Elizabeth D. Slenker

From Philosopedia

Slenker, Elizabeth “Elmina” Drake (1827–1908)

Slenker, the daughter of a Shaker preacher expelled for becoming a "Liberal," was born in La Grange, New York. She wrote for nearly all the Liberal (freethinking) journals of her era and knew many of the reformers. She advertised, successfully, for an egalitarian husband in the Water-Cure Journal and married Isaac Slenker, Quaker-style.

Elmira preached alcoholic and sexual temperance, adopting a philosophy called "Dianaism," which taught sexual sublimation and practices to avoid unwanted pregnancies. With Lillian and Moses Harman, she worked on a free-love journal, Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, which advocated using contraceptive devices, for which she developed a sex survey, anticipating the Kinsey Reports. Agents of Anthony Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice arrested her for mailing sealed letters of advice on sex and marriage to private correspondents. With bail set at $2,000, she was shown into a cold cell with a blanket on the floor. The New York Times critically reported in its coverage of her newsworthy arrest that Elmina refused to swear on a bible and testified at a preliminary hearing that she did not believe in god, ghosts, Heaven, Hell, the bible or Christianity.

The pleasant, ordinary looking woman was vilified as "homely" for sporting a radically short haircut. Unable to raise bail she spent 6 months in jail and was indicted on July 12, 1887.

Freethinking attorney Edward W. Chamberlain represented her during her October trial, at which a jury found her guilty. She was set free on a technicality by the judge on November 4, 1887. Truth Seeker readers paid her legal expenses.

She wrote Studying the Bible in 1870 and published several novels, including The Clergyman's Victims, The Infidel School-Teacher, and The Darwins. In the former, she wrote:

• When a mere girl, my mother offered me a dollar if I would read the Bible through; . . . . despairing of reconciling many of its absurd statements with even my childish philosophy, . . . I became a sceptic, doubter, and unbeliever, long ere the "Good Book" was ended.

From 1892 to 1893, she edited from Snowville, Virginia, Little Freethinker.

In her early 80s, Slenker died in Snowdon, Virginia.

{BDF; EU, William F. Ryan; FFRF; PUT; WWS}