involved in the strongly anti-clerical freethought movement by lecturing and contributing articles to freethought periodicals, eventually becoming the editor of freethought newspaper The Progressive Age. During her time in the freethought movement in the mid and late 1880s, de Cleyre was especially influenced by Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and Clarence Darrow. Other influences were Henry David Thoreau and labor leaders Big Bill Haywood and Eugene Debs. After the 1887 execution of several Haymarket protesters in Chicago, she became an anarchist. "Till then I believed in the essential justice of the American law of trial by jury", she wrote in an autobiographical essay, "After that I never could". She was known as an excellent speaker and writer. Biographer Paul Avrich said that she was "a greater literary talent than any other American anarchist". She was also known as a tireless advocate for the anarchist cause whose "religious zeal", according to Emma Goldman, "stamped everything she did." She became pregnant by James B. Elliot, another freethinker, giving birth to their son Harry on June 12, 1890. As de Cleyre and Elliot agreed, their son lived with Elliot, and de Cleyre had no part in his upbringing. She was close to and inspired by Dyer Lum ("her teacher, her confidant, her comrade", according to Goldman). Her relationship with him ended shortly before he committed suicide in 1893. De Cleyre based her operations from 1889 to 1910 in Philadelphia, where she lived among poor Jewish immigrants and where sympathy for anarchist beliefs was common. There, she taught English and music and learned to speak and write in Yiddish. Throughout her life, de Cleyre was plagued by illness. Goldman said that she had "some disease of the nervous system which she had developed in early childhood". She survived an assassination attempt on December 19, 1902. Her assailant Herman Helcher was a former pupil who had earlier been rendered insane by a fever and whom she immediately forgave as she wrote: "It would be an outrage against civilization if he were sent to jail for an act which was the product of a diseased brain". Death De Cleyre died from septic meningitis on June 20, 1912, at St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. She is interred near the Haymarket defendants and other social activists at the Waldheim Cemetery (now Forest Home Cemetery) in Forest Park, a suburb west of Chicago. Goldman was later buried