Secularism

The history of the Freethought or Secularist movement (the terms were used interchangeably) has often taken a back seat in histories of Victorian radicalism—its diminished influence in the twentieth century obscuring its high profile during the second half of the nineteenth. The Victorian era witnessed a significant rise in the number and outspokenness of Freethinkers—those who questioned the truth and authority of all forms of organized religion.Footnote ¹¹ In the second half of the nineteenth century, Freethinkers or Secularists campaigned for the complete separation of religion from political, cultural, and moral life in Britain. Yet Secularism did not simply denote support for the separation of Church and State based upon a neutral regard for religious faith. The Secularist movement had its roots in a far more partisan and embattled debate, which was concerned not only with the role of religion in politics but also with whether religion—specifically Christianity—could be considered both true and morally just.

Front page of the Secular Chronicle July 7, 1878, p. 1. With kind permission of the Bishopsgate Institute, London.

Freethinkers saw themselves as the intellectual descendants of the Enlightenment, in that their arguments against the existence of God or the possibility of supernatural occurrences were firmly rooted in an empirical and rational analysis of the workings of the natural world. Miracles were scoffed at along with virgin births and the physical resurrection of Christ. Freethinkers deliberately set about constructing an opposition between the claims of science and those of religion, and they refused to accept that any aspect of religion could be justified in “rational” terms. Freethinkers also critiqued Christian doctrine through the application of rational moral standards. By contrast to what they believed was the infantilizing and hypocritical value-system of the Christian Church, Freethinkers preached a moral code based on autonomy and individual responsibility. Developments in biblical criticism and comparative religion were used by Freethinkers to reduce scripture to nothing more than a collection of inaccurate historical documents and to show how religion was merely an expression of humanity’s psychological needs and desires.

But Freethought was not simply an intellectual movement, and its development during this period cannot be separated from the political struggles out of which it emerged. Freethinkers were political as well as intellectual radicals, consciously identifying with a tradition of rebellion against state religion and arbitrary authority which they traced back through the French Revolution to the Enlightenment. During the nineteenth century, Freethought emerged as a popular “movement” with an activist base amongst mainly the lower-middle and upper-working class. The most prominent and infamous early nineteenth-century Freethinker was Richard Carlile, imprisoned three times between 1817 and 1831 for writing, publishing, and selling blasphemous works. The next wave of Freethought emerged from the Owenite utopian socialist movement, active during the 1830s and 1840s. Robert Owen and many of his followers rejected orthodox religion as part of the “old immoral world.” A more intransigent opposition to all forms of religious belief, argued for by George Jacob Holyoake and other leading Owenites, proved too extreme for the Owenite leadership, who eventually sought to disassociate Owenism from militant Freethought.

With the disintegration of the Owenite movement after 1845, Freethinkers regrouped around the Central Secular Society, established by Holyoake in 1851. Over the next 10 years, some sixty local Secular Societies grew up around the country and in 1866 these were incorporated into the National Secular Society, presided over by Charles Bradlaugh. Membership peaked in the mid-1880s with 120 local societies and around 3,000 members, but with a sympathetic periphery that might have amounted to about 60,000.

Karl Marx, in spite of his own atheism and belief that religion served as the “opium of the people,” disliked the organized Secularist movement. He found it sectarian and believed its fixation on religion was a distraction from the more fundamental issue of class struggle. He also argued against making secularism a criterion for membership of the International, for fear that this would alienate large swathes of the still-religious working class.Footnote ¹² Marx particularly loathed Bradlaugh, referring to him scathingly as the “Bishop of Atheism.”Footnote ¹³ Yet Marx’s dismissal of the movement as a whole was unfair. Secularism was by no means a rigidly defined ideology; it encompassed pantheists and deists, as well as atheists, and was united by a commitment to free speech, free dissemination of knowledge, and a rejection of “superstition.” It was thus a highly politicized and contested world-view, dealing with questions of freedom and authority, which overlapped with and fostered other radical political traditions. In particular, it intersected with the women’s rights movement that was also emerging during this period.

Feminism

A handful of women gained prominence within nineteenth-century Secularism, as journalists, authors, and public lecturers. These women contributed to the production of Secularist ideology, gave their views on the direction the movement should take, had their work published in the Secularist press, lectured to large audiences of Freethinkers, and were, on the whole, taken seriously by the movement’s male leadership. The leading Secularist newspaper, the National Reformer, affirmed its commitment to female enfranchisement in 1866, and by the 1880s all but one of the Secularist leaders supported votes for women. Opposition to women’s suffrage did exist within the rank-and-file of the movement, but a survey of local meeting reports suggests that such opposition was never voiced without facing counter-arguments. Certainly, support for women’s rights formed an important part of the self-consciously constructed identity of the Freethought movement. Secularists saw religion as the primary cause of women’s oppression and viewed the Judeo-Christian Scripture as the founding text of female subordination from which flowed all modern laws discriminating against women. Thus, support for women’s emancipation was not simply bolted on to Freethought but lay right at the heart of the Secularist critique of Christianity.Footnote ¹⁴

Harriet Law was one of the most prominent Freethinking feminists, both within the movement and nationally. Born Harriet Frost in Ongar, Essex in 1831, her father worked variously as a farmer, victualler, butcher, and milk dealer, and her family was forced to move to East London after losing most of their money through unfortunate investment. She came, therefore, like so many in the Secularist movement, from a family balanced precariously on the cusp of the upper-working and lower-middle class. Possessing some education but lacking financial security, she occupied this social strata throughout the course of her life.Footnote ¹⁵ None of the census returns that I have been able to find for her list resident servants, which at the time was a crucial signifier of middle-class status.Footnote ¹⁶ As a young woman, Law took a job teaching in a Sunday school in order to help support her family, and eventually she was able to start her own establishment.Footnote ¹⁷ In 1851, she was baptized into the Particular Baptist Church, but after a brief period of challenging East End Secularists with Christian arguments she became convinced by the views of her opponents and joined their ranks. In 1855 she married Edward Law—employed at the time as an ironmonger—who was undergoing a similar loss of faith. Edward helped to care for their children while Harriet became a professional Freethought lecturer, touring the local Secular societies that had begun to grow up around Britain.Footnote ¹⁸ The 1871 census, unusually for a married woman, specifies her profession (“public lecturer”) and locates her as a guest in a house in Manchester, far from home and her four young children.Footnote ¹⁹ In 1872, Law raised £2 from a lecture tour, which she donated to the International’s fund for refugees from the Paris Commune.Footnote ²⁰ From 1876 to 1878, she was sole editor of the newspaper the Secular Chronicle, which introduced a regular “ladies page” devoted to the subject of women’s emancipation.

While both women and feminism had played an important role in the Owenite movement in the 1830s and 40s, by the 1850s and 60s, socialism and feminism had, at least publicly, parted ways.Footnote ²¹ Many radical and labor movement organizations marginalized women, while the organized women’s movement focused primarily on the position of middle-class women and took pains to advertise its respectability.Footnote ²² Campaigns for education, professional employment, and a property-based franchise took precedence in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ²³ The question of sexual morality and the gendered double standard was at the center of the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts, which began in 1869, when feminists opposed the incarceration in lock hospitals of women suspected of undertaking sex work. It took an enormous amount of courage to speak publicly about prostitution, venereal disease, and men’s lack of “chastity,” and campaigners worked hard to mitigate this violation of middle-class respectable femininity by framing their demands as a Christian moral mission. Even then, feminists such as Emily Davies and Millicent Garrett Fawcett sought to disassociate their campaigns for higher education and the vote from those against the Contagious Diseases Acts, despite private sympathy for the cause.Footnote ²⁴

By contrast, feminists in the Freethought movement continued the critique of the Christian institution of marriage pioneered by an earlier generation of Owenite feminists. They supported women’s right to divorce and engage in sexual relations outside of marriage, at a time when most of the women’s movement was unwilling to even publicly debate such matters.Footnote ²⁵ In 1878, Harriet Law proudly positioned a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft on the front page of her newspaper, despite the fact that most other feminists were nervous about associating with the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women due to her having had a child out of wedlock.Footnote ²⁶ Harriet Law gave her youngest daughter Florence the middle name Aspasia, presumably after the ancient Greek philosopher and mistress of Pericles often believed to have been persecuted for her impiety, seemingly unconcerned that this figure was widely—if incorrectly—reputed to have also been a sex worker.Footnote ²⁷ Law’s 1878 profile of Marx quoted with apparent approval the description of the First International given by the Spanish Minister of State, which maintained that it aimed to do away with the family, religion, and the very social order upon which they were founded.Footnote ²⁸

Harriet Law was part of a small but vocal group of women in the Secularist movement pursuing this more outspoken and iconoclastic vision of women’s emancipation. A number of Freethinkers supported birth control, most famously Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, who were the subject of a high-profile obscenity trial in 1877 when they published a pamphlet on the subject. Others, mostly men, supported greater sexual libertinism and a celebration of bodily pleasure in opposition to the strictures of the Church, a position often associated with George Drysdale’s infamous Elements of Social Science (first published 1854). Harriet Law stopped short of publicly advocating birth control and repudiated Drysdale’s work when it was used by her Christian opponents to smear her good name.Footnote ²⁹ Having already transgressed numerous boundaries of feminine propriety through her socialist feminism, opposition to religion, and career in public speaking, perhaps she too was not immune to the pressures of respectability and calculated that the risks were simply too high. Perhaps she believed, despite her denunciation of the Christian institution of marriage, that total sexual freedom before women had gained political and economic equality would benefit only men. Or perhaps she was deterred by the association of birth control with Malthusianism, which blamed poverty on working-class people having too many children rather than an unjust capitalist system. Law’s commitment to freedom of speech, however, ensured that these issues were discussed openly in the Secular Chronicle, which printed contributions from people with variously opposing views.Footnote ³⁰

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the Freethought movement also fostered a cohort of democratic suffragists—those who argued for women’s enfranchisement as part of a broader progressive and democratic vision—which, as historian Sandra Stanley Holton has shown, did not regain prominence until the early twentieth century.Footnote ³¹ In the 1860s, when the nationwide campaign for women’s suffrage was only just beginning and its advocates were debating whether it would be foolhardy to call for votes for married as well as single women, Harriet Law was already calling for universal suffrage for both men and women. In 1866, Law took her message to the streets during the riots that erupted in Hyde Park when police attacked those demonstrating for franchise extension under the proposed Reform Bill. Law “overcame one of the stern policemen” and was “carried in triumph from place to place” by an enthusiastic crowd who forced her to continually address them on the political and social rights of women as well as men.Footnote ³² In 1868, she attended a meeting of the electors of her local constituency, Tower Hamlets, where she “stood forward to vindicate the rights of her sex and to proclaim herself as ‘the only woman who had the courage to speak outside Hyde Park, and urge the men to pull down the railings.’”Footnote ³³ Harriet Law’s atheism prompted her to reject the notion of God-given gender roles and natural sexual difference. She published an article which claimed that it had not “as yet been proved that a man differs from a woman” and as a result women should have full rights and duties in the governance of the polity—including the right to vote and sit in parliament. In discussing whether men and women had natural and different talents, Law denied that any skill was definitely the domain of a particular sex.Footnote ³⁴

Harriet Law’s uncompromising views made many in the wider feminist movement wary of associating with her. In 1869, she volunteered to take charge of the International’s strike-fund for silk workers in the French city of Lyon; she initially assumed that the women suffragists around John Stuart Mill (who had circulated a petition to include women in the franchise extended by the 1867 Reform Act) would be happy to help since the majority of the strikers were women and had included equal pay in their initial demands.Footnote ³⁵ The following month, however, she had to report to the General Council the disappointing news that the suffragists would not lend their official support, though many individuals were willing to make private donations to the fund.Footnote ³⁶ I suspect that this was not simply due to the unwillingness of so-called “bourgeois feminists” to support the strike, but also because it was the notorious Secularist Harriet Law who promoted it. Although the organized women’s movement in 1860s and 1870s believed that it was more strategic to focus on campaigning for educational and employment opportunities for middle-class women, they were not unsympathetic to the position of their working-class sisters. They were, however, terrified of their cause being strangled at birth by opponents keen to portray it as irreligious and sexually immoral, and this made them extremely cautious about any public connection with the Freethought movement.Footnote ³⁷ In 1877, Harriet Law became involved in efforts to re-form a version of the IWMA in London, subsequently renamed the International Labour Union. Edith Simcox, another advocate of women’s rights and active trade unionist, was initially elected onto its committee, but quickly resigned the following month after her friend, the novelist George Eliot, urged her not to be seen with Harriet Law and Annie Besant.Footnote ³⁸

Harriet Law used her newspaper editorship to support both “bourgeois” feminist causes, such as suffrage, education, the Women’s Disabilities Removals Bill, and the Married Women’s Property Act, as well as trade unionism for women workers.Footnote ³⁹ In 1877, she called for support for the “Women’s Provident League” (probably the Women’s Protective and Provident League, later renamed the Women’s Trade Union League), which, Law claimed, “is supported by the female trade unions which already exist among the dressmakers, tailoresses, upholsteresses, shirt and collar makers and book binders.” Reminding her readers that the working class consisted of women as well as men, Law pointed out that “[i]n these trades there are at least three millions of workers in the United Kingdom,” adding that “so long as no union exists among them, employers will be able to exact almost any terms.” She thus advocated “combination and co-operation” to enable “women workers” to “obtain all those concessions which, after much waiting, men look upon as their natural right.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Despite her support for Marx in the IWMA, Harriet Law was unafraid to publicly criticize him when their political views diverged, especially when it came to questions of women’s emancipation. In the summer of 1868, the General Council debated the impact of industrial machinery. Marx deplored how “the use of machinery had forc[ed] women and children into the factory.” He qualified this statement, claiming that he objected not to the participation of “women and children … in our social production” but to the “abominable” conditions under which it took place. However, his remark resonated with a more conservative position put forward by a number of delegates at both the Geneva and Lausanne congresses who opposed altogether women working outside the home. As the debate wore on, Harriet Law was moved to “protest against the view taken of women’s labour,” arguing that “machinery had made women less dependent on men than they were before and would ultimately emancipate them from domestic slavery.”Footnote ⁴¹ This relatively brief statement signaled not only her opposition to women’s exclusion from waged labor but also long-standing concern among feminists for the unbearable burden of domestic labor imposed on working-class women—an issue that barely figured in Marx’s analysis of work and exploitation.Footnote ⁴²

Socialist internationalism

The IWMA has been described by historians as having a masculine, “if not sexist,” culture where “the ideal of the male breadwinner … prevailed” even if it was not universally endorsed.Footnote ⁴³ Harriet Law would probably have felt more comfortable than most at being the only woman on the General Council due to her already considerable experience of working in mixed-sex and male-dominated organizations. Secularism did not distinguish between male and female members in its committee structures.Footnote ⁴⁴ Both men and women were permitted to run for executive positions in the National Secular Society, the British Secular Union, and the Freethought League.Footnote ⁴⁵ At a local level, Secular societies were relatively unusual (compared to other mid-Victorian organizations such as radical clubs and trade unions) in that their meetings, lectures, and branch membership were open to women.Footnote ⁴⁶ Harriet Law and a handful of other Freethinking women contributed to the production of Secularist ideology, gave their views on the direction the movement should take, had their work published in the Secularist press, and lectured to large mixed-sex and often rowdy audiences.

Harriet Law’s career as a public lecturer provided a great deal of practice at making herself heard above a hubbub of male voices. She was unafraid to take on men in even the most adversarial of debates. Victorian left politics, including both Secularism and the labor movement, occupied a world of “public talk” whereby organized lecturers jostled for space alongside itinerant street speakers of every political and religious stripe. Harriet Law spoke at both indoor and open-air gatherings, at which different voices and views struggled—sometimes violently—to be heard, lecturing to often hostile audiences of up to a thousand people, mostly men. When, for example, in 1876, she acted as respondent to lecture by a Christian speaker, the Blackburn Times reported that:

Harriet Law complained that one of the Christians on the platform deployed “brute force … pushing us roughly, and probably only being restrained from further violence by a secularist threatening to proceed against him by action for assault.”Footnote ⁴⁸ On another occasion, when Law spoke on “Martin Luther and Thomas Paine” in Hebden Bridge in 1870, the hall was attacked by an angry crowd who pelted the windows with stones. She was mobbed upon leaving the lecture, but managed to reach her lodgings that night unharmed. On the following day, however, when Law returned to give a second lecture, “the crowd closed in upon her … and the lady received a blow in the right eye struck by a man’s fist ….”Footnote ⁴⁹ Compared to such inhospitable audiences, disagreements with the men of the First International most likely left her unfazed.

Harriet Law’s socialism placed her at odds with the mainly radical-liberal men who headed the Secularist movement.Footnote ⁵⁰ The right to think for oneself and to reject the tutelage of the church was at the heart of Freethought and tended toward a powerful individualism embodied by the movement’s most famous advocate Charles Bradlaugh, who was a vocal critic of Marx. Law, by contrast, declared herself a “communist.” This placed her not just on the left of the Secularist movement but also on the left wing of the General Council. When the latter organization debated trade unions and fair pay in 1869, Harriet Law insisted that workers would never be able to enjoy the full value of their labor under capitalism. “[W]e must have communism as Robert Owen wanted it,” she declared. “Under no other form could the right to labour and the value of labour be guaranteed, it could not be done under the competitive system; she was in favour of communism.”Footnote ⁵¹ Law’s endorsement of Owenite socialism, which the Communist Manifesto had criticized as utopian, was another matter upon which she was not afraid to disagree with Marx. She applauded “[t]he highest and broadest kind of co-operation, as embodied in the communistic system of Robert Owen” and maintained that Owen’s writings on the land question were “not from the pen of a Utopian philosopher, but are the utterances of an eminently practical man, who tested his theories.”Footnote ⁵² Elsewhere Law eulogized the Owenite feminist and Freethinker Emma Martin.Footnote ⁵³ Harriet Law attempted to show readers of the Secular Chronicle that a collectivist political vision did not have to contradict the pride that so many felt in their individual struggles to obtain an education and free themselves from the bondage of their religious upbringings. Instead, Law argued that “communism (which is national co-operation) combines the strength of unionism, the zeal of patriotism, and resources of individualism …”Footnote ⁵⁴

Harriet Law’s socialism was also informed by internationalism and anti-imperialism, perhaps influenced by the “labour internationalism” of the IWMA or perhaps a factor drawing her to that organization in the first place.Footnote ⁵⁵ Secularist opposition to Christianity led at least some Freethinkers to condemn the British Empire, and Harriet Law’s Secular Chronicle printed a number of articles on the topic.Footnote ⁵⁶ Her eldest daughter, Harriet Teresa Law (1856–1941), authored some of them.Footnote ⁵⁷ Harriet Teresa Law criticized the explorer and colonialist Henry Morton Stanley, remarking that his explorations in Central Africa offered nothing more than a “choice between bible and bullets.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In 1876, she also expressed sympathy for the Kai Colo in Fiji when they were defeated in their war against annexation by the British, who allied with rival Fijian tribes:

The Kai Colo had been particularly resistant to British missionaries’ attempt to Christianize them, and although Harriet Law and her daughter were critical of all religions, they tended to have more sympathy for those of non-Christian faith, especially when they were oppressed by Christian powers.Footnote ⁶⁰ They also, for example, wrote against antisemitism. Harriet Law denounced the oppression of Jews in Britain and Eastern Europe, while Harriet Teresa Law condemned the hounding of a Jewish mayor in Taunton, south-west England, as well as attempts to convert Jewish people to Christianity.Footnote ⁶¹