Women Without Superstition: "No Gods - No Masters," The Collected Writings of Women Freethinkers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

This fall, I had a terrible urge to agree with the Promise Keepers. But only about one thing. Whenever they were questioned about their view that men should rule the home, they would say: "Your argument is not with the Promise Keepers. Your argument is with the Bible."

Yes, the Good Book can get in the way. Arguing with the Bible is the theme of Annie Laurie Gaylor's pioneering work, Women Without Superstition: "No Gods--No Masters," The Collected Writings of Women Freethinkers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Freedom From Religion Foundation). 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.

I'm especially fond of two of Ernestine Rose's quotes. "Agitate! Agitate! ought to be the motto of every reformer. Agitation is the opposite of stagnation--the one is life, the other death." She also said, "All children are atheists, and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so."