Village Atheists by Schmidt Leigh Eric

Author:Schmidt, Leigh Eric.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

THE OBSCENE ATHEIST

OR, THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF INFIDELITY

EVEN AS THE BLASPHEMY TRIAL OF C. B. REYNOLDS WAS coming to a close in May 1887, the next big legal battle for freethinkers was already looming. Just three weeks before the Morristown verdict was reached, a United States marshal, acting on evidence provided by agents of Anthony Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, had shown up in the very little town of Snowville, Virginia, to arrest one of the country’s most notorious atheists, an ex-Quaker and displaced Yankee named Elmina Drake Slenker. Comstock’s far-flung inspectors had been keeping a watchful eye on Slenker for several years. They knew that she had been carrying on a vast correspondence about marriage and sexuality with various editors, physicians, amateur investigators, and advice seekers. They also knew that Slenker, nearing age sixty, was an infidel of long standing—one who relished her forthright identification as an atheist and who seemed to take particular pleasure in instilling children with her godless principles. As the New York Times rightly observed at the time of her arrest, there was “no newspaper office of a free thinking or infidel character in which her signature was not a familiar sight.” In the eyes of Comstock and company, it was hard to say which made Slenker more threatening—her brazen unbelief or her uncensored candor about marriage, sexuality, and the body. To those going after her, her blasphemy and obscenity were utterly entangled; her shameful irreligion and her “immoral sentiments” about sex were all part of the same witch’s brew.1

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