Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Woman's Bible and the Roots of Feminist Theology.

You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon the earth has degraded woman. [1] Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1885

On November 12, 1895, the National Council of Women, a coalition of suffrage groups, sponsored a celebration at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City in honor of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's eightieth birthday. Six thousand people filled the house to pay tribute to Stanton and to celebrate her half- century of service to the woman's movement. [2] Stanton's birthday celebration made headlines across the country, as women gathered to praise the suffrage movement's most prominent leader. The Mail and Express of New York reported that the "event is being celebrated in a hundred thousand homes in every part of the great Union, where her name has long been revered as the synonym of progress and the elevation of American womanhood." [3] In San Francisco, where a huge crowd gathered to honor Stanton, the Daily Report stated that a "really great woman is now eighty years old. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's beautiful life is celebrated to-day by 700,000 women." [4] The New York Recorder described the celebration as the "event of the century" and a "grand tribute to Woman." [5]

Stanton was pleased and honored by this demonstration of support, yet she also seemed surprised, even puzzled by the praise. As she recalled in her autobiography:

My birthday celebration, with all the testimonials of love and friendship I received, was an occasion of such serious thought and deep feeling as I had never before experienced. Having been accustomed for half a century to blame rather than praise, I was surprised with such manifestations of approval; I could endure any amount of severe criticism with complacency, but such an outpouring of homage and affection stirred me profoundly. [6]

If Stanton genuinely preferred praise and approval to criticism and controversy, one hardly would have known it from the speech she delivered at her birthday celebration. Opening with a few remarks about the achievements of the women's movement over the past fifty years, Stanton devoted the remainder of the speech to an attack on religion, describing how the "perversion of the religious element in woman" had relegated her to subservient status. "We must demand," Stanton declared, "that the pulpit be no longer desecrated by men who read passages of Scripture or preach from texts that teach the subordination of one-half the human race to the other." In remarks seemingly designed to inflame and polarize, Stanton concluded that the "imperative duty" of the woman's movement "at this hour" was "to demand a thorough revision of creeds and codes, Scriptures and constitutions" that oppressed women in the name of religion. [7]

The first volume of Stanton's Woman's Bible appeared just two weeks later. The most polemical work of her career, Stanton's Bible represented a wholesale attack on Christianity and the Bible--the realization of the demand in her birthday speech that oppressive religious doctrines be "revised and corrected." In sharp contrast to the praise and adulation of her birthday tributes, the Woman's Bible again made Stanton the object of criticism and scorn, not only among religious leaders and social conservatives, but even among her colleagues in the suffrage movement. Even the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) rejected the Woman's Bible by passing an official censure resolution at their annual convention in January 1896. Proclaiming the Woman's Bible a strategic mistake, the resolution put NAWSA on record as having "no official connection with the so-called 'Woman's Bible.'" [8]

Scholars generally have praised Stanton as an astute, even brilliant public advocate, but few have counted the Woman's Bible among her greatest works. Some have largely ignored the Woman's Bible; in her 225-page biography of Stanton, for example, Elisabeth Griffith dedicates only four pages to the work. [9] In an attempt to sanitize their mother's image, Stanton's own children expunged all references to the Woman's Bible from the 1922 edition of her autobiography. [10] Still other scholars have judged the Woman's Bible a rhetorical blunder that tarnished Stanton's reputation and cost her the leadership of the suffrage movement. Stanton biographer Lois Banner, for example, has proclaimed the Woman's Bible a "failure, [11] while feminist scholar Kathi Kern similarly has argued that the Woman's Bible "backfired" and "did more to offend than persuade its potential audience." [12] Religious scholar Jeanne Stevensen-Moessner also seemed convinced that the Woman's Bible was a mistake. According to Stevensen-Moessne r, the Woman's Bible's "theological trajectory" diverted attention from Stanton's agenda of political reform and contributed little of lasting value to the cause of women's liberation. As such, StevensenMoessner concludes, the Woman's Bible is of "value primarily as a historical piece." [13]

This essay offers a much different assessment of Stanton's Woman's Bible. I argue that by challenging the leadership of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and by raising questions more far-reaching than the right to vote, the Woman's Bible helped broaden the agenda of the woman's movement and foreshadowed the theological revisions of feminism's "second wave." Deliberately provocative and polarizing, the Woman's Bible was designed not to ingratiate and persuade, but rather to shake up a movement that Stanton believed had become too conservative and short-sighted. By dismantling and demythologizing patriarchal images of biblical women, Stanton laid the foundation for the more radical, cultural feminism of the late twentieth century.

The first section of this essay reviews the history of feminist biblical criticism that shaped Stanton's early reflections on religion. From the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century, a handful of women challenged patriarchal interpretations of the Bible, yet few of these critics rejected the Bible as a whole. Most merely reinterpreted the scriptures to reflect more positively on women and to warrant calls for gender equality. Early in her career, Stanton's reflections on religion fit squarely within this history of positive, reform-minded biblical interpretation. Insisting only that the Bible had been distorted by sexist interpretations, and urging a greater voice for women in the institutionalized church, Stanton stopped well short of proclaiming religion per se the enemy of women.

As I show in the second section of this essay, however, Stanton's religious rhetoric changed radically in the 1880s and 1890s, beginning with her speech to the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1885 and culminating in the publication of the Woman's Bible in 1895. Stanton now attacked the Bible and Christianity directly as relics of ancient, misogynist cultures. In the Woman's Bible, Stanton unleashed a radical attack on all that was sacred, even to her colleagues in the suffrage cause. In doing so, she accomplished precisely what she set out to accomplish: the Woman's Bible attracted extraordinary attention, refocused the debate over women's rights on the root causes of sexist oppression, and shook up a movement that Stanton felt had stagnated in its single-minded pursuit of the elective franchise.

The History of Feminist Biblical Criticism

The historical legacy of feminist biblical interpretation is largely fragmented and diverse. [14] Yet, while feminist biblical critics throughout history have varied in their beliefs and ultimate goals, all have claimed the right to reinterpret the scriptures from a woman's perspective. "Whatever route women took to self-authorization and whether they were religiously inspired or not," as historian Gerda Lerner has explained, women "were confronted by the core texts of the Bible, which were used for centuries by patriarchal authorities to define the proper roles for women in society and to justify the subordination of women." [15] Throughout the medieval and Renaissance eras, the challenge to these patriarchal readings of the Bible focused primarily on the Creation and the Fall.

Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval mystic and a devout nun, was one of the first women to publish biblical criticism. In her Book of Divine Works, written between 1141 and 1151, [16] Hildegard disputed the notion of woman's inherent weakness by arguing that Satan tempted Eve because he recognized her procreative abilities. "Satan saw the woman," Hildegard wrote, "and realized that she would be the mother who would bear in her womb a world of great possibilities." [17] Over a century later Christine de Pizan wrote what many consider to be the first feminist religious work in the Western tradition, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405). Like Hildegard, de Pizan challenged patriarchal interpretations of the Bible, arguing that Eve's sin actually benefitted society in the long run. "[I]f anyone would say that man was banished because of Lady Eve, " she wrote, "I tell you that he gained more

through Mary than he lost through Eve when humanity was conjoined to the Godhead, which never would have taken place if Eve's misdeed had not occurred." "Thus man and woman should be glad for this sin," she reasoned, "through which such an honor has come about." [18]

In the sixteenth century, Jane Anger, considered to be the "first major female polemicist in English," [19] reinterpreted the Creation story to emphasize Eve's purity and moral superiority. Her essays, written in the old English style characteristic of the Elizabethan era, went beyond the interpretations of …