'"[5] During the Civil War, Marilla offered her services as a nurse for the Union Army, but she was turned down due to her lack of medical training.

"[6] As she could not tend to the wounded soldiers, Ricker devoted as much time and money as she could to sending clothes and other goods to aid the war effort.

Biographers disagree on what she accomplished on her travels, suggesting that she either engaged with European freethought movements or simply wanted to learn new cultures and languages.

Ricker worked on the famous Star Route trial with Robert Ingersoll – perhaps the United States' most well-known agnostic.

[14] The Boston Globe praised her charity, noting that she "spent her entire income, beyond the actual necessary expenses of her personal maintenance, in these noble efforts.

[18] In 1869, the year after her husband's death, Ricker attended the first National Woman Suffrage Association convention, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

"[20] Freethinking suffragists believed that the interference of religion in the effort to obtain the vote for women would delay or even prevent the movement from achieving its goal.

Their non-religious views often have been suppressed, as if shameful, when in fact repudiation of patriarchal religion is an essential step in freeing women."

"[22] During the 1910s, Ricker remained in New Hampshire and, perhaps due to failing health, concentrated on publishing articles and books elucidating her freethought beliefs.

Not only did the churches own more than "13 billions" of property, on which they were too "dishonest" to pay taxes, they also were responsible for pervasive inequality and the fact that "human freedom is but half won.

"[23] Ultimately, her publications extolled the goals toward which she had been working for her entire life: "I am a freethought missionary, and I am doing my 'level best' to drive superstition, alias Christianity, from the minds of mankind.

"[24] Ricker often wrote the same phrase in the front of her books, especially those that she donated to libraries: "A steeple is no more to be excluded from taxation than a smoke stack.