Voltairine de Cleyre, anarchist/freethinker/philosopher

Overlooked No More: Voltairine de Cleyre, America’s ‘Greatest Woman Anarchist’
At a time of rampant income inequality, stifling social roles for women and church-mandated morality, de Cleyre rebelled against the accepted order.

Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.

By Michael B. Dougherty

At 24, Voltairine de Cleyre appeared before Philadelphia’s Unity Congregation to deliver a lecture, provocatively titled “Sex Slavery.”

She appealed to the assembled crowd: “Let woman ask herself, ‘Why am I the slave of man? Why is my brain said not to be the equal of his brain? Why is my work not paid equally with his?’ ”

The year was 1890.

It was a time of rampant income inequality, stifling social roles for women and church-mandated morality, and many in the growing American middle class were ready for change.

De Cleyre rebelled against the accepted order and delivered searing critiques of capitalism and state power, whose abuses she saw manifested in many facets of life, from labor to prisons to marriage (proposals for which she twice rejected).

She adopted anarchism as a political philosophy and became one of the movement’s most prominent and determined supporters, establishing a reputation as a transfixing speaker and earning the admiration of her fellow freethinkers.

Her contemporary, Emma Goldman, called her “the poet-rebel, the liberty-loving artist, the greatest woman anarchist of America.”

More significantly, for historians of the period, “she pointed to gender oppression, the power of the state and capitalism as being interconnected,” Sandra Jeppesen, an associate professor of interdisciplinary studies at Lakehead University in Orillia, Ontario, said by email.

Not only was she concerned about women’s issues from a woman’s perspective, but “because she was poor, she was also involved in working class struggles and Jewish immigrant support work,” Jeppesen said.

De Cleyre’s views, which she propagated prolifically in poems and essays, were grounded in personal experience.

De Cleyre, who was named after the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire, was born on Nov. 17, 1866, in Leslie, Mich. Her family struggled with poverty. Her father, Hector de Cleyre, was an itinerant tailor from France who won his American citizenship fighting in the Civil War. Her mother, Harriet Elizabeth Billings, came from an abolitionist family in upstate New York.

The youngest of three sisters, de Cleyre created a desk by placing a board on the limb of a maple tree so that she would have a private place to write. She drafted her first poem at age 6.

She spent three years in a Catholic convent school, where she developed a deep animus toward dogma and forced obedience. But the experience also sharpened her rhetorical skills.

De Cleyre was just 19 when she began writing and lecturing on Free Thought, a questioning of traditional religious and social beliefs. She traveled between Ohio and Boston and settled in Philadelphia, where in 1892 she founded a social group called the Ladies’ Liberal League. The group’s purpose was not “to smile men into ticket-buying and shame them into candy purchase,” she said, but to host discussions on sex, prohibition, socialism, anarchism and revolution. For income, she gave private lessons in English, penmanship and music at her home...

(continues, nyt)