Freethinkers United! Conference
Orlando, Florida 1997
[Christos: Can I have your attention please? One of the questions posed to the previous speaker was why in our country atheism is not widespread as it is in Europe. A very good example came to my attention that unfortunately we don't even know how to spell atheism. So, the sign outside of our room was signed incorrect[ly] "athiest" and of course it is correct now. But this is the education that we get from the state of affairs in our country. Hopefully we are going to improve that with our activities. And now I'd like to introduce, it is my pleasure to introduce the next speaker which is a great feminist. She received a feminist award last year. Miss Annette Van Howe.]
Thank you very much. Well it is indeed an honor to be asked to speak here.
I want to talk to you today about women in history. And particularly about famous freethinkers in our history and how they felt about the Bible and the role of the church as far as women are concerned. I'm a great advocate that women should learn about women's history because if they learn about their own history they will understand where they are today; appreciate what they have today and they will not want lose what gains we have made. I have a mug which says: "Women's history is the primary tool of women's emancipation," and that's by historian Gerta Lerner. I think she's very correct. That's the saying that has motivated me to study women in history. I have a masters in American History and I also took women's studies courses and have a degree in that from FAU. I took those courses when I became the chair of a history coalition of women's organizations and felt I'd better know something about what I'm preaching. I'm still learning. But, I'm convinced that if women knew about the struggles and philosophies of our foremothers, we'd be able to learn from it and build upon it. We should be particularly broadcasting the views of those who have exposed the Bible and the Church as being the suppressors of women's rights.
I want to quote from some of those women. I also felt when I was writing this, well why am I saying this to a bunch of humanists and atheists; they probably know much of it already. So, I am going to conclude by giving my views on what we should be doing as a collective society.
The feminist movement in the 19th century was nurtured by liberal and non-conformist women. They were unorthodox, heretics, agnostics and atheists. Most of women today don't realize that. We owe them a great debt because they dared to question the status quo. You know, we've had a revolution since that time, so women are neither silent, obedient or subjected to the men's rule as they were. Thanks to those feminists who challenged religious domination and discriminatory laws and practices, we have some of the rights we possess today. I particularly want to tell you that I found two sources that were very interesting, I know the title of one of them will intrigue you. It was "Wild Women, Crusaders, Curmudgeons and Completely Corsetless Ladies in an Otherwise Virtuous, Victorian Era." Can you imagine that? And if I could read some of them, it's hilarious. I have used them for programs at a number of women's groups and they found them very interesting. Another one is the recent book by Annie Laurie Gaylor, a freethinker, whose book is "Women without Superstition, No Gods, No Masters." It's the collective writing of women freethinkers in the 19th and some in the 20th century. Her book covers 51 freethinkers, beginning with Mary Wolstoncraft who is the very first to advocate that women should have equal rights. She wrote "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" in 1792. Her credo was that women should have reason and be able to use it. She protested the narrow sphere of women in society and the assumptions of the time that women should feel, not think. When she wrote that book, women were classed with children and in the parlance of the day, considered to be idiots. They were disenfranchised, they had identity comparable to that of a daughter or wife, nothing else. As such they had no custody rights, their husbands could spend their pay checks, inherit their property, and married women could not sue or be sued. A lot of us today don't remember that or know it. The term "femme couverte" meant that they were literally covered legally by their husbands. They had no rights. That was what our feminist foremothers fought very hard to eliminate. That's why they went to the 1848 convention, to get women their marital rights.
In the 19th century, women abolitionists, the temperance and the women's rights advocates were all heretics. Regardless of their views on religion, by their actions they defied the injunction to keep silent. The most recent heretic, (because I told you this went into the 20th century) was a young girl born in 1962. She's a Muslim and objected to the Muslim law and wanted its revision and said "I want a modern, civilized law where women are given equal rights. I want no religious law that discriminates. None. Period. None. Why should a man be entitled to have four wives? Why should a man get two thirds of his parents property and a daughter only a third? Should I be killed for saying this?" she asked.
Others with whom we are more familiar are Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Goldman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Susan B. Anthony, Cary Nation and Mathilda Jocelyn Gage, who is someone I did not know about until I began to study women's history. But, I'll tell you about her. Stanton, Anthony and Gage were cohorts, you might say, in the early suffrage movement. They collaborated and wrote a six- volume treatise on the women's suffrage movement. If anyone of you has the courage to go and get it, each volume is 4 to 5 inches thick, so you know how intense it was. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the brains of the suffrage movement. She was brilliant. She penned the Declaration of Sentiment which was passed at the 1848 First Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls. It is a beautifully scrolled document based upon the Declaration of Independence. She started out by saying that "all men and women are created equal." And then it went on, stating women's grievances. In one of the resolves she asked for women's suffrage. That's the only that did not pass unanimously because it was such an unknown thing at the time. In another resolve she said "Woman is man's equal and it was intended by the creator." At that time she was still appealing to people based upon religion. Then she said "The speedy success of our cause depends on our untiring effort for the overthrow of the monopoly of the pulpit." Can we imagine that today? Because we have many, many women now in our pulpits, particularly in some of our, shall I say, more advanced churches and progressive churches. She also said: "When I say a prayer, I don't address it to the patriarch in the sky, I address it to my heavenly mother." She maintained that all religions on the face of the earth degrade us. "So long as women accept the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible." She took it upon herself to analyze the Bible as being very offensive to women. She got at least 20 other women--most of them didn't do as much as she did, to analyze the Bible--and she called it "The Woman's Bible." Today you can still get it. It received a lot of reviews by the papers, most of them unfavorable. And, although it was politically correct, in my estimation, the women in the suffrage movement at the time voted to disassociate themselves from the [Women's] Bible. They were too much concerned with alienating the religious establishment. Well, their stand brought a reaction from Stanton that she'd devote the rest of her life exposing the Bible.
Stanton wrote several compositions on the ultimate religion. One of them is something that you might say made her a humanist. Listen to it. "I think the next form of religion will be a religion of humanity in which men and women will worship what they see of the divine in each other. The new religion will inspire its worshippers with self respect, with noble aspirations to attain divine rights. It will teach the solidarity of the race, that all must rise or fall as one. Its creed will be justice, liberty, equality for all the children of the earth. It'll teach our practical duties to man in this life, rather than our sentimental duties to God in fitting ourselves for the next life." [applause] I agree with you; isn't it remarkable that she wrote that in the 1850's?
Now here's an incident that proves Stanton really knew her Bible: During a women's rights convention, a married clergyman saw fit to scold her for speaking in public. He said "The Apostle Paul enjoined silence upon women; why don't you mind him?" And she retorted: "Well the Apostle Paul enjoined celibacy upon the clergy; why don't you mind him?"
When Stanton's Bible was attacked by the women's convention, Susan B. Anthony was one of the few who defended her. She reminded the women that over the years they had defended the rights of such people as Ernestine Rose who was an outspoken atheist. Anthony deplored the resolution as being censorship and said "When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and no creeds, then I'm not going to stand upon it." She reminded them that Katy Stanton was the first to propose suffrage and to make drunkenness the cause for divorce. At the time both ideas were initially scorned but later accepted by the women's movement. Despite Anthony's call to educate ten women into the practice of liberal principles and to organize ten thousand on a platform of intolerance and bigotry, the resolution censuring Stanton passed by a vote of 53 to 41. And with that Stanton was read out of the women's suffrage movement officially and she turned her efforts from then on to exposing religions and the Bible.
Although Anthony, as we all know, was the mother of our suffrage movement, she really had other interests which most of us don't realize. She was a teacher long before she got involved in suffrage. She was in the temperance movement and helped organize the teachers into a union. She was for equal pay for equal work. She was for prostitution, for divorce, and the economics of female dependency on men. She spoke freely about sex slavery and was a champion of co-education and public schools. Anthony was a Unitarian for the last 50 years of her life and said "I pray every single second of my life, not on my knees, but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men."
I mentioned Mathilda Jocelyn Gage before because she was an early suffragist who worked, as I said, closely with Stanton and Susan B. and later years dedicated herself to freeing women from the teachings of the Christian Church. In her essay in which she took on women, church and state she said that the authority of the church over marriage has always been prejudicial to women. "It's the church and not the state to which the teachings of women's inferiority is due. It's the church which primarily commanded the obedience of woman to man. Marriage is not a contract between equals, but an appropriation of the woman by the man. The wife is but a veritable slave of the husband. These are certainly fighting words, even today.
Emma Goldman, in her time, was the acknowledged "red." She was the atheist. She lived from 1869 to 1940 and she said "My earliest recollections were rebelling against orthodoxy in every form. She left Russia, came to Rochester, New York, found a job in a factory, earned $2.50 a week, got married. The marriage didn't last; and she then went to New York City where she found political activism to her liking. In a Mother Earth article on the failure of Christianity, she wrote: "I believe that Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves. Never could society have degenerated to its present appalling stage if not with the assistance of Christianity." She was outspoken, and said: "Where are the gods to make an end to all these horrors, these wrongs, this inhumanity to man? Not the gods, but man must rise in his mighty wrath. He must undertake to usher in justice upon the earth."
There's another woman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who is very famous as a writer, a poet, an editor and a theorist. She spent her life proposing a very rational attitude toward women. She hated housework, hated marriage and eventually wrote a piece called "The Yellow Wallpaper" which really was an autobiography of how marriage makes someone go insane, because that is what ended her life. She also wrote "Women in Economics" which is hailed as being very revolutionary and advanced thinking for her time. Another book, "His Religion and Hers" is a stunning treatment of patriarchal religion. She broke the mold by embracing humanism and repudiating religion. According to Annie Gaylor, she rejected the family values of her day finding the traditional home a prison for women. Women were relegated to the abnormal and degrading position of being the personal servants of adult men. I wonder if we'd have the courage to say these things today.
As late as 1988 Meg Bowman, who is the chair of the Women's Feminist Caucus of the AHA, wrote "Dramatic Readings on Feminist Issues." She went around the country and had women read the parts and as soon as they did they burned it, after they read it. I'll give you a few of the readings. St. Augustine who said "Any woman who acts in such a way that she cannot give birth to as many children as she is capable of, makes herself guilty of that many murders." According to Bowman it is still the daily prayer of the Orthodox Jewish male which says "Blessed art thou oh Lord, our God and king of the universe, that thou did not create me a woman." According to her, Martin Luther, as we know a protestant clergyman, said "Women should remain at home, sit still, keep house and bear and bring up children." John Knox, a Scottish Presbyterian Minister, declared: "Woman in her great perfection, is made to serve and obey man, not to rule and command him." As late as 1968, a Houston Presbyterian minister wrote "How to Treat a Woman." He said, "It seems to me that nearly every woman I know wants a man to love with authority, and he gives this example of how he knows it: "Our family airedale will come clear across the yard for one pat on the head. The average wife is like that. She'll come across town, across the house, across the room, across to your point of view and across almost anything to give you her love, if you offer her yours with authority." I'm afraid these attitudes are still prevalent today because at the Woman's Fourth World Conference, which I attended in Beijing, the churches tried to defeat the platform particularly on reproductive choice. They didn't succeed, I'm happy to report. Their motivation hasn't changed because what they want to do is to keep women pregnant, keep them preoccupied in the kitchen, with their children and their church, or as I like to remind everybody, like the three K's (Kuchen, Kinder and Kurche) of the Nazis.
The Equal Rights Amendment, which was just recently reintroduced, was defeated primarily by the Catholic, fundamentalist and Mormon churches who organized their congregations against it. The religious war against women is still continuing today, whether the issue is violence against women, birth control, abortion, education or even dress reform, the message against freedom for women is the same from the fundamentalist branches of Christianity, Islam, Judaism or Hinduism. Women must be aware of their feminist foremothers' efforts to staunch the negative role of religious influence. And it's my hope by speaking here today and by having others, who are hopefully going to be motivated, to spread the word.
There's a more recent woman who has a very interesting message with which I basically agree. It's Barbara Ehrenreich. She was born in 1941, so you know she is quite young, at least in my estimation. She's a well-known writer for Time Magazine, the Nation, New York Times Magazine and others. And she gives some valuable advice. She says: "It must be time to dust off Voltaire and Tom Paine. Why? Because some of our leading evangelists are preaching that humanism is basically Satan's philosophy." So she advises that we humanists, atheists, unitarians, universalists and ethical culturalists realize that they are all included in the category of being Satan. It may be time, she says to prepare for a second inquisition, because she feels that it may be coming. If we're going to burn, not just the atheists, but lukewarm agnostics, we might as well know what for. The threat, she warns, is as much political as in any sense religious. The Christian right passes itself off as American, while we atheists and others are tagged as being unamerican, communistic and even traitors. During the 50's this attitude was at its highest. Senator Joseph McCarthy proclaimed "Without God there can be no American form of government, nor any American way of life." In 1954 President Dwight Eisenhower pushed Congress to pass the under-god phrase into the Pledge of Allegiance. Do we all know it was that recent? Two years later, "In God We Trust" was adopted as a national motto without a dissenting vote in Congress. If you objected then, you'd probably be branded as a communist. The red scare infiltrated (this is just post-war) every political and cultural belief at that time. I'm sure most of us remember it. And, I'm afraid that we think that it can't happen again. But it can, perhaps under some other guise, and I'm afraid it might happen as a theocratic kind of government.
Today, those who are noisily religious are not progressive. They've captured, however, the moral initiative. The emotional fervor and the sense of community used to belong to the left and even the feminist movement. She charges that what has happened to the left is that they've forgotten it and particularly those who are extremely left said: "well we don't want to bother with religion; let's just get our point across" and in the process we have lost something very valuable. The left speaks in rational and academic tones about corporate power, oil prices, unemployment, and so forth, while the right mobilizes around the family, the fetus or the neighborhood school. As the right advances, she says, the left retreats to arid, intellectual, secular, arguments. I agree with her call for a moral vision of society, even a utopian dream by the left. It is necessary or we cannot succeed. We have to project a born-again radical movement. We cannot just talk to ourselves and have these intellectual debates. We've got to take action. We should include all kinds of people, feminists, labor unions, environmentalists, pacifists and religious activists, but this time it should be based upon political activism, and not religion. The atheist response should be very direct. There is nothing but this earthly life. There's no chosen people. We are all one human family. That's all we have. A new movement must become more than an old-fashioned atheist-humanism warmed over, as living things are the only genuine reason to act because we are the only actors on the scene. Whatever happens, utopia or barbarianism, is up to us. I thank you. [applause]
Voice: We have the great, great granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton with us. [applause] Van Howe: Wonderful! Stand up. Stand up. You should be very proud; she was quite a remarkable woman.
Voice: What's wrong with four wives? Van Howe: I'll let all the women answer that.
Christos: Remember that this is Easter and they might crucify us.
Voice: ... Legislature right now is saying, and it's based on religious doctrine, marriage is one man and one woman. That's religion speaking. Van Howe: They have just passed a law to that effect. The religious right and the fundamentalists want us to get back to the old traditional way of having a husband, a wife and the kids and the wife at home to take care of the children, be obedient, be good, and have him the head of the family. They want to go back, and I'm saying that that's wrong. We have to recognize that that's not progress.
Van Howe: I have some other notes here and I'm just going to look at a couple of them because I think that I really feel very strong about it. One of them is, an article appeared in last Sunday's Miami Herald, and this is economic. I went to a woman's economic empowerment conference in Miami in January '97. There women from 80 countries around the world. These women were top women in their countries. They were politicians, they were executives, they were entrepreneurs. And they came to talk about how women have to work together to have political empowerment in the world. One of the big problems, however, is that we still have companies in this country and elsewhere--not just this country--in Germany they do it too, and in the other big countries. They take their industries and go to Taiwan, to Hong Kong, to wherever they can get cheap labor. And until we recognize that--as I keep saying--what hurts them hurts us because we live in a global economic society. We will lose jobs; we will lose earning power in the long run. The Miami Herald writer's solution is that the big capitalists have to recognize that it's not to their benefit to go from country to country. As soon as they go to one country and they find that they can get it cheaper in another country, they skip over to that one in order to, of course, keep their profits high. They are only cutting their own throat in the long run. I know some of you are going to say that they only work (you know) on a quarter basis. I say long run. And we have to look at it that way, too. Because if these people, including us, if our wages are going to go down, and this an old thing that I learned way back when, if you don't earn enough, and Ford said the same thing, you don't earn enough to buy back the product that I'm producing, we're going to have an excess of that product. And so, capitalism has to recognize, as he said that it's to their own self-interest to raise the wages to keep everything working from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. We can't just talk about taking money away from those who are getting it needlessly, a million here, two million there. But talk about what's going to happen so we can raise the wages and the standard of living of everybody around the world. And that's what women are addressing at their conferences now. I thank you.