Women & atheism.

Why gender is not a side issue

The major world religions are not gender-neutral institutions that happen, regrettably, to have produced some patriarchal customs. They are systems built, from their founding texts outward, around the regulation of women: their dress, their movement, their reproduction, their access to public space, their right to inherit, their right to refuse marriage, their right to leave. Strip the regulation of women out of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Quran, or the Hindu legal codes, and a large fraction of the text would not survive the cut.

That fact has two consequences for how this site approaches the subject. First, women who leave religion — or who never believed in it — are often telling you something specific about how it works: not as a private spiritual practice but as a public legal and social order. Second, “the women’s issue” is not a footnote to be raised after the metaphysical arguments are settled. For most of human history, it has been the practical content of religion in actual lives.

Living thinkers

The women below are the current generation of female atheist, agnostic, and ex-religious public intellectuals on whose work this site draws most directly.

Historical figures

The current generation did not appear out of nowhere. Women have been arguing publicly against the religious construction of their own subordination for at least two centuries — sometimes from inside organized atheism, sometimes from suffrage, abolitionism, anarchism, or labor politics, almost always at a real cost.

• Madalyn Murray O'Hair (1919–1995) — Founder of American Atheists. Won the 1963 Supreme Court case that banned mandatory school prayer. The woman who turned American atheism into an organized political force.
• Emma Goldman (1869–1940) — Anarchist, feminist, and one of the earliest American writers to argue that women's emancipation required the rejection of religion. Author of The Failure of Christianity and The Philosophy of Atheism.
• Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) — Existentialist philosopher whose The Second Sex argued that religion is one of the central structures producing 'woman' as a subordinated category. Atheist throughout her adult life.
• Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) — Birth control activist who explicitly framed reproductive autonomy as incompatible with the Catholic Church's authority over women's bodies. Imprisoned for opening America's first birth control clinic.
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) — Co-author of The Woman's Bible (1895), which rewrote scripture chapter by chapter to expose its treatment of women. Driven out of the mainstream suffrage movement for refusing to compromise on religion.
• Annie Besant (1847–1933) — Victorian freethinker, secularist, and birth-control campaigner who was prosecuted in 1877 for publishing a contraception pamphlet. Wrote Why I Do Not Believe in God before later turning to theosophy.
• Ernestine Rose (1810–1892) — Polish-born American atheist, abolitionist, and suffragist who delivered fierce public lectures against religion in the 1840s and 1850s — one of the earliest openly atheist women in American public life.

The themes that recur

Read across this list and a small number of arguments come up again and again. They are worth naming explicitly because they are not separate “women’s topics” — they are the practical content of most religion in most lives.

• Bodily autonomy.Contraception, abortion, divorce, FGM, dress codes, and the legal definition of marriage are decided in most of the world’s legal systems by reference to religious doctrine. Every woman on this page has argued, in some form, that this is the central political effect of organized religion.
• The cost of leaving. Apostasy is a capital crime in classical Islamic law and still carries serious legal or social penalties in much of the world. Even in secular democracies, women who leave faiths like Mormonism, Orthodox Judaism, or high-control evangelicalism often lose family, community, and economic support all at once. The cost falls differently on women.
• Scripture is not a neutral source. Francesca Stavrakopoulou and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, separated by a century, make the same basic point: the texts were written by particular men in particular historical situations, with particular interests in keeping women in particular places. They cannot be read as the voice of a neutral deity.
• Free speech is the precondition of every other right. The fatwas, the death threats, the imprisonments, the social shunnings — these are the ordinary consequences of women publicly criticizing religion, and they are the reason the right to do so is not optional.
• Atheism as a positive project. Almost every woman on this list, regardless of her century or her tradition, makes the same point Emma Goldman made in 1916: atheism is not mere denial. It is a commitment to this world, this life, and the fellow humans actually in it.

Voices

Where the rest of the site picks this up

Several pages on this site engage these themes directly rather than as part of someone’s biography:

• Religion and societal harm — documented effects of organized religion on women, children, and dissenters.
• Apostasy — what leaving Islam, in particular, still costs in legal and social terms.
• Leaving Islam and Leaving Orthodox Judaism — first-person accounts of high-control religious exit, where gendered cost is central.
• Religious trauma — the psychology of growing up inside high-demand belief systems.
• Church and state— the legal and constitutional fight Madalyn Murray O’Hair largely founded.