page_title: Atheist feminism
section_title: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage
hierarchical_section_title: Atheist feminism / History / Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage
caption_attribution_description: Photo of Madalyn Murray O'Hair. 1983 at Robert Ingersoll statue, Peoria, Illinois.
context_page_description: Atheist feminism is a branch of feminism that also advocates atheism. Atheist feminists hold that religion is a prominent source of female oppression and inequality, believing that the majority of the religions are sexist and oppressive towards women.
  In addition, atheist feminism opposes sexism within the atheist population. For example, Victoria Bekiempis wrote in The Guardian:
  But other female atheists are blunt in their assessment of why the face of atheism doesn't necessarily reflect the gender makeup of its adherents. Annie Laurie Gaylor, who founded the Freedom From Religion Foundation with her mother, Anne Nicol Gaylor, in 1978, sums it up succinctly: "One word – sexism." Gaylor's husband, Dan Barker, who helms the organisation along with her, is usually the one invited to speaking engagements, despite her longer tenure as the organisation's leader and her numerous books on atheism.
  The atheist Sikivu Hutchinson wrote about the hiring of David Silverman by Atheist Alliance International:
context_section_description: The most prominent other people to publicly advocate for feminism and to challenge Christianity in the 1800s were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage. In 1885 Stanton wrote an essay entitled "Has Christianity Benefited Woman?" arguing that it had in fact hurt women's rights, and stating, "All religions thus far have taught the headship and superiority of man, [and] the inferiority and subordination of woman. Whatever new dignity, honor, and self-respect the changing theologies may have brought to man, they have all alike brought to woman but another form of humiliation." In 1893 Matilda Joslyn Gage wrote the book for which she is best known, Woman, Church, and State, which was one of the first books to draw the conclusion that Christianity is a primary impediment to the progress of women, as well as civilization. In 1895 Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote The Woman's Bible, revised and continued with another book of the same name in 1898, in which she criticized religion and stated "the Bible in its teachings degrades women from Genesis to Revelation." She died in 1902.
caption: Madalyn Murray O'Hair was a noted atheist feminist
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