Eva Parker Ingersoll (née Eva Amelia Parker; 4 May 1841 – 2 February 1923) was an American freethinker, activist, and the wife of Robert G. Ingersoll, said to have been a significant influence on the development of her husband's own humanism.
Early life
Eva Amelia Parker was born in Groveland, Illinois, the daughter of Mr. & Mrs. Benjamin Weld Parker. Her parents were freethinkers: admirers of Thomas Paine and Voltaire. Eva's paternal grandmother, Sarah Buckman Parker, was known to be extremely bright and a noted “infidel.”
Robert Ingersoll was a lawyer and lecturer, who became best known as 'the great agnostic'. Eva Parker was described as being 'as free a thinker' as he was. The couple met when Ingersoll, defending a client in Groveland, was invited to dine with the Parkers. The family were described as being 'good heretics and "infidels" on their own account' and, as such, had been 'intensely interested in Robert ever since he made his first anti-theological speech, entitled Progress, at Pekin, Illinois, about a year before'.
Marriage
Parker married Robert Green Ingersoll at her family home on 13 February 1862. In his 1927 biography of Robert Ingersoll (who died in 1899), Joseph McCabe wrote of the marriage that:I dislike gush and will say only, in hackneyed phrase but with sincere meaning, that Ingersoll found an ideal mate. As late as 1913 and 1917 I found the home somehow so full of the spirit and presence of Robert Ingersoll that it was difficult to believe that he was not merely at work up-town and would drop in for dinner... Agnostic like himself, moved and directed by the same high ideals as himself, proud of him and devotedly attached to him, conscious that through him she was working for the world in working for him and his children, Eva Ingersoll found the thing which is as beautiful as it is rare, a perfect home, and she gave American mothers for all time a refulgent example of an entirely sweet and harmonious and serviceable family-life without a little of either the letter or the spirit of Christianity.This sentiment was echoed in the biography of Robert Ingersoll written by the couple's granddaughter, who wrote:Robert Ingersoll enjoyed the incomparable blessing of a supremely happy home from the day of his marriage until the day of his death. For thirty-eight years husband and wife were intellectual and spiritual comrades as well as romantic lovers, sharing each other's beliefs, thoughts, and emotions, consecrated to the same ideals and purposes. Robert inscribed his first published volume of lectures to "My Wife, a Woman Without Superstition."Helen H. Gardener devoted her 1885 work Men, women and gods, and other lectures to Eva Ingersoll, writing:This little volume is respectfully dedicated, with the love of the author, to Mrs. Eva Ingersoll, the brave, happy wife of America's greatest orator and woman's truest friend. In her beautiful home-life superstition and fear have never entered; human equality and freedom have their highest illustration; and time has deepened youthful love into a diviner worship than angels offer or than gods inspire.Robert and Eva Ingersoll had two daughters, Eva and Maud, both of whom went on to be prominent activists. Eva Ingersoll Brown's daughter, Eva Ingersoll Brown Wakefield (1892–1970) was, alongside John Dewey, Albert Einstein, Julian Huxley, Thomas Mann, and George W. Rappleyea, an early member of The First Humanist Society of New York, founded in 1929.
