An intimate, influential activist in the Gage, Stanton, Anthony wing of the 19th century women's rights / suffrage movement and the National Woman Suffrage Association, Blake was also a noted fiction writer, journalist, essayist, lecturer. Born in North Carolina, she spent her first your years on her father's plantation in Roanoke, Virginia. When her father died in 1837, mother returned to her family in Connecticut. Like many of the other woman's rights leaders of her era, Blake was much better educated than most other women of her time: she attended school until age 15, then was privately tutored in the Yale undergraduate curriculum. Married to Frank Umsted in 1855, her first daughter was born in 1857, about the same time as her first short story published by Harper's Weekly in 1857, and her second daughter born in 1858.

      Widowed in late 1858 when her husband shot himself in head (it is unknown if it was suicide or an accident), Blake refused to define herself as a victim and refused remarriage as a solution to her financial problems. Rather, she turned almost exclusively to writing for mass market magazines, adopting numerous pseudonyms. Becoming a Washington-based Civil War correspondent for 1 magazine and 2 papers, she eventually married Grifill Blake in 1866 but continued to support herself by writing. Writing under at least a half-dozen pseudonyms, she established her reputation as a voice for women's rights. Her works include a collection of short stories, a collection of essays, hundreds of uncollected short stories and essays, and 5 novels including Southwold (c. 1859), Rockford; or, Sunshine and Storm (1863), Forced Vows; or, A Revengeful Woman's Fate (1870), and Fettered for Life; or, Her Lord and Master (1874) and Woman and Paganism in Christianity. Blake's public lectures in response to Dr. Morgan Dix's Lenten lectures on "Woman" were published under the title Woman's Place To-Day and did much to awaken women to the cause of suffrage. Possibly best known today as the author of Fettered for Life, a novel about the very real potential for women to make not just disastrous, but deadly, marriages, Blake constantly warned women to beware of their legal disabilities.

      After 1869 she devoted herself to the woman's movement, touring the US speaking on women's rights. Some of her accomplishments as a woman's rights activist include: president of NY State Woman suffrage Association (1879-1890) and Civic and Political Equality Union of New York City (1898-1900) and founder of the National Legislative League. Successfully leading campaigns to establish pensions for Civil War nurses, to open civil service positions to women, to give women joint custody of their children, to enable women to serve on school boards, and to work in public institutions where women were incarcerated. Blake along with Matilda Joslyn Gage and others signed the1876 Centennial Women's Rights Declaration.

      As the 19th century was drawing to a close, the woman's movement was becoming more conservative - it was becoming acceptable to be a woman's suffragist. After the American Woman's Suffrage Association and the National Woman's Suffrage Association were merged, the combined organization turned sharply conservative. Upon Susan B. Anthony's retirement from the presidency of the NAWSA, Blake unsuccessfully contended with Carry Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw to head the organization: Shaw, and eventually Catt, became the leaders of the combined organization.

      Blake's commentary on of the creation story in Genesis is taken from The Woman's Bible. Blake referred to both creation stories in Genesis. Her tone is the most indignant of all of the writers we have seen yet.

      Blake begins her analysis by noting that the first creation story in Genesis (Genesis 1: 26 - 28) where God formed man in his own image as man and woman is evidence that early Hebrews were polytheists. The creatures are created in an ever-increasing order of glory, with woman, God's most glorious creation, being formed last. Echoing Mary Astell's observation of 3 centuries earlier, Blake notes that man cannot be considered to be superior to woman without considering the beasts of the field to be superior to man.

      "Many orientalists and students of theology have maintained that the consultation of the Gods here described is proof that the Hebrews were in early days polytheists - Scott's supposition that this is the origin of the Trinity has no foundation in fact, as the beginning of that conception is to be found in the earliest of all known religious nature worship. The acknowledgment of the dual principle, masculine and feminine, is much more probably the explanation of the expressions here used.

      In the detailed description of creation we find a gradually ascending series. Creeping thins, "great sea monsters," (chap 1, v 21, literal translation). "Every bird of wing," cattle and living things of the earth, the fish of the sea and the "birds of the heavens," then man, and last and crowning glory of the whole, woman.

      It cannot be maintained that woman was inferior to man even if, as asserted in chapter ii, she was created after him with out at once admitting that man is inferior to the creeping things, because [he was] created after them." page 19

      "In v 23 Adam proclaims the eternal oneness of the happy pair, "This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh;" no hint of her subordination. How could men, admitting these words to be divine revelation, ever have preached the subjection of woman!

      Next comes the naming of the mother of the race. "She shall be called Woman," in the ancient form of the word, Womb-man. She was man and more than man because of her maternity.

      The assertion of the supremacy of the woman in the marriage relation is contained in v. 24: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave unto his wife." Nothing is said of the headship of the man, but he is commanded to make her the head of the household, the home, a rule followed for centuries under the Matiarchate." pages 21 - 22

      Finally, in discussing Genesis 3: 1-24, Blake uses arguments that have by now become familiar to our readers. While echoing earlier writers, Blake manages to emphasize what the Bible does not say and contrasts Adam's behavior with Eve's - that the story is about the fall of man, not the fall of woman; the brevity in which Adam's fall is recorded v. the long narrative on Eve's fall; the absence of any leadership as head of the household on Adam's part; Adam's shameless conduct in the aftermath of the incident as opposed to Eve's forthright acknowledgment of her part

      "Note the significant fact that we always hear of the "fall of man," not the fall of woman, showing that the consensus of human thought has been more unerring than masculine interpretation. Reading this narrative carefully, it is amazing that any set of men ever claimed that the dogma of inferiority of woman is here set forth. The conduct of Eve from the beginning to the end is so superior to that of Adam. The command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge was given to the man alone before the woman was formed, Gen 2: 17. Therefore the injunction was not brought to Eve with the impressive solemnity of a Divine Voice, but whispered to her by her husband and equal. It was a serpent supernaturally endowed, a seraphim as Scott and other commentators have claimed, who talked with Eve, and whose words might reasonably seem superior to the second-hand story of her companion - nor does the woman yield at once. She quotes the command not to eat of the fruit to which the serpent replies "Dying ye shall not die," v 4, literal translation. In other words telling her that if the mortal body does perish, the immortal part shall live forever, and offering as the reward of her act the attainment of Knowledge.

      Then the woman fearless of death if she can gain wisdom takes of the fruit; and all this time Adam standing beside her interposes no word of objection. "Her husband with her" are the words of v 6. Had he been the representative of the divinely appointed head in married life, he assuredly would have taken upon himself the burden of the discussion with the serpent, but no, he is silent in this crisis of their fate. Having had the command from God himself he interposes no word of warning or remonstrance, but takes the fruit from the hand of his wife without a protest. It takes six verses to describe the "fall" of woman, the fall of man is contemptuously dismissed in a line and a half.

      The subsequent conduct of Adam was to the last degree dastardly. When the awful time of reckoning comes, and the Jehovah God appears to demand why his command has been disobeyed, Adam endeavors to shield himself behind the gentle being he has declared to be so dear. "The woman thou gavest to be with me, she gave me and I did eat," he whines - trying to shield himself at his wife's expense! Again we are amazed that upon such a story men have built up a theory of their superiority!

      Then follows what has been called the curse. Is it not rather a prediction? First is the future fate of the serpent described, the enmity of the whole human race - "it shall lie in wait for thee as to the head" (v 15, literal translation). Next the subjection of the woman is foretold, thy husband "shall rule over thee," v 16. Lastly the long struggle of man with the forces of nature is portrayed. "In the sweat of they face thou shalt eat food until thy turning back to the earth (v 19, literal translation). With the evolution of humanity an ever increasing number of men have ceased to toil for their bread with their hands, and with the introduction of improved machinery, and the uplifting of the race there will come a time when there shall be no severities of labor, and when women shall be freed from all oppressions.

      "And Adam called his wife's name Life for she was the mother of all living things" (v 20, literal translation).

      It is a pity that all versions of the Bible do not give this word instead of the Hebrew Eve. She was Life, the eternal mother, the first representative of the more valuable and important half of the human race." pages 26 - 27

      The Woman's Bible, Coalition on Women and Religion, Seattle, 1992

      Annie Laurie Gaylor (ed.), Women Without Superstition: "No Gods - No Masters": The Collected Writings of Women Freethinkers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 696-page hardback, fully indexed, 51 photographs, published in 1997 by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. (See booklist to order.) $25

      Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements, The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present [New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990] Blain notes that for info on her life, see Katherine Devereux Blake and Margaret Loiuse Wallace, 1943

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