Greevz Fisher

Greevz Fisher (born John Greeves Fisher; 9 September 1845 – 18 May 1931) was an Anglo-Irish businessman, anarchist, activist, philologist, and co-founder of the Legitimation League.

Life

John Greeves Fisher was born in Youghal, Ireland, in 1845. In 1877, he moved to Wetherby, Yorkshire to join his cousin in business in Leeds. Although raised as a Quaker, by 1884 Fisher was described as "an acknowledged disbeliever", remaining an atheist for the rest of his life. In 1887 he married Marie Clapham, a suffragist and fellow freethinker who Fisher met at a secularist meeting in Leeds.

Fisher campaigned for the abolition of illegitimacy, and was a staunch advocate of birth control, publishing and distributing free literature on contraception. The goal of the Legitimation League was "to create machinery for acknowledging offspring born out of wedlock, and to secure for them equal rights with legitimate children." In 1893, Fisher published a pamphlet titled Illegitimate Children: An Inquiry into their Personal Rights and a Plea for the Abolition of Illegitimacy. He was considered among the leading individualists, alongside figures such as Auberon Herbert, Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Joseph Hiam Levy, and Henry Seymour. Fisher himself wrote that:The individualist creed is that the maximum of liberty is the most useful treatment for all rational beings, and… to suppose rationality to pertain to each anthropoid individual taken at random, at least until some evidence is forthcoming to the contrary.In 1892, Fisher offered himself as a 'Liberty candidate' for East Bradford. His platform included "voluntary taxation, no compulsory education, liberty for Ireland with no government, the abolition of professional monopolies, and female freedom".