Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner (1858-1935)

Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner was the daughter of pioneering secularist Charles Bradlaugh, but was herself a remarkable humanist, who lectured, wrote, and organised in the name of human rights, rationalism, and peace. A Vice President of both the National Secular Society and the Ethical Union (now Humanists UK), she also sat on the Executive Committees of the Humanitarian League, the International Arbitration League, and the Women’s National Liberal Federation. She campaigned against the death penalty and the blasphemy laws, and staunchly defended the reputation of her father, while creating a worthy legacy of her own.

Hypatia Bradlaugh was born in London on 30 March 1858, the daughter of prominent secularist Charles Bradlaugh and his wife, Susannah (née Hooper). Alongside her elder sister, Alice, Hypatia was educated at private schools, and later at the secular school at Old Street’s Hall of Science. There, Hypatia studied, taught, and met her future husband, Arthur Bonner. The couple became engaged in 1884, and were married the following year.

Both Alice and Hypatia were active in freethought circles: lecturing, writing, and becoming Vice Presidents of the National Secular Society. Hypatia contributed regularly to her father’s National Reformer, and to Annie Besant’s Our Corner. She also acted, until his death in 1891, as secretary to Charles Bradlaugh, after which she devoted herself to writing the two-volume Charles Bradlaugh: a Record of his Life and Work, published in 1894. She worked tirelessly to defend her father’s reputation, and wrote a rebuttal to claims of a deathbed conversion to Christianity entitled Did Charles Bradlaugh Die an Atheist? (1898).

Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner was the founding Chair of the Rationalist Peace Society, formed in 1910 ‘to carry on Peace propaganda on Rationalist lines’. In 1913, introducing a collection of essays written to present a rationalist perspective on peace, she wrote of the urgency of such a task, rejecting the notion that anti-war work was the preserve of the Christian. The essays, she wrote, were:

As well as noting the pacifist ideals present in non-Christian belief systems, such as Confucianism and Buddhism, Bradlaugh Bonner pointed to a venerable tradition of freethinkers who had criticised or rejected war, including Voltaire, Paine, Shelley, and Comte. In contrast to those ‘Christian rulers’ who had for centuries ‘gone to war in order to assert the superiority of their faith’, she quoted L.T. Hobhouse (President of the Ethical Union in 1923), who had observed in 1899 that:

Throughout the early decades of the 20th century, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner lectured, organised, and wrote in the name of progressive political thought and humanist values. She was an advocate of women’s suffrage, an opponent of the death penalty, and a promoter of moral (rather than religious) education in schools. She was actively involved with the Rationalist Press Association, including as a regular contributor to The Literary Guide (now the New Humanist) and the Agnostic Annual, as well as serving on the Executive Committees of the Humanitarian League, the International Arbitration League, and the Women’s National Liberal Federation. She remained a popular speaker for freethought and humanitarian causes until 1924, when an ailing voice necessitated her retirement from the lecture circuit. She served as a Justice of the Peace 1921-1934, which she valued – wrote J.P. Gilmour – for ‘the opportunities it provided to have justice tempered with mercy, and thus helping to avert that wrecking of human lives which arbitrary punishment of first offenders is apt to entail’. 

Rationalist Peace Society and Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner’s Thomas Paine Collection | Bishopsgate Institute

Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner by Edward Royle | Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Essays Towards Peace (1913)

Works by Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner | The Internet Archive