Voltairine de Cleyre

The Sex Question

Voltairine De Cleyre, “Washington Sights and Sounds” (1890)

August 19, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
For the Boston Investigator. WASHINGTON SIGHTS AND SOUNDS. Mr. Editor:—When Charles Dickens visited us in 1842, he wrote that Washington was rather a city that was “going to be,” than an accomplished fact. Choosing between this opinion and that of a personal friend who declares it is the only city in the United States fit to live in, I should award the palm to Dickens. Washington is still a largely “going to be” sort of place, a queer mixture of metropolitan airs and country village smells. I had heard so much of its magnificent distances that I was prepared to […]
The Sex Question

Voltairine de Cleyre, “Are they Fallen?” (1902)

August 19, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
Are They Fallen? I am not sure that the wisest policy for me, having said my say on the subject of fallen women, would not be to display a “masterly inactivity.” I have little taste for controversy, and generally feel that when one has made a strong statement of a case (at least as strong as the writer’s ability permits) the best thing to do is to let others do the arguing. However, as I feel that the point that I am urging in this discussion is, though the curious bias which the continuously negating attitude gives to the human […]
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 […]
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 […]