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Lucy Colman
Lucy Colman was born in Massachusetts in 1817. Even when a young child, she was appalled by the idea of slavery. The only thing she could imagine that could be worse was burning in a fiery pit in hell. She had experienced the usual religious training of children of the time, and one day asked, “Mother, if god is good, why does he cause little children to be born as slaves?” Her mother told her to read the Bible. Little Lucy dutifully began her reading.
Lucy Colman |
Shortly thereafter, Lucy’s mother died and Lucy went to her aunt’s to be raised. She asked her aunt, “Why does god use such filthy words in the Bible? Why does he make women obey commands that are not natural? What good are such laws?” Her aunt told her, “I don’t know; put away the Bible till you are older; read the psalms and the New Testament.”
When Lucy was only seven, a wave of Calvinistic evangelism swept over the area. Lucy attended the meetings, and was told that some people were predestined to go to heaven, while others were predestined to go to hell. “What is the use of repenting your sins?” Lucy thought, “If it is already decided you will go to heaven or hell no matter what you do?”
Religion was a very puzzling matter to little Lucy. In later years, her questioning resulted in her becoming a confirmed and eminent Atheist, who appeared at Freethought conventions “like a Queen,” as one Freethought editor wrote. 6
Lucy became an abolitionist speaker and traveled from town to town speaking on the subject of slavery. She said that the ministers in each town always caused her the most trouble.
At one time, to discredit her, a minister spread the rumor that he had seen her with an unmarried man under a bedcloth - twice! Lucy forced the minister to appear with her before an audience to explain that she and the unmarried man had been in a wagon on their way to a speech when the minister saw them, and that the “bedcloth,” a hostesses quilt, had been over their legs as a means of keeping off the chill air. The minister then said that he had meant his accusation only as a joke.
At another time, a minister rose after one of Lucy’s speeches to say that Lucy must have weak morals, for she ignored the commands of the bible by uncovering her head and speaking in public. Lucy asked her attacker if he considered himself a good Christian, to which he indignantly replied, “Of course I do. I am a Christian, and I do not wish to be insulted by such a question.”
Lucy replied, “No insult was intended, sir. I knew you were a very ignorant man, but I did suppose you knew something of the Bible laws in reference to your own sex, as you were so familiar with the laws by which I should be governed. You come into a meeting of mine, and insult me with your charges, with your face as smooth as a woman’s; and your Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not mar the corners of thy beard’ - you have cut yours all off.”
When the man vehemently denied any such passage being in the Bible, Lucy opened the book and read the command to the audience, and thus another heckler was silenced.
Lucy went on to fight for women’s rights, free speech and free thoughts.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Born in 1815, young Elizabeth Cady was sent to a girls seminary after graduating from the local school. While she was there, a “hell and damnation” preacher was making the rounds of the area and was invited to speak at the school. Young Elizabeth was innocent and believed what he had to say. Later, she wrote “...we learned the total depravity of human nature, and the sinner’s awful danger of everlasting punishment. This was enlarged upon until the most innocent girl believed herself a monster of iniquity, and felt certain of eternal damnation.” 7
Elizabeth Cady Stanton |
Elizabeth was so terrified by his words, she was physically affected, and began having nightmares. Her condition became so poor that the school sent her home, hoping she might recover there. Her family members were so concerned that they sent her on a trip with her sister and brother-in-law, who talked with her about rationalism until she overcame the damaging words of the preacher.
After she had married, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote of the incident that “my religious superstition gave place to rational ideas based on scientific facts, and in proportion as I looked at everything from a new standpoint, I grew more happy day by day. ... I view it as one of the greatest crimes to shadow the minds of the young with these gloomy superstitions, and with fears of the unknown and the unknowable to poison all their joy in life.” 8 She also said that “Only those who have lived all their lives under the dark clouds of vague, undefined fears can appreciate the joy of a doubting soul suddenly born into the kingdom of reason and free thought. Is the bondage of the priest-ridden less galling than that of the slave, because we do not see the chains, the indelible scars, the festering wounds, the deep degradation of all the powers of the God-like mind?” 9
Elizabeth, of course, would go on to be a leading women’s rights advocate and prominent Freethinker, publishing the extremely controversial book The Woman’s Bible. Her role in history is so dramatic that she cannot go totally unnoticed, but the religionists have done what they could to discredit her and elevate her less vocal Freethinking coworker, Susan B. Anthony.
Marilla Ricker
It must have been a very odd household - one in which the father was a Freethinker and the mother was a devout Free Will Baptist.
Marilla Young was born in 1840, one of five children, and showed her independence at a very young age. She watched her four siblings dress up on Sunday and dutifully follow their mother down the road to church. Marilla refused to go. She chose instead to stay home with her father and work on different chores around the farm.
Marilla Ricker |
When Marila’s mother wanted all the children to kneel and pray at night, Marilla sat bolt upright in her little chair, and with a determined look, said “I will not pray, Hannah” (she called her mother by her first name). Her mother would say to her, “Marilla, you are exactly like your father,” and she would reply, “Yes, Hannah, but you gave me my father and I am entirely satisfied with him.”
Marilla became a teacher at sixteen, while still attending school herself. At that time, it was common practice to have the children read from the Bible each morning, but Marilla had her pupils read from different books. The school committee was upset by this, and came to see her. They told her she must have the children read from the Bible.
In typical “Marila-style,” the next morning she said to her pupils, “We will now read the startling and truthful account of Jonah whilst he was a sojoumer in the sub-marine hotel.” She came very close to losing her position, 10 but in 1861, she graduated from the Colby Academy in New London, and continued teaching until 1863.
That year, Marilla married John Ricker, as unlikely a pairing as that of her parents. Marilla once explained, “My husband was a Congregationalist. Their creed is complex from a mathematical standpoint. They seem to think that three gods are one, and one god is three gods. I, having been taught that figures didn’t lie, couldn’t understand it until I thought of a boy who said to his teacher when she explained to him that figures didn’t lie, ‘You should see my sister’s at home and then on the street. You will find that figures do lie’.” 11 Mr. Ricker died in 1868, leaving Marilla a childless and wealthy widow. She was never to marry again.
Marilla went on to become one of the first women attorneys in the United States, and was licensed to present cases before the US Supreme Court. She was known as the prisoner’s friend and worked without pay for the indigent jailed in Washington, DC.
Marilla was very active in the women’s rights movement and sometimes was invited to speak to groups who did not know she was also an Atheist. After the death of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Marilla was invited to speak before a group of women members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. They eulogized Elizabeth, making her out to be a devout Christian. “You really would have thought,” Marilla later wrote of the incident, “that ‘our Elizabeth’ had been a teacher in a Methodist Sabbath School!”
Marilla went on to report: “I was the last person called upon to speak and I changed the aspect of the meeting somewhat. I read Elizabeth’s views on the Bible and something of her work in the Free-thought line. I was the only person present who had ever seen her and I spoke ‘whereof I knew’.”
One woman asked Marilla, “Did you ever have a creed?” to which she responded, “No, except to pay one hundred cents on a dollar, but I know all about creeds” - and proceeded to illuminate them on her upbringing by her Free Will Baptist mother and her life with a Congregationalist husband. It is doubtful that the group ever invited Marilla to speak before them again. 12
Marilla was delightfully blunt and her books, I’m Not Afraid - Are You? and I Don’t Know - Do You?, contain many wonderfully witty quotes, such as:
• “Nothing grows slower than truth, and nothing faster than superstition.”
• “The first thing for people to do is to get rid of the silly notion that there is anything holy in the name of Jesus any more than in the name of Hercules, Bacchus, or Adonis.”
• “Above all, teach children that prayer is idiotic. There may be one God or twenty. I do not know or care.”
• “We are living in the Twentieth Century of what is called the Christian Era, and we have not outgrown the superstitions of the First Century.”
• “The greatest danger which confronts our nation today is not political but religious, and the preservation of our free institutions does not depend upon our army and navy, but upon the emancipation of the human mind from ecclesiastical slavery. ...You can not have free schools, free speech and a free press where the mind is not free.”
Marilla Ricker died in 1920, just as women were finally achieving the political equality she had worked to obtain for them all her life.
Margaret Sanger
Little Maggie Higgins was born in 1879, the sixth child of eleven. As with Marilla Ricker, Maggie’s parents were an oddly matched couple, with her mother being a devout Roman Catholic and her father a Freethinker.
When Maggie was a young girl, her father, a stonecutter, invited his hero, Robert Ingersoll, to speak in their town. When Ingersoll arrived, Mr. Higgins, with little Margaret by his side, escorted their eminent guest to the hall in which he was to speak. To their dismay, however, they found that they were denied access to the hall. To make things even worse, some of the citizens of the town had gathered and began to pelt them with tomatoes.
Margaret Sanger |
Eventually, a place was found in which Ingersoll could speak, but after his appearance in the town, the neighborhood children called Maggie and her siblings “Devil’s children” and “Heathens” and suddenly her father could not find work in town. This would not be the last time little Maggie would find opposition from religionists. Later in life, when her compassion as a nurse led her to want to save the lives of millions of women, she published a little article which included a description of the reproductive process.
When she received her copy of the paper in which her article was to be published, she eagerly skimmed the pages. There was the title: “What Every Girl Should Know.” But under the title, instead of her article, it read in big, black letters: “NOTHING! By Order of the Post Office Department.” Thus began her battle with the conservative Christian postmaster general Anthony Comstock, whose sexual beliefs were so restricted that he said that all nonprocreative sex, even in marriage, was “bestial and base.”
When her husband was arrested for distributing her writings, the judge sentencing him to thirty days in jail told him, “Your crime is not only a violation of the laws of man, but of the law of God as well, in your scheme to prevent motherhood. Too many persons have the idea that it is wrong to have children. Some women are so selfish that they do not want to be bothered with them. If some persons would go around and urge Christian women to bear children, instead of wasting their time on woman suffrage, this city and society would be better off.”
The lifelong battle between Margaret and religionists which began when she was just a little girl continued all her life, and even now, after her death, she is violently hated by many religionists.
Conclusion
These are just little glimpses into the personalities of some of the leading Freethought women of the nineteenth century. Even as children, they all shared a propensity to question what they were told and a commitment to truth that overshadowed a child’s usual tendency to simply accept the word of authority.
All of these women retained these qualities in adult life, leading them to work for abolition, worker’s rights, women’s rights, and freedom from ecclesiastical domination.
Although largely forgotten, because of the successful efforts of the religious, we must keep the ideals of these women alive at a time when our rights are being increasingly eroded by religionists. We must not forget their great fight for freedom from oppression, against a church organization that supported slavery, industry over workers, men over women, and superstition over reason.
As another great nineteenth century Atheist woman named Josephine K. Henry stated after a lifetime spent fighting for reason and women’s rights, “I sit alone on the rock of my own individuality, with the waves of superstition and religious tyranny surging around me, and if, when I have passed from earth, my grave leveled, and my name forgotten, the echo of [my] words shall awaken to power, and release from injustice, tyranny, and cruelty, one woman, my reward will be great indeed.” 13
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REFERENCES
1 Frances Wright, Free Enquirer, A.J.G. Perkins and Theresa Wolfson, Harper and Brothers Publishers, New York and London, 1939, p. 8.
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2 “Address of the State of the Public Mind and the Measures Which it Calls For, delivered in New York and Philadelphia, in the Autumn of 1829,” Life, Letters and Lectures 1834-44, Frances Wright D’Arusmont, Arno Press, New York, 1972, p. 174.
3 Ernestine L. Rose, Women’s Rights Pioneer, Yuri Suhl, Biblio Press, New York, 1990, pp. 173-174.
4 “Ernestine L. Rose,” Jenny P. d’Hericourt, Agitator, 25 June 1869; reprinted by The Revolution, 16 September 1869.
5 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, edited by Gerda Lemer, Schocken Books, New York, 1981, pp. 70-77.
6 The Blue Grass Blade, 10 April 1909.
7 Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences, edited by Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch, Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York and London, 1922, p. 47.
8 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, edited by Ellen DuBois, Schocken Books, New York, 1981, pp. 9-13; ibid, p. 49.
9 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Speech to the Anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1861,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, edited by Gerda Lemer, Schocken Books, New York, 1981, p. 80.
10 “Marilla M. Ricker,” Josephine K. Henry, Blue Grass Blade, 12 July 1908.
11 “Mrs. Marilla M. Ricker on Ye Olden Thyme,” Marilla Ricker, The Blue Grass Blade, 30 November 1902.
12 The Blue Grass Blade, 30 November 1902.
13 The Blue Grass Blade, Vol. XI, No. 22, 20 July 1902.
Carole Gray is an Atheist historian specializing in rescuing the lives of Atheist heroines from oblivion. Presently she is completing her magnum opus, the two-volume Nineteenth Century American Women of Freethought, which we hope will be published next year. Carole is also well-known for the well-researched Atheist and Freethought calendars she has produced.
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