The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #69767 Message #1186379
Posted By: GUEST
15-May-04 - 04:19 PM
Thread Name: BS: American Secularist Tradition
Subject: RE: BS: American Secularist Tradition
There is another book some here might be interested in: "Women Without Superstition: "No Gods - No Masters," The Collected Writings of Women Freethinkers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries" by Annie Laurie Gaylor.
Some excerpts of the book review of it from The Progressive:
"This anthology of fifty-one feminists, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Katha Pollitt and Barbara Ehrenreich, shows how the leaders of the women's-liberation movement have long understood the crucial importance of breaking with the Bible. The phrase "No Gods--No Masters" comes from Margaret Sanger, the birth-control crusader. And Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, "I consider the Bible the most degrading book that has ever been written about women." She noted that "it was hurled at us on every side."
Gaylor's selections of original writings are well chosen, and her introduction is convincingly argued. I found her brief biographical sketches fascinating, especially the ones about feminist freethinkers I hadn't heard of. Like Ernestine L. Rose, "America's most outspoken atheist" of the nineteenth century. Born in a Jewish ghetto in Poland (her father was an orthodox rabbi), she rejected religion at age fourteen and came to the United States in 1836 when she was in her twenties. Within a year, she challenged a preacher to a public debate. The audience responded with shouts of "Drag her out!"
"Ernestine became America's first women's-rights activist after drawing up a petition in support of a Married Woman's Property Act," Gaylor writes. "It became a suffrage legend that Ernestine garnered only five signatures in five months." Twelve years later, the Act was law in New York."