The Hearts of Your Readers Will Shudder

My critique of Lori Ginzberg's 1994 article, which isn't really about Freethought

Lori D. Ginzberg is a History and Women's Studies Professor at Penn State. She wrote an award-winning book in 1990 called Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States, about middle-class Protestant reformers. These are her heroines, and we already know how they felt about Frances Wright. So is this really an article about American Freethought?

As expected, Ginzberg begins this article ("'The Hearts of Your Readers Will Shudder': Fanny Wright, Infidelity, and American Freethought", Lori D. Ginzberg, American Quarterly 46:2 (June 1994), 195-226) not by describing Wright or her program, but by describing the effect her speaking had on "the religiously orthodox and politically conservative." In her very first sentence, she identifies one of the main problems the mainstream had with Wright: she typically spoke before "predominantly working-class audiences" (195). She notes the comments of the Advocate of Moral Reform, which announced when Wright returned to America in 1836 that her previous talks had led women, "once happy in their husbands' arms", to have run away and "indulged themselves to indiscriminate indulgence in libidinous practices". Then she quotes Catharine Beecher's complaints about Wright's "brazen front and brawny arms". Both statements seem to emphasize the very nasty, irrational, personal, [[ad hominem]] nature of the righteous majority's reaction to Wright. Ginzberg claims to be fascinated by the way "Wrightism" becomes a handy epithet for any critique of the status quo that becomes too challenging, but it's hard to tell what she thinks of this.

Ginzberg goes on to group Wright and her ideas with other challenges such as Paine's Age of Reason and Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She mentions that the French Revolution was more than a generation in the past, but I think she's probably right that this is the unresolved issue that still motivates the conservatives (and possibly propels the Second Great Awakening). But when she describes the interest of historians of the 1970s and 80s with this movement, she concludes that "they have agreed on the insignificance of American freethought as a discrete phenomenon in the early nineteenth century, its smallness as a movement, and its precipitous decline in the face of revivalism" (196-7). She claims there were "few actual freethinkers" and "about freethinking women, we hear nothing". This can only mean, "we care to hear nothing", because even the reading I've just begun doing on the topic in the last several weeks reveals a lot of freethinkers of both sexes. So I'm just calling BS on that, from the start. You rarely see what you don't look for.

Ginzberg acknowledges it is a "truism" that religion and middle-class women are virtually synonymous in this era (but what of working-class women? Or don't we care?) She does at least admit that the widespread "insistence upon and celebration of the evangelical victory hints at a vanquished enemy, an elusive yet profoundly threatening disbelief in the tenets of both 'true religion' and 'true womanhood'...some fear that women would be attracted to Wright's views" (197). For that matter, why did America need a "Second Great Awakening" unless most people were "asleep" to the call of the faith that had been mainstream, but was becoming less relevant to most Americans' lives at just the moment the New England states were finally [[disestablishing]] their churches (1818 in CT, 1819 in NH, and not until 1833 in MA). She notices that "the depth of the fear of freethinkers seems disproportionate to their influence" (198), but then retreats to her insistence (drawn from the judgments of secondary source authors who were obviously more interested in faith than its opposite) that freethought was trivial.

Ginzberg mentions that despite losing the ability to compel attendance and payment of church taxes, "the clergy were seeking and gaining a strong cultural influence that frequently took a political form" (199), but she seems to assume the cultural and political inroads made by ministers were entirely benign and nothing for anyone to worry about. Ginzberg actually mentions a "tradition of Christian terrorism against followers of the Enlightenment tradition", but doesn't seem at all concerned. She notes that the ideas of the freethinkers "caught on in the 1820s among a group of working-class thinkers and activists, many of them refugees from religious and political persecution in England" (200).

Ginzberg then makes what I consider her biggest unsubstantiated leap of faith, claiming the freethinkers demonstrated "ambivalence toward women" (198). She bases this assertion on the fact that freethinkers (even Wright) sometimes lamented the ways the clergy manipulated women and took advantage of their credulity and often of their lower levels of education. But over several pages she gives example after example of freethinkers' support of women: resisting Sunday closure legislation pushed by the clergy (which was for many a women's issue); belief in "women's rights as citizens" (201); universal, free education; reconsidering "legal and sexual customs surrounding marriage" (202); and birth control (206). The freethinkers conspicuously led on all these issues; I don't think the fact that middle-class Protestant women were not as forward-thinking means these were not proposals to improve the situation of American women. Later, Ginzberg actually shows us evidence of how organized religion considers women, when a churchman complains of Wright, saying "when a female undertakes to ridicule religion, it is one of those marks of depravity that carries with it the most unnatural and odious idea in nature" (203). When in 1829 the Working Men's Party (disparagingly called the Fanny Wright Party) elected its candidate tot he state legislature, the *Commercial Advertiser* called then "poor deluded followers of a crazy atheistical woman" (203-4). So who is disparaging women?

Ginzberg even admits that "only rarely do we listen to Frances Wright herself" (202), to which I can't help responding, speak for yourself! And if you feel that way, do something about it. Ginzberg did notice that Wright characterized the revivalist movement was "a reversal" of the direction America had been moving. She quotes Abner Kneeland wondering "how long will people countenance such vain delusions, called 'revivals'...?" And a Pennsylvania "Meeting of Freemen" in 1829 complained of a "religious excitement" or "crusade" which "if not arrested in its progress, [would] abridge the civil and religious liberties of the people." Isn't that what happened? Couldn't it be argued that it's an issue that has not yet been resolved?

She then moves on to a description of Kneeland's blasphemy trial, where his lawyer warned, "You will make him a martyr and them Inquisitors...Such are the horrors of religious persecution, that men will fly for relief even to infidelity" (205). Ginzberg does notice that one reason for the backlash against The Boston Investigator was that it made the types of ideas it covered available to a popular audience. This is similar to the penny press controversy in England; the complaint against Kneeland was, "here is Journal, a Newspaper, cheap--and sent into a thousand families, &c. Where *one* man would be injured by Hume, Gibbon, or Volney, a thousand may be injured by this Newspaper so widely circulated, so easily read-- so coarsely expressed--so industriously spread about" (205). The part she is mistaken about is that actually, the complaint that Kneeland was supplying the "COMPLETE RECIPE how the trade of a strumpet may be carried on without its inconveniences or dangers" (206) was NOT unrelated to the *Investigator* as she supposes, because Kneeland had just published the third, revised edition of Fruits of Philosophy and featured articles and letters from Knowlton frequently in its pages.