February 15

Susan B. Anthony (1820)

It was on this date, February 15, 1820, that American feminist and social reformer Susan Brownell Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts, into a strict Quaker family. Nevertheless, Anthony was taught from youth the virtues of self-discipline, principled convictions, and belief in one's own self-worth, and developed a sense of justice and moral zeal. "I was born a heretic," she said. "I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows."

Anthony taught for fifteen years, but was attracted to the Temperance and Abolitionist movements. Her association with Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), led her to join the Feminist movement in 1852, to which she eventually dedicated her life. One biographer noted that "more than any other suffrage leader, [Anthony] was the victim of masculine ridicule." In spite of this opposition, Anthony traveled and lectured nationwide for the female vote, the right to own property, the right to organize, and equal pay for equal work. Along the way, in 1900, Anthony coaxed the University of Rochester — her last home — into admitting women.

It is a characteristic of the early days of social reform movements that the pioneers were almost wholly Freethinkers, Agnostics, Deists and even Atheists. So it was with Anthony, who was careful to keep her platform broad, but said,

I tell them I have worked 40 years to make the [Woman Suffrage] platform broad enough for Atheists and Agnostics to stand upon, and now if need be I will fight the next 40 to keep it Catholic enough to permit the straightest Orthodox religionist to speak or pray and count her beads upon.

What you should say to outsiders that a Christian has neither more nor less rights in our Association than an atheist. When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I myself shall not stand upon it.

* Rufus K. Noyes, Views of Religion, 1906.
** Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, 2 vols., 1898-99. Harper (1851-1931) also contributed to the History of Woman Suffrage.

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Jeremy Bentham (1748)

It was also on this date, February 15, 1748, that British jurist and social reformer Jeremy Bentham was born into a Tory family in Houndsditch, in London, the son of a lawyer. A precocious learner, Bentham studied Latin at age four and sailed through Oxford, pausing only long enough to condemn the "mendacity and insincerity" of its religious atmosphere. He embarked on a legal career, but objected to its servitude to creeds, so he turned toward social reform: prison and legal reform and education reform: he founded University College, London, opening it to Non-Conformist, Catholic and Jewish students.

Said Bentham, "There is no pestilence in a state like a zeal for religion, independent of morality."* One of the founders of the philosophy of Utilitarianism, and a mentor to John Stuart Mill, in private Bentham was candid about his Atheism: he called Christianity "Jug" or "Juggernaut" in unpublished manuscripts.** With English historian George Grote he wrote Analysts of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (1822), under the pseudonym "Philip Beauchamp," a work in which both attacked religion and professed Atheism.

A part-time neologist, Bentham introduced the words "international," "maximize," "minimize," and "codification" into English. Jeremy Benthan died in London a wealthy man on 6 June 1832. His legacy was a tens of thousands of unpublished manuscript pages, some of which were eventually published. "The spirit of dogmatic theology," said Bentham, "poisons everything it touches."†

* Rufus K. Noyes, Views of Religion, 1906.
** Sir Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 1900, II, p. 339.
† Noyes, op. cit.

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