I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly.

After schooling in the convent de Cleyre began her intellectual involvement in the strongly anti-clerical freethought movement by lecturing and contributing articles to freethought periodicals. The title of the essay refers not to traffic in women for purposes of prostitution although that is also mentioned but rather to marriage laws that allow men to rape their wives without consequences. She was a colleague of Emma Goldman with whom Voltairine de Cleyre maintained a relationship of respectful disagreement on many issues.

Many of her essays were in the Collected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre publiVoltairine de Cleyred posthumously by Mother Earth in 1914. " She believed that any system was acceptable as long as it did not involve force.