Chapter One

... not in demanding little, not in striking for an hour less, not in mountain labor to bring forth mice, can any lasting alleviation come; but in demanding much-all. -Voltairine de Cleyre, "The Eleventh of November, 1887"

Freethinkers

"The history of intellectual progress is written in the lives of infidels," freethinker Robert Ingersoll proclaimed in 1894 ("Voltaire" 177). In the hundreds of works Voltairine de Cleyre published from the 1880s until her death in 1912-poems, sketches, essays, lectures, pamphlets, translations, and short stories-she was proud to count herself among the infidels. De Cleyre defined freethought broadly as "the right to believe as the evidence, coming in contact with the mind, forces it to believe. This implies the admission of any and all evidence bearing upon any subject which may come up for discussion" ("Economic Tendency" 3). Among the many subjects that came up routinely in late-nineteenth-century free-thinking circles were marriage, sexuality, birth control, women's rights, race relations, labor relations, evolution, the existence of God, and the relation of the individual to the state. The names of freethought periodicals reflected their commitment to follow truth wherever it led: the Boston Investigator, the Truth Seeker, the Open Court, the Liberal, and at the far left end of the spectrum Lucifer, the Light Bearer. As a young freethinker in 1886, de Cleyre wrote for and then edited a now lost periodical, the Progressive Age, presumably of a similar nature (Avrich, AA 40).