Freethought Children's Literature and the Construction of Religious Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

Dear Miss Wixon, wrote ten-year-old Susie Cox from Minnesota in June 1893, heard about you from papa. He said I should write a letter for the Children's Corner. ... Papa takes The Truth Seeker, Investigator, Secular Thought, and the Freethinker's Magazine. We have the 'Freethinker's Pictorial Text-Book' and 'Old Testament Stories Comically Illustrated.' ... My teacher here said we were wicked people, because we did not read the Bible. I send best wishes to you and all friends.' One of the thousands of children who sent letters to juvenile periodicals during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Cox is significant because she represents part of a critically understudied population: the children of freethinkers. In the past decade, historians of freethought Lori D. Ginzberg, Susan Jacoby, and Evelyn Kirkley have begun the process of reconsidering the movement's significance in American cultural life, but their focus has been on the experiences of adults.2 This essay expands and complicates our understanding of freethought's history by examining it through the prism of children. Drawing upon children's books and periodicals, published children's letters, adult discussions of children's reading, and manuscript population census records, I argue that adult freethinkers used