treatment they had in prison was so bad that if she wasn't 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 obediently worthy of husband this was some blasphemy was somehow something apart. And yet she persisted with it in the end. She didn't give her, she wasn't proud beaten by him, she refused his authority ultimately in the same way that they were all refusing the authority and the stakes tell them what to think. And so I know nobody else is ever going to see her as the sort of heroin a free thought because she didn't come to it through an intellectual position or thinking through she came to it through the experience of a working cast 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 up both of her life but also of her position on all the issues she'd had to grapple with at various points. I'm not a huge fan of Richard Carlisle, I'm not a great fan of Eliza Sharples either ifs and truths went over. He was also of course left penniless in the end. 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. 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 but 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 as 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. Absolutely. So just thinking I suppose partly and it's interesting you mentioned someone like Eliza Sharples making these kind of later interventions and then going back down in 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 kind of other things that they were doing these wider causes that were involved and there is obviously often interplay with the suffrage movements and things like that but they were doing other things too. Other 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? 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 Katie Stanton convened the Seneca Falls Convention. She was at a 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 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, it's 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 Martin O 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 oppressed it's probably worth saying actually singers were talking about abolition and abolitionists that were talking about the abolition of slavery I know that again that might be an assumption that were making that people would know but actually it was a cause that people and Harriet Martin O is a personal favourite of mine as well really did take up right about and that did very much linking with there as you say their free thought their ideas on oppression on fairness 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 nonfiction poetry even religious works and they sold very well because otherwise they wouldn't have been published they publishes in those days when they were altruistic then they are now some of them much better than the men the 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 the 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 it was all to scot did it, or was it 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 had 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 Brontis into the 19th century Anne Brontis, 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 Brontis 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 Brontis died very young was the first of the three to die. And the Tenant of Wildfell Hall was not reprinted until much later and then caveated. And so I think 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, they were all lesser Jane Austen in one way or another, is that we then cease 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 sometimes much more starting to their own age than it now seems to ours. And I think that is a really valuable point as well in terms of thinking about again coming back to that why these women were so 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 examples proved they were so much the victims of that extreme backlash once they did. They seem to be doing something, writing something, saying something that was a betrayal of them as women, a betrayal of women as a whole in the sense of what they were saying about whether it was the kind of biblical patriarchy or religion itself. And again to return to those some of those names they got given and the horrified responses and the press people I can imagine I think it always strikes me that sometimes she would be written about in the press especially before she became an overnight 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 equality 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 they weren't writing they didn't have a voice and then they did it's much more complex than that. So they were often like silenced and concealed in other ways I remember you telling me madder about how in so many of the obituries of the women who were involved in free thought were humanist organizations in the 19th or 20th century. Then when they were when their obituries 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 child and it her action might have given 20 or 30 years of voluntary organizing labor to humanist or ethical organizations completely silenced even in death so it just seemed to be a deliberate attempt to suppress and silence the radical views of women in particular because they didn't put that in the obitures of men you know when we're all to snarl died is 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. So similar kind of silencing and similar kind of removal as a man of saying of their agency isn't it that I did that they did hold these views or arrive at these views themselves and act on them. I think it's useful to look at the 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 women 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 opened up things started opening up after that generation but when Elizabeth Katie 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 ponds of the day they were really legally classed with idiots they if they were that 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 freethenking 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 Katie Stanton promoted divorce reform which was considered so shocking to many of her colleagues in marriage reform and the right to personal autonomy which was studying 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. 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 legislation which specifically for bad 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 whoever managed their property to use the vote on their behalf because elections were so apart from the else extremely rowdy usually full of people who were drunk whilst voting and not at all like in actions nowadays. They had the vote and the 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 dairy. 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 a new jersey where women were able to vote and were then deprived of it. 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 but at the first state that legalized the right to vote in state elections was Wyoming. I mean in the 1890s I think the first country was New Zealand. Yes. In the 1890s. 90s. But it did vary and women were successful in some cases in doing more local voting. But not at the federal level. 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 freedom. So we divorced law is an obvious one. As we were saying, we're also the right to control our reproductive freedoms. But they were also foundational to the humanist movement full stop. My first predecessors, Chief Executive of Humanity in 1896, was a woman. I think I'm when they have these gatherings of UK religion and belief leaders, I always say to them, I'm definitely the only one who was first a predecessor was a woman, not the religions ever were. And a very amazing woman, who's one of my favorites is her own of balance, a great suffer just as more information about her on the human should K page. So I mean, these women, they have blazed a trail, but they've cast her along, she had an influence over so many progressive causes as well, haven't they? The right to vote. That was Elizabeth Kaye 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 jaring at them and booing them. In some cases, they would turn the lights off. They were really hounded and they were very brave. 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 a market-sanger who actually commissioned the first pill, who trounced Comstock in the Supreme Court in the 1930s, finally. So they were the people who were free from religion. They weren't bound by these doctrines of women's subservience and they were the ones who were campaigning for all of these freedoms. And of course, in many other aspects too, but for women especially, we owe them a huge debt. And not just doctrines of subservience, either ideas about what was proper or moral or 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 is an amazing humanist legacy. Yeah, even dress reform, which of course is a big issue now in the Islamist world, but 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 at. We who wear slacks and could be comfortable are all indebted to those early activists. In the UK, we had the rational dress society, which is a huge sum through that in the 19th century, which is a perfect example of this. I think it's also worth remembering sometimes that some of the people that is quite shocking to find some of the people who oppose 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 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 exacricable 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 larger than a lot 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, 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 lead contraception. And so they felt it was handing over to men a power over their bodies that they didn't want to do and there would not be anything done about the very high levels of infant mortality. And it was only as new ideas about women's body and the 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 from clergy and churches. But why at the end do we think that these women are so little known today outside of the Georgia Litz or 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? I guess I would say that a lot of it was sexism. At some of it was that the whole free thought movements could get erased. In his day, Robert Ingersong 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 walked with men, Mark Twain, or rapsodized 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 Besent and Elizabeth Gidey Stan. You might get some token coverage, but some of it they just became, they disappeared. Like I said, it was very hard when I was researching women without superstition back in 1994, 1995 to find so much stuff. 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 Payne. He's our forgotten founder in the United States and I'm on a committee to try to get him a moral to human DC. And there have been many attempts in the past. 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's that kind of thing. It's partly free thought gets wiped out and partly the sexism within these movements. I 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 and 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 get the state to allow humanist marriages. And yet we 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 as 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 organising a society of framing the way in which society expresses it so. Well said Nan and 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 more than 20 states where abortion is basically banned now or almost unavailable and the new abolition movement is anti-abortionist who want to ban off-worms 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 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 the 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 condition 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 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 the and think how 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 there's even a very powerful minister who's set up a new church in DC that are 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 be lost it isn't in this an amendment in her constitution but it shows you how extreme this movement is and how much as NAN said it is really important to remember that these battles have been fought in some cases one 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 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 uncruvable afterlife we should be worrying about leaving our plan and our descendants secure and pleasant future and this is just our constant refrain and another refrain especially among the feminist re-thinkers is that they believe that salvation was found in the freeing of women that equality was going to save the human race as we come to the end of the episode we'd love you to tell people where if they would like to they can find out more about your work what you've written what you're doing now so if we start with you and then working people find out more on my website which is www.namcelom.com through my books which obviously I've written about the women I've talked about and the various activities that I have I've also got a biography of Margaret Bulkfield 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 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 should we say 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 their women covered in that book they can also check out YouTube and find you the Annie Laurie I'm definitely going to order uncontrollable women I haven't read that yet it sounds wonderful and then 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 at the frf.org and there is a shop link that lists books that we carry including some of the books that FFRAF has published and including women without superstition and there is a digital version available brilliant thank you both so much this has been fascinating at times depressing uplifting inspiring motivating like all good conversations 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 Maddie and Andrew cheers thank you for listening to Unholy History as 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 Humanists UK this podcast was produced by Humanize Live find out more about creating content for compassionate communities at www.humanized.live and you can find out more about the rich history and influence of humanism on the Humanist Heritage website at heratage.humus.uk