Bonnie Bullough

From Philosopedia

Bullough, Bonnie (1927—1996)

Bullough, who had been a dean of nursing at the State University of New York at Buffalo, was a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. Also, she was a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism, was on that group’s Faith-Healing Investigation Project, and was a contributing editor for Free Inquiry.

In 1966 she became a Fulbright lecturer in Cairo. With her husband, Vern L. Bullough, she wrote Women and Prostitution, A Social History as well as Sexual Attitudes: Myths and Realities (1995). She spoke in Delphi, Greece, at the 1995 International Multidisciplinary Conference on Human Behaviour and the Meaning of Modern Humanism in. Also in 1995, she and her husband were given an Alfred C. Kinsey award for outstanding contributions to the scientific study of sexuality. With her husband, Bullough went to Berlin, Beijing, Amsterdam, Toronto, and elsewhere, proclaiming the virtues of humanism. In Ghana, she brought contraceptive information to women.

Gerald Larue, at a commemoration ceremony following her death, told of her somewhat unhappy childhood, of her having been born into a Mormon family and never having known her father. Larue mentioned that she had written and co-authored more than 160 refereed articles as well as another fifty and over twenty chapters in a variety of books.

Bullough, who suffered from interstitial lung disease, chose to spend her last hours playing a game of bridge and, just before dying, left her husband Vern with a list of jobs to do, including the final preparation of a book she was completing. This illustrated, Paul Kurtz wrote, that she “did not believe in the illusion of immortality. She thought that the best response to death is the reaffirmation of life.”

{Free Inquiry, Summer 1996; HNS2}