Many readers today disapprove of books solely about men, but organized atheism hasn’t always been terribly concerned with gender parity. Slenker confessed that every place she went, she was the first woman atheist anyone there had ever seen. When the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism (4As) surveyed its membership in 1930, it was 93 percent male.
Churches, by contrast, have been a model of balance, with women even outnumbering men in terms of membership. So it is ironic that one of the traditional ways that atheists attacked Christianity was for allegedly being anti-women. When 4As founder Charles Lee Smith debated evangelist and Foursquare Church founder Aimee Semple McPherson, one wonders whether he noticed that only the Christian camp could boast a prominent female leader.