Read about Infidel Feminism

Uncovering an important tradition of Freethinking feminism.

‘Infidel Feminism‘ is the first in-depth study of a distinctive brand of women’s rights that emerged out of the Victorian Secularist movement.

Anti-religious or secular ideas were fundamental to the development of feminist thought, but have, until now, been almost entirely passed over in the historiography of the Victorian and Edwardian women’s movement.

In uncovering an important tradition of Freethinking feminism, this book reveals an ongoing radical and free love current connecting Owenite feminism with the more ‘respectable’ post-1850 women’s movement and the ‘New Women’ of the early twentieth century.

And a Freethinker was a very scary thing: a person who forms their opinions on the basis of reason, independent of authority or tradition, and especially ‘a person whose religious opinions differ from established belief’.

In this book the author, Dr Laura Schwartz, looks at the lives and work of a number of female activists associated with organised Secularism, whose renunciation of religion encouraged and shaped their support for women’s emancipation.

These self-proclaimed ‘infidel’ feminists championed moral autonomy, free speech, and ‘the democratic dissemination of knowledge’.

Alongside their rejection of god-given notions of sexual difference and a critique of the Christian institution of marriage such Freethinking principles provided powerful intellectual tools with which to challenge dominant and oppressive constructions of womanhood.

Their contribution to the wider feminist movement was significant at a time when the issue of women’s rights was integral to the creation of modern definitions of ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ and when feminists and anti-feminists, Christians and Freethinkers battled over who had women’s best interests at heart.

Schwartz is Assistant Professor of Modern British History at the University of Warwick and a founding member of the History of Feminism Network. She has written on many aspects of the history of feminism in modern Britain.