Month: August 2017

fiction

Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Sorrows of the Body”

August 11, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
I have never wanted anything more than the wild creatures have,—a broad waft of clean air, a day to lie on the grass at times, with nothing to do but slip the blades through my fingers, and look as long as I pleased at the whole blue arch, and the screens of green and white between; leave for a month to float and float along the salt crests and among the foam, or roll with my naked skin over a clean long stretch of sunshiny sand; food that I liked, straight from the cool ground, and time to taste its […]
fiction

Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Reward of an Apostate” (1908)

August 11, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
I have sinned: and I am rewarded according to my sin, which was great. There is no forgiveness for me; let no man think there is forgiveness for sin: the gods cannot forgive. This was my sin, and this is my punishment, that I forsook my god to follow a stranger—only a while, a very brief, brief while—and when I would have returned there was no more returning. I cannot worship any more,—that is my punishment; I cannot worship any more. Oh, that my god will none of me? That is an old sorrow! My god was Beauty, and I […]
fiction

Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Heart of Angiolillo” (1898)

August 11, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
Some women are born to love stories as the sparks fly upward. You see it every time they glance at you, and you feel it every time they lay a finger on your sleeve. There was a party the other night, and a four-year old baby who couldn’t sleep for the noise crept down into the parlor half frightened to death and transfixed with wonderment at the crude performances of an obtuse visitor who was shouting out the woes of Othello. One kindly little woman took the baby in her arms and said: “What would they do to you, if […]
fiction

Voltairine de Cleyre, “A Rocket of Iron” (1902)

August 11, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
It was one of those misty October nightfalls of the north, when the white fog creeps up from the river, and winds itself like a corpse-sheet around the black, ant-like mass of human insignificance, a cold menace from Nature to Man, till the foreboding of that irresistible fatality which will one day lay us all beneath the ice-death sits upon your breast, and stifles you, till you start up desperately crying, “Let me out, let me out!” For an hour I had been staring through the window at that chill steam, thickening and blurring out the lines that zig-zagged through […]
The Sex Question

Voltairine De Cleyre, “Sunday Schools and Social Intercourse Among Liberals” (1890)

August 11, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
For the Boston Investigator. SUNDAY SCHOOLS AND SOCIAL INTERCOURSE AMONG LIBERALS Mr. Editor:—Among the many wants of the Free Thought movement is a much wider social intercourse than exists at present, a much more extensive acquaintance with the literature and plans for work of other similar organizations. This became singularly evident to me on the evening of the 12th of October last, when I lectured before the German Freethinking Society at Philadelphia. So far, the American and German movements have been “things apart.”—True, an attempt was made at Milwaukee to unite them after a fashion; but it failed, because there […]
Anarchist Beginnings

J. Wm. Lloyd, “Prayer of the Governmentalist” (1886)

August 11, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
For Lucifer Prayer of the Governmentalist. Our Government which is in Washing­ton—hallowed be thy name! May thy Kingdom become, and thy will be done, in America even as the Czar’s is in Russia! Give us this day a chance at some big fat office, and remit to us our taxes ac­cording to tho amount we have loaned thee on thy bond, with interest, and grant to us favors in consideration of our ef­ficiency at election times! Lead us not into Liberty, and deliver us from Anarchy; for behold, we are al­together too stupid and greedy to comprehend or endure them! […]
fiction

Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Old Shoemaker” (1896), with note and response

August 11, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
The Old Shoemaker He had lived a long time there, in the house at the end of the alley, and no one had ever known that he was a great man. He was lean and palsied, and had a crooked back; his beard was grey and ragged, and his eyebrows came too far forward; there were seams and flaps in the empty, yellow old skin, and he gasped horribly when he breathed, taking hold of the lintel of the door to steady himself when he stepped out on the broken bricks of the alley. He lived with a frightful old […]
The Sex Question

“Voltairine De Cleyre at Greensburg” (1893)

August 11, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
For the Boston Investigator. VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE AT GREENSBURG. Mr. Editor:—In the little city of Greensburg, some thirty miles east of Pittsburgh, there are a few brave, strong souls who are making war on God and his adjutants with a zeal which only those who have a principle at heart can do. About a month ago your subscriber, being invited to deliver a lecture under the auspices of their union, found herself shaking hands with the ungodly trinity of officers one April night, after a long day’s ride though the perpetual wonder of the Alleghany mountains. Very sad, gray-brown, sorrowful […]
The Sex Question

“Justice and Jehovah” (1888)

August 11, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
“JUSTICE AND JEHOVAH.” The Address of Miss Voltairine De Cleyre Before the Cleveland Secular Union Miss Voltairine De Cleyre of Grand Rapids addressed the Secular union in the Memorial hall last evening on the subject of “Justice and Jehovah.” The central idea in her address is expressed in the quotation from Tennyson’s Locksley Hall: “Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth.” The lecturer essayed to show by a series of word pictures—told metaphorically as visions—conditions of society which cannot be properly vindicated by the idea of a just or good God. Her first description was […]
The Sex Question

Voltairine De Cleyre, “The Woman’s National Liberty Union” (1890)

August 10, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE WOMAN’S NATIONAL LIBERAL UNION Mr. Editor:—Hereafter let it not be said that the women of American are behind their brothers in the work of freeing the country from superstition’s shackles. The most radical organization in the United States, so far as the Church is concerned, was born in Washington D. C., the 24th of last month. And that organization is founded by women, officered by women, and will do its principal worth through women. It is the first and only national English-speaking body in these State of American which has the courage of its convictions, and openly declared its […]