Page:Heroines of freethought (IA cu31924031228699).pdf/224

216 she traveled through Pennsylvania many years ago. Controverted and attacked by the clergy and the press, she maintained an undaunted front, and persevered to the last. That she was a woman of great mind is established by the number of her followers, including some of the best intellects of the country, and by the repeated publication and very general reading of her tracts and essays.”

Elizabeth Oakes Smith, in an article published in the Revolution in 1868, speaks of her thus: "I arrived in the city of New York near the close of the year 1839, and the great topic of conversation was this remarkable woman, who was most certainly the pioneer woman in the field of the lecture-room.”

“Fanny Wright was most grievously aspersed on every side, and she must have felt to the core her innate worthiness, to bear it as she did. They said she was an “Infidel,” using the word precisely as a Turk might have applied it to a Christian,