By Annie Laurie Gaylor

I'd like to start with a joke, just to make sure there's at least one laugh in my talk this morning. It's my favorite joke about women and religion:-

A woman is solo-mountain climbing. She's a pro, she's strong, but her rope slips. She finds herself dangling hundreds of feet above a precipice. There is complete silence, except for the beating of her panicked heart. As she hangs on, she figures it maybe pointless but she calls for help several times anyway: "Is anybody up there?"

She hears a voice from above, a deep baritone, which says: "I'll save you my daughter." She sighs with relief, but when she looks all around but can't see anybody. "Who are you? Where are you?" The deep voice says: "I am God. I will save you, but first you must prove your faith. . . by letting go of the rope."

She thinks about this, and then she calls out: "Is anybody else up there? That's religion for you. It asks everything of woman but gives her nothing in return.

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I salute the work of the many feminist humanists here, male and female, for their dedication to empowering women, and the IHEU for its commitment to creating a feminist caucus of the IHEU or its equivalent, for giving women humanists from around the world a chance to meet and share concerns and strategy. It's been a memorable weekend, and I understand it's just the beginning.

It's also a special thrill for me to be to visit and speak in Conway Hall and the South Place Ethical Society. I work with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which I helped to found, and which is an association of freethinkers in North America working to keep church and state separate, so this is a freethought "pilgrimage:" for me.

This historic spot is named for freethinker Moncure Daniel Conway, who moved to London after he left the United States and resigned from the Methodist ministry over the abolition issue.

One of Moncure Conway's descendants was a longtime member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Katherine Conway Nicholson, from Michigan, who was Conway's great-niece. Sadly, she died just this September at age 96. Katherine Conway Nicholson was born in 1907, the same year her great-uncle died. She wrote a piece for our newspaper Freethought Today, reporting that she only learned about her great-uncle's background by accident. She had been told he was the black sheep of the family: "We never speak ofhim." Can you imagine?

Katherine did not have the advantage of knowing about his background; she had to reinvent the wheel, yet on her own she went down the same freethought path as her famous and infamous ancestor. As a second-generation freethinker who did not have religion forced upon me, I find such stories fascinating and admirable, particularly when it is women raised in oppressive religions who break those "ties that bind." I am married to Dan Barker, who was immersed in evangelical fundamentalism, became an ordained minister, yet on his own left religion in his thirties after a course of reading. Dan likens freethinkers to wild flowers, because they are not cultivated, but often come to freethought in comparative isolation. Among our membership it's not uncommon to hear, "I'm the only atheist in Montana" or "I'm the only agnostic in North Carolina." Of course, this isn't true, but in the United

States it is very common to grow up without ever encountering another atheist or agnostic! To follow the conclusions of their own minds in rejecting religion in such circumstances takes courage and integrity. I was last in London at the age of 19. One of my favorite memories is participating in a huge pro-abortion, pro-choice rally in Hyde Park that I just happened to learn about. I carried a sign with Florynce Kennedy's great maxim: "If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." I'm now looking forward to being part of another London protest. It was very thoughtful of Pres. Bush to time his visit to London to coincide in part with mine, since I've never had the opportunity to picket him in person before. I've brought a placard to hold at the demonstration with a pun that Dan, my husband, coined when we marched in New York City last February against the war as part of the worldwide protest: "Bush is a bad precedent."

I am also going to hold a bumpersticker one of our friends suggested: "War is for losers." (I have to warn you that I like show & tell.)

The Freedom From Religion Foundation has another timely bumpersticker Dan also suggested: "GLOBAL WARNING: RELIGION IS DIVISIVE."

Babu Gogineni gave me a rather ambitious assignment: to draw together there marks by conference participants yesterday with my theme of women and freethought: "no gods, no masters." Babu also suggested that I mention feminist and current events in the United States, then asked me to end on an upbeat and positive note! :)

It's that upbeat and positive note, juxtaposed with talking about current events in the United States, that's been a special challenge! So let me getthe bad news over with first.

The current climate in the United States, which is in the throes of a theo-patriotic kneejerk response to 9/11, has had a very depressing and muzzling effect on the campaign for human rights. Progressive organizations have actually all grown a bit in membership, but the economic toll is going to be bad in the long run.

Margaret Sanger always observed the retrogressive effect of war on civil rights: that had it not been for World War I and World War II, she felt the battle to give women access to birth control would have been won in short order. War, like religion, is such a waste of lives, time and energy. It was a theme of previous presenters that peace seems to be a prerequisite for lasting progress for women's rights.

Until the current threat is diminished and Bush is out of office, the work to enhance human liberty is imperiled. While we all carry on in the United States, defeating Bush is the first priority for feminists. (Please note I'm speaking as an individual.)

Bush and his policies are not just a threat to women's rights, to the separation of church and state, the economy, the disadvantaged. His policy of pre-emptive strikes and pre-emptive war constitute a threat not just to American freedom, the Bill of Rights, our Constitution and the rule of law, to the lives of those 650 prisoners of war detained with no rights in Guantanimo Bay, not just to Afghanistan, Iraq, whatever hapless country is next in line, not just to our work to empower women, but to our planet's survival.

He and his supporters think God put him in the White House wasn't the American electorate that voted him in!

Then there's his Attorney General John Ashcroft. He's a religious fanatic and an extreme anti-abortionist. Ashcroft told the notoriously segregated Bob Jones Christian university, which once gave him an award, that Jesus is King of the United States. Imagine that! Ashcroft has apparently never read the Declaration of Independence or he'd know that we threw kings out in 1776!

When the uncovered bosom of Lady Liberty, a prominent statue in the reception room of the Justice Building in Washington, D.C., offended him, he covered her up with what looked like a blue burqa. Talk about symbolism! We call people like him the Christian Taliban. The right is currently in control of all three branches of our federal government. The good news is: patriotic dissent is alive and well, there are three books skewering Bush & Co. that have been on the bestsellers list for weeks, we do have a chance to unseat him next year, and another bit of good news was reported this week:

George Soros, one of the world's richest men, a Hungarian immigrant who became a US citizen and has given away nearly $5 billion in the past to promote democracy abroad, announced this week the new focus of his life is defeating Bush. He called it "a matter of life and death" he's been waking up at 3 a.m. every night worrying about Bush, a chronic state for many of us.

Many of us are still very hopeful, but it doesn't pay to underestimate the religious right.

***

I have often wondered what our U.S. feminist foremothers, who worked so hard for the right to vote in my country, would make of an election process that brought us our current political debacle? What would they think of President Bush's Orwellian suppression of civil liberties in the name of freedom, and his war without end in the name of peace?

More than 100 years ago, the suffragist Susan B. Anthony, lamented over public indifference toward another pre-emptive war, by the US, when it attacked the Philippines:

Anthony asked: "I wonder if when I am under the sod up in the air on fire? . . . I really believe I shall explode if some of you young women don't wake up this nation upon the new islands it has clutched from other folks into the living present & work to save us from any more barbaric male governments." (Letter to Clara Bewick Colby, Dec. 17, 1898)

Anthony would have been out there demonstrating in London later this week.

***

In talking about the status of women in the United States, I thought it would be instructive to compare the rights of women today with the status of women back in 1848, when freethinker Elizabeth Cady Stanton Stanton first called for the right to vote and sparked a revolution for women. Stanton recorded how "the bible was hurled at us from every side," how indignant mobs led by clergymen tried to disrupt women's conventions.

Stanton never lived to exercise her right to vote under the suffrage amendment which she proposed and she composed, but it finally passed as a constitutional amendment in 1920, the only constitutional guarantee explicitly covering women.

Stanton was, as a young woman, barred from enrolling in college, which blows my mind. Today, girls rule! Women are a majority on U.S. college campuses. When Stanton adopted Turkish trousers and a short skirt, known as "bloomers," she wrote ecstatically that she felt "like a captive set free."

Nonstop public abuse forced her to abandon the fashion reform, except in private. More than a century later, I remember having to start a petition drive to change this as a 7th grade junior high school student because girls, even in our cold, cold climate, were barred from wearing pants in school. My daughter takes for granted wearing jeans every day. She and her friends wouldn't think of wearing skirts! Imagine how complacent Stanton would be with the today's fashion choices in the Western world: no corsets, and trousers of every length.

We still have no Equal Rights Amendment to our constitution, although it was first proposed in 1923. The religious lobbies of the Catholic, fundamentalist and Mormon churches defeated the Equal Rights Amendment. We worked so hard on that one in the 1970s and early 1980s, and came so close. Such simple justice, who could object? "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

Many of the ERA's guarantees are law today, although it varies from state to state. But these rights are not enshrined in our constitution, where they belong.

We heard bout the impressive political gains of Scandinavian, Scottish and British women. The U.S. has never elected a woman president, while currently there are 17 heads of state who are women worldwide. Only 13% of our powerful US Senate is female, 14% of the very large House of Representatives. Women fill about 22% of state legislative seats. We've recently lost some ground, although we've made definite progress since the rise of the feminist movement in the 1970s. But the U.S. ranks 59th out of 181 nations in which women are elected to national legislatures.

Abortion is still legal in the United States, but it hangs by a swing vote of our United States Supreme Court. Feminists have just gone to court to halt the so-called partial-birth abortion ban passed by Congress and signed into law in November, whose over-broadness threatens the the right to legal abortion under the Supreme Court's 1973 decision Roe v. Wade. My mother started to work to repeal criminal abortion laws in 1967 and 1968. I remember when abortion was illegal, when my mother had to refer U.S. women to Mexico City for illegal abortions there.

There's a generation of young women who have grown up when abortion has always been legal in the United States. Now, I am very fearful that my 14 year old daughter may soon witness the recriminalization of abortion. We don't ever want to go back to those dark days.

Most states deny poor women public-funded abortions, essentially creating a two-tiered system: those who have money have rights; those without means have none. My mother administers the Women's Medical Fund charity, which helped well over 12,000 women obtain safe and legal abortions. (My mother wrote about the fight to legialize abortion in Wisconsin in a book called "Abortion Is a Blessing" now online at http://www.ffrf.org/AIAB//

She has also written a booklet, "The Myth of Choice for Women Who Are Poor."http://www.ffrf.org/why_abortion/) In the midwestern state of Wisconsin, where I come from, we have a Catholic-dominated State Supreme court, and legislature.

Only a handful of low-income women a year have abortions as part of the medical assistance program. Women in wheelchairs, women who are HIV positive, have been turned down for public coverage. As my mother likes to say, our state, known as a dairy state, takes better care of the health of its cows than its women.

The Catholic church is the single largest denomination in the United States with disproportionate pull. Unfortunately Catholics and fundamentalists are working, not always together but in concert to attack secular gains, attain public aid for religiously-segregated education, to try to repeal abortion rights, put prayer and the Ten Commandments in public schools, fight gay rights and gay marriage, and otherwise legislate their dogma.

The United States consistently sides with the Vatican, and the most theocratic Islamist governments in United Nations debate. In the United States, where domestic violence affects 1 in 4 women, Congress has refused to ratify "CEDAW," the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination, adopted TWENTY-FOUR years ago by the UN General Assembly. That is a scandal.

Look what Bush's religious crusade has wrought for women in Iraq. The women of Iraq who enjoyed western-like freedoms have all but disappeared from public life since the U.S. launched its war.

The Global Gag rule first imposed by Pres. Ronald Reagan, repealed by Pres. Clinton and reimposed by George Bush, has devastated health care and reproductive choices for millions of women worldwide. There is more to women's liberation and humanism that "issues," though.

There are intangible kinds of rights. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's favorite homily was: "I believe in a definite purpose for girls. The thing which most retards, and militates against woman's self-development, is self-sacrifice. Put it down in capital letters, that self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice."

While I think many girls today are growing up with a "definite sense of purpose." the human race clearly has a long way to go in embracing Stanton's "duty of female self-development."

Scan the globe. We find that dress reform, equal rights, access to education and the means to control their own bodies remain unrealized dreams for alltoo many women. Why is this?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton answered this question herself, in a very powerful address to the Women's Suffrage Association in 1885:She said: "You may go the world over and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman. There is not one which has not made her subject to man. Men may rejoice in them because they make man the head of the woman.

I have been traveling this old world during the last few years and have found new food for thought. What power isit that makes the Hindu woman burn herself on the funeral pyre of her husband? Her religion.

"What holds the Turkish woman in the harem? Her religion. By what power to the Mormons perpetuate their system of polygamy? By their religion. "Man, of himself, could not do this; but when he declares, OThus saith the Lord,' of course he can do it. So long as ministers stand up and tell us that as Christ is the head of the church, so is man the head of the woman, how are we to break the chains that have held women down through the ages?

You Christian women can look at the Hindoo, the Turkish, the Mormon women, and wonder how they can be held in such bondage. Observe to-day the work women are doing for the churches. The church rests on the shoulders of women. . .

"Now I ask you if our religion teaches the dignity of women? It teaches us that abominable idea of the sixth century--Augustine's idea--that motherhood is a curse; that woman is the author of sin, and is most corrupt. . . . We want to help roll off from the soul of woman the terrible superstitions that have so long repressed and crushed her."

Former Catholic theologian Mary Daly put it. more succinctly: As long as god is male, male is god. I researched Stanton and other women skeptics when I compiled an anthology of English-speaking women freethinkers, "Women Without Superstition - No Gods - No Masters," published in 1997. (On line excerpts: http://www.ffrf.org/wws/quotes.html) I hope there will be many other such anthologies like it. I just brushed the surface.

The subtitle, "No Gods - No Masters," was Margaret Sanger's credo, appearing on the masthead of her journal, Woman Rebel. It actually has its roots in the anarchist movement, but she made the motto plural. In a nutshell it rejects the master/slave hierarchy of male power over women. and supernatural power over all humanity. (And of course, the Freedom From Religion Foundation has printed this motto,

"No Gods - No Masters," on a bumpersticker.)

It has been centuries of struggle for women to achieve what gains we have made. In the United States, every freedom won by women for women, small or large, from women wearing bloomers to riding bicycles to not wearing bonnets in church, to being permitted to attend universities and enter professions, to vote, to own property, to be the guardians of their own children, was opposed by the churches. Scripture was handily invoked to say God opposed women's rights.

"I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and they desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee" Gen 3:16

Here's our answer to that: EVE WAS FRAMED (bumpersticker)

"the head of every man is Christ; and the head of every woman is the man..." 1 Cor 11:3. 8-9

"Let the woman learn in silence in all subjection. . . For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression." (I Tim 2:11-14)

Here's our bumpersticker answering that: SEXISM ... THE ORIGINAL SIN

The first to speak out for women's rights have been the secularists, freethinkers and unorthodox who were not intimidated by the power of religion. In this country freethinking Deist Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the first significant call for woman's rights, a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in 1792.

Wollstonecraft wrote: "[Women's] first duty is to themselves as rational creatures." A human being, she wrote, "cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obeys any authority, but that of reason."

Freethinking women filled the ranks of abolition and suffrage movements, but were and are also the catalysts calling for marriage and divorce rights, birth control, abortion, the right of women to be free, to own themselves. Because organized religion has been the principle enemy of women's rights, women have also played a special role in supporting secularism.

One of our bestselling bumperstickers says:

"KEEP CHURCH & STATE SEPARATE"

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This is where I get to the uplifting part, I promise! In reading and researching women's freethought writings I discovered a recurring humanist theme sounded by these women: the importance of this world, improving life on earth, not worrying about some unknown, unprovable realm.

Scottish reformer Frances Wright (1795-1852), the first to speak in public before a mixed ("promiscuous") assembly of men and women in the United States (1828), and to call for women's equality:

"We are on the earth, and they tell us of heaven; we are human beings, and they tell us of angels and devils; we are matter, and they tell us of spirit; we have 5 senses whereby to admit truths, and a reasoning faculty by which to build our belief upon them; and they tell us of dreams dreamed thousands of years ago, which all our experience flatly contradicts." (1828)

We have a bumpersticker Frances Wright would have enjoyed:

BEWARE OF DOGMA

British freethinker Emma Martin (1812-1851), named "a heroine of freethought" by George Jacob Holyoake, wrote in the 1840's:

"Religion, with an upward glancing eye, asks what there is above. Philosophy looks around her and seeks to make a happy home of earth."

She warned: People "lose themselves, while looking for God."

Ernestine L. Rose (1810-1892), the world's first canvasser for women's rights, a Polish native who became an abolitionist, feminist and well-known atheist in the United States, moved to England to spend her later years here and is buried at Highgate Cemetery. Rose wrote:

"Our life is short and we cannot spare an hour from the human race, even for all the gods in creation." Ernestine Rose also advised:

"Agitate! Agitate! ought to be the motto of every reformer."

The American suffragist and writer Helen H. Gardener (1853-1925) wrote, poignantly, in 1885, words that are as timely as ever today:

"I do not know of any divine commands. I do know of most important human ones. I do not know the needs of a god or of another world. . . . I do know that women make shirts for seventy cents a dozen in this one. I do know that the needs of humanity and this world are infinite, unending, constant, and immediate. They will take all our time, our strength, our love, and our thoughts; and our work here will be only then begun."

American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) protested that we are "directing our best efforts toward the sky . . . Improvement in the human race is not accomplished by extracting any number of souls and placing them in heaven, or elsewhere. It must be established on earth."

She added: "Surely fathers, not to speak of mothers, should be more concerned about what will happen to their living children in the world we are making, than about what may happen to themselves after they are dead!"

National Secular Society president emerita Barbara Smoker (who is in the audience today), writes: "To say grace, knowing that people on this globe are starving, indicates a highly selfish acquiescence in the arrogantly supposed favoritism of the almighty. A really decent god-believer, far from giving thanks for the food and good health and fortune enjoyed by himself and his family and close friends, would surely curse God for his neglect of the hungry, the sick and the tormented, throughout the world."

Ruth Hurmence Green, U.S. author of the Born Again Skeptic's Guide to the Bible, who died in 1981, advised: "Let us use our energy and our initiative to solve our problems without relying on prayers and wishful thinking. When we have faith in ourselves, we will find we do not need to have faith in gods."

To paraphrase Ruth Green: any institution depending for its existence on the enslavement of women deserves to perish.

****

In my own words, I protect the fact that beliefs inconsistent with the known laws of science and reason have been used to hold women in subjection, to deny women rights, to punish, to diminish, even to terrorize. The union of such beliefs with the power of government is woman's greatest threat. Secularism is woman's best friend.Matilda Joslyn Gage, an American feminist from the 19th century, wrote very movingly that:

"The world has seemingly awaited the advent of heroic souls who once again should dare all things for the truth. The woman who possesses love for her sex, for the world, for truth, justice and right, will not hesitate to place herself upon record as opposed to falsehood, no matter under what guise of age or holiness it appears."

"During the ages," Matilda Gage added, " no rebellion has been of like importance, with that of Woman against the tyranny of the Church and State; none has had its far reaching effects. We note its beginning; its progress will overthrow every existing form of these institutions; its end will be a regenerated world."

I'd like to conclude with the words of a truly heroic "soul" . who does not hesitate to place herself upon record opposing holy falsehood, Taslima Nasrin.

Taslima Nasrin, who was born in 1962, is the youngest contributor to the anthology Women Without Superstition. You know she is under a death fatwa, she had to escape her country of Bangladesh for making holy men mad at her, she has been refused entry in India, she must hide to avoid being assassinated. In a speech last year, she noted: "We are at a point where we must ask if religion and democracy can co-exist, if religion and freedom of speech can co-exist, if religion and human rights as well as religion and freedom can co-exist.

"Millions of women around the world are suffering because of religion. They have acid thrown on their faces, are flogged, stoned, burned to death. Women who survived the Taliban rule in Afghanistan are witnesses to outrageous practices. In Pakistan, every man is allowed to kill women, even in public places, if they determine that the women are doing un-Islamic things.

Millions of women do not have any access to education, no access to work, no right to have human life. What does the future hold for most of the world's women if patriarchy, the religious tool to keep women inferior, persists!"

Taslima Nasrin quoted the words of John Lennon in "Imagine." - "Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try; no Hell below us, above us only sky. "Imagine there's no countries for and no religion too."

She concluded:

"As humanists and rationalists and freethinkers, we do not dream of Paradise, where women will see their former husbands copulating with seventy-two virgins for eternity. Or of Heaven, where the screams of loved ones suffering in Hell will upset our peacefulness.

"My message," she said, "is that, along with the Beatle John Lennon, we all need to be dreamers, need to be skeptical of dogmas and doctrines, need to dream how to make Earth a peaceful, a reasonable, an enlightened place, one in which life will be truly civilized, truly humanized. Let me join you in that struggle! Or join me in your struggle. I believe we are in the same struggle. We are out to make the world beautiful."

Another Bumper sticker:- IMAGINE NO RELIGION

Annie Laurie Gaylor is a co-founder of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a nationwide United States group based in Madison, Wis. She is author of "Woe to the Women: The Bible Tells Me So" (1981), "Betrayal of Trust: Clergy Abuse of Children" (1988) and editor of the anthology "Women Without Superstition: No Gods - No Masters" (1997). She edits the Foundation's newspaper Freethought Today, which is published ten times a year. She has a journalism degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1980). She has been a director of co-director of the Feminist Caucus of the American Humanist Association for about ten years, and previously edited and published a feminist monthly newspaper, The Feminist Connection. She can be reached at algaylor@ffrf.org. The Freedom From Religion Foundation website is: www.ffrf.org