Watch Annie Laurie Gaylor's timely talk on the history of women
and freethought. Click here to view the embedded video. Today's
New York Times bears a heartbreaking photograph on its front
page showing a row of abject women garment workers in
Bangladesh. The accompanying story reports that they daily churn
out garments for the U.S. and European markets that individually
often sell for more than each garment worker earns in a month.
Minimum wage for garment workers is set at roughly $37 a month.
That inexpensive "Made in Bangladesh" label comes with too high
a price tag for womankind. The story immediately brought to mind
a haunting quote, my favorite quote by 19th century freethinker
Helen H. Gardener. In the chapter, "Vicarious Atonement" from
her elegant and still-timely book, Men, Women and Gods (1885,
reprinted in my anthology Women Without Superstition), Gardener
wrote: "I do not know of any divine commands. I do know of most
important human ones. I do not know the needs of a god or of
another world. I d