Excerpted from The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought by Susan Jacoby, published January 2013

by Yale University Press. Copyright 2013 by Susan Jacoby. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.

Ingersolls rejection of the idea that women were, by nature, intellectually inferior to menan article of faith for most men and most women in his erawas another of his distinguishing characteristics as a humanistic freethinker. The dedications of many volumes in Ingersolls collected works emphasize his high opinion of the capabilities of women: Volume I, To Eva A. Ingersoll, My Wife, A Woman without Superstition; Volume II, To Mrs. Sue M. Farrell, in law my sister, and in fact my friend; Volume XII, To My Daughters, Eva and Maud, whose hearts have never been hardened, whose imaginations have never been poisoned, and whose lives have never been cursed with the dogma of eternal fire. That Ingersoll was a family man who adored his wife and two daughters was well known, and his spotless domestic reputation despite the best efforts of scandal-hungry reporters frustrated those who wished to equate freethought with free love. Ingersolls twentieth-century biographers failed to recognize, probably because most of them were writing before the emergence of the second wave of American feminism in the 1970s, that Ingersoll held a radical view of womens rights and wrongs that went far beyond the suffragist movement of his time. In the battle over the subjugation of women, he sided with Stanton, who saw religion and centuries of religion-based law as the main cause of womens oppression, rather than with those who saw the vote itself as the ultimate remedy for all of womens ills. Like Stanton, Ingersoll viewed the franchise as necessary but not sufficient for women who wished to be not only the helpmates of men but the masters of their own lives. In this he resembled feminists of the 1970s and 1980s rather than the suffragists of his own time.