By Barbara Crane
My interest in Thomas Paine began when I moved to New Rochelle in 2016 after retirement from decades advancing women’s reproductive health, rights and justice around the world. My earlier academic work had focused on international politics and development, with special attention to the role and influence of transnational networks and policy coalitions, later also designated by scholars as “epistemic communities” – all before the Internet made such networks a feature of the global landscape.
I found myself in New Rochelle living near the historic sites associated with Paine — the 18th century cottage he lived in briefly from the farm he was granted after the Revolution, the 1839 Monument and the 1925 memorial building constructed in his honor by the Thomas Paine National Historical Association.
Little did I know my curiosity about these historic sites, owned by two different associations, would draw me into volunteering and an ongoing quest for knowledge about Paine’s political thought and influences on the American and French revolutions.
As I learned more, I discovered things about Paine that resonated with my interests and experience.
He was a central figure in an early transnational network of revolutionaries and reformers influenced by thinkers of the Enlightenment, especially in America, France, and Britain — including Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, the Marquis de Condorcet, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Their impact eventually extended to those fighting oppression in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and beyond. Paine’s elaboration of the principles of democracy, human rights, equality, and social justice in Common Sense (1776), The Rights of Man (1791) and other works, reflected the reciprocal influences among members of this network at the time.
Paine was a friend of the early British feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft. They met in the late 1780s in London and moved in the same circles there and later in Paris. She published A Vindication of the Rights of Men in 1790, a critique of Edmund Burke’s writing on the French Revolution. Paine published Rights of Man, also a critique of Burke, in 1791. In 1792, Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Like Paine, she was inspired by the French Revolution and went to France in 1792, where she remained during the worst of the Reign of Terror until 1795.
Paine’s work, The Age of Reason, initiated while he was imprisoned in France, was fundamental to the emergence of the 19th century Freethought movement in the United States that drew abolitionists, labor groups, women suffragists, birth control activists and those who stood for separation of church and state.
As one who has worked for reproductive freedom, I learned the role of the Freethought movement in resisting the Comstock Act, a draconian 1873 law that treated disseminating information and means to prevent pregnancy as obscene, including access to contraception and abortion methods. The fight against Comstock was critical to the 1884 founding of the TPNHA.
The Comstock Act is still on the books and never repealed, despite court decisions. It’s again being invoked in Texas and New Mexico by opponents of reproductive freedom to restrict access to safe abortion.
Paine’s radical thinking about democracy, human rights and equality put him at odds with more conservative Founding Fathers, leading to personal attacks on him, causing him to be discounted by many mainstream historians.
I am convinced we need to revive his fervor and his confidence in the power of Enlightenment ideas when understood by all citizens. TPNHA contributes to this goal for society. s Barbara B. Crane, PhD is a political scientist and independent consultant, retired from a career in global women’s reproductive health. She serves as Vice President on the TPNHA board.