Anne Nicol Gaylor, who transformed a local campaign for abortion rights into a national crusade to maintain the separation of church and state, died on June 14 at a hospice in Fitchburg, Wis., near Madison. She was 88.

The cause was complications of a fall on May 30, her daughter, Annie Laurie Gaylor, said.

Claiming descent from a carpenter’s apprentice on the Mayflower, whose fellow passengers had sought religious freedom, and born to a nonbeliever, Ms. Gaylor became a principal founder in the 1970s of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which bills itself as the nation’s largest group of atheists and agnostics.

Even in death, she held to her principles. Having already arranged to be cremated, she left a handwritten list of instructions with her family that explicitly ordered “No memorial,” and specified that a small tombstone be inscribed “Feminist — Activist — Freethinker.”

No one could dispute those characterizations, not even the adversaries whose vitriolic passions she provoked, first by advocating abortion rights and raising money for poor women unable to afford to terminate their pregnancies, and then by singling out religion as “the root cause of women’s oppression.”