Rereading Eve: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and The Woman's Bible, 1885-1896
On an overcast Thursday morning, January 23, 1896, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) gathered, appropriately, in the Church of Our Father, Washington, D.C., for the opening session of its twenty-eighth annual convention. The press reported that notwithstanding the weather, several hundred "bright-faced women" filled the "cozy little church." Delegates, this reporter continued, who were "all animated by the same motive, the desire to secure equal rights before the law for women."
As the proceedings got under way, tension and conflict among the delegates overshadowed shared motives. Rachel Foster Avery, NAWSA's Corresponding Secretary, submitted her annual report which concluded:
During the latter part of this year, the work of our Association has been … much hindered by … the so-called "Woman's Bible." As an association we have been held responsible for the action of an individual … in issuing a volume with a pretentious title, covering a jumble of comment … without either scholarship or literary value, set forth in a spirit which is neither that of reverence or inquiry.… I should be untrue to my duties as secretary of the Association did I fail to report the fact that our work is being damaged.
Avery then called for a convention resolution denouncing the individual action of this officer. The unnamed officer and editor of the volume was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, honorary president of NAWSA. The volume in question was The Woman's Bible, a collection of scriptural passages pertaining to women accompanied by commentaries on those passages. Eighty years old and a virtual shutin, Stanton was not in attendance at the NAWSA convention. Defending Stanton were two of her younger colleagues who had assisted in the compilation of The Woman's Bible: Clara Colby, editor of the liberal suffrage paper, The Woman's Tribune, and Lillie Devereux Blake, president of the New York City Woman's Suffrage League.
Colby immediately objected to the report, called for the paragraph on The Woman's Bible to be expunged, and offered a defense of Stanton and free speech. Colby was countered by other speakers who, according to reporters, handled the book "pretty roughly." Blake, on the other hand, insisted that much of the criticism voiced rose from sheer ignorance about the book. Turning to the audience, Blake asked for an indication of how many of them had actually read The Woman's Bible. Eight hands in all went up.
As the discussion ensued several delegates suggested that the national convention was an inappropriate forum for a debate so clearly outside the boundaries of the suffrage movement. Influential officers, however, insisted that the book had a direct and damaging impact on suffrage work. The Secretary's denunciation, they claimed, "voiced the sentiments of the rank and file of the party in every portion of the Union." Worried that this discussion would dominate the convention, NAWSA's president, Susan B. Anthony, supported a motion to table the report and argued that if "the association should take to criticizing and repudiating the views of individual members it would have very little time to do anything else." The vote to table carried by 59 to 16. A head-on collision between The Woman's Bible's opponents and advocates was temporarily averted.
The Woman's Bible, a collection of feminist commentaries on biblical passages published in two volumes in 1895 and 1898, has narrowly escaped obscurity. When the feminist spirituality movement of the 1970s re-kindled the attack on patriarchal Christian texts, The Woman's Bible was resurrected, reprinted and re-read. It appealed to a new generation of readers not so much for the quality of its scholarship, but rather as a symbol of the seemingly timeless hermeneutical challenges feminists faced. Yet we know very little about the role of The Woman's Bible within its own historical context. While historians have not yet been impressed with the importance of The Woman's Bible, the circumstances of its creation and reception demonstrate the extent to which contemporary notions of "woman's sphere" were not static but, in fact, were a point of critical debate among women reformers.
Stanton's religious dissent was repudiated by the very constituency she hoped to convert. In forcing the public discussion of The Woman's Bible, Stanton accelerated the suffrage movement's articulation of an increasingly conservative vision of woman's rights. Both the narrowing political platform and the narrowing ideological vision which emerged from this controversy reinforced conventional notions of separate spheres by championing woman's "special" rather than "equal" participation in religion, society and politics.
Stanton's creation of The Woman's Bible reflected a life-long disenchantment with organized religion and its impact on women. By the 1880s, Stanton's direction as a reformer had shifted from what she perceived as the movement's narrowing political focus to a complete emancipation from "woman's sphere." Central to this campaign was her indictment of the church and clergy whom she charged with women's social conservativism. Stanton offered two reasons for her renewed attention to the church. First was her belief that woman's political subjection grew out of her denigration in the church. The second was her impatience with traditional avenues for social and political reform. In 1886, Stanton complained to a colleague that she was
discouraged & disgruntled, & I feel like making an attack on some new quarter of the enemies [sic] domain. Our politicians are calm & complacent under our fire, but the clergy jump round the minute you aim a pop gun at them like parched peas on a hot shovel.
Stanton throughout her public career had published articles, given speeches and authored resolutions censuring the church for its role in the subjection of women. As early as 1854 she had offended fellow abolitionists and woman's rights advocates by claiming the pronouncements of Paul regarding women were but "human parchments" in need of amendment. In 1869 Stanton reported she had begun work on a book titled "Women of the Bible." Her nationwide lyceum lecture tours in the 1870s included a speech entitled "The Bible and Woman's Rights" in which she argued the Bible supported women's right to the franchise. While in England in the early eighties, Stanton delivered a controversial lecture, "Has the Christian Religion Done Ought for Woman?" (She determined it had not.) A published version of this address appeared two years later in The North American Review.
Although clerical issues frequently occupied Stanton's thought and writing earlier in life, by the mid 1880s she turned with renewed vigor to questions of religion. Specifically in 1885 and 1886 she shocked fellow suffragists and liberal clergy alike with a convention resolution asking association members to withdraw "personal support" for all individuals or institutions who taught that "woman was an afterthought in creation, her sex a misfortune, marriage a condition of subordination, and maternity a curse." By the 1890s, however, the Bible itself became Stanton's chief political target.
But why the Bible? Why would a veteran abolitionist and leading suffragist desert the injustices of live men and women in favor of a seemingly esoteric battle against the Bible? Stanton's persistent attack on the Bible throughout these years responded directly to the suffrage movement's changing constituency and ideology. By 1881, under the leadership of Frances Willard, the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) had adopted a suffrage plank to achieve its goal of total abstinence. The WCTU swelled the ranks of sagging local and national suffrage organizations with its 200,000 members, considerable financial resources, and established women's networks. While many suffrage leaders welcomed the WCTU with open arms, Stanton feared the influx of evangelical women would endanger the movement's traditional focus on a broadly based emancipation of women, one that insisted on women's simultaneous liberation in the political process, the church and the family. "We who understand the dangers threatened in the Prohibition movement," Stanton wrote to Colby, "must not be dazzled by the promise of a sudden acquisition of members to our plat-form, with the wide spread influence of the church behind them, if with all this is coming a religious proscription, that will undermine the secular nature of our government." Stanton's fellow infidel, Matilda Joslyn Gage, put it more bluntly: "The great dangerous organization of the movement is the W.C.T.U.; and Frances Willard with her magnetic force, her power of leadership … is the most dangerous person upon the American continent to-day."
Although Stanton herself had served in the early 1850s as the president of the New York Woman's State Temperance Society, by the 1880s she had come to associate the WCTU and Willard's particular brand of evangelical politics with the growing conservativism of the suffrage movement. At the heart of the movement's increasingly cautious ideology, Stanton argued, was woman's blind faith in the Bible. The combined weight of its message and its authority rendered the Bible a dangerous text for women. Stanton warned repeatedly, "The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world" and "that she precipitated the fall of the race." The substance of certain scriptures was especially alarming to Stanton in light of the authority the Bible commanded in nineteenth-century America and in the new NAWSA. According to Stanton, "Canon and civil law; priests and legislators; all political parties and religious denominations" alike marshalled biblical precedents to justify woman's inferior position in law, politics and religion. Stanton envisioned The Woman's Bible as a challenge to the meaning and authority of biblical scriptures and as an attempt to liberate women from the "religious superstitions" that she believed blocked their emancipation.
In 1886 Stanton advertised the formation of a British/ American committee of women to undertake the revision of biblical scriptures. Stanton informed readers that the committee would study the Old and New Testaments in both the original languages as well as in the modern translations in preparation of the commentaries. Stanton had great hopes for her committee and the impact of its work. "If we could get twenty five intelligent well educated good common sense women," she wrote, "We could make 'The Woman's Bible' a great feature of the general uprising in this nineteenth century." Clearly Stanton assumed that although the influence of evangelicals had been great, the hard work of religious liberals could offset the conservative influence and restore the suffrage movement to its former vigor.
Despite Stanton's efforts to forge a collective of women dedicated to biblical revision, her colleagues did not share her enthusiasm for this project. Stanton wrote countless letters to women reformers pleading with them to join her committee. Mostly, they declined. Her colleagues expressed concern about the possible anti-suffrage backlash the publication of such a text might create, especially within the churches. By the end of 1886, Stanton was relegated to begging women for the use of their names in exchange for no work, complaining, "I have dozens of such ridiculous letters of protest that I blush for the stupidity … of my sex."
During the summer of 1886, Stanton, assisted only by her daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch and British suffragist Frances Lord, began the "committee's" exegetical work. They literally cut out the passages intended for exegesis, pasted them in a blank book, and wrote commentaries below. Without the aid of Greek and Hebrew scholars, Stanton relied on a second-hand knowledge of biblical criticism to prepare her commentaries. She challenged scriptures on a variety of counts. According to Stanton, texts portraying women uncharitably were either mistranslated, misinterpreted, untrue to the principles of science or reason, or simply outmoded relics of an archaic social structure. These concerns were in keeping with challenges raised in other contexts by Freethinkers and biblical critics of the time. Her exegesis, however, privileged social commentary over scholarly convention.
Stanton was especially concerned with the plight of Eve whose Old Testament behavior allegedly condemned women to eternal inferiority. Of Eve's temptation by the serpent, Stanton wrote:
the unprejudiced reader must be impressed with the courage, the dignity, and the lofty ambition of the woman. The tempter evidently had a profound knowledge of human nature, and saw at a glance the high character of the person he met by chance in his walks in the garden. He did not try to tempt her from the path of duty by brilliant jewels, rich dresses, worldly luxuries or pleasures, but with the promise of knowledge, with the wisdom'of the Gods.
In this passage of The Woman's Bible, Stanton attempted to redeem Eve's behavior which, she argued, had been misappropriated by traditional male renderings of the garden of Eden. While in other instances Stanton argued on a point of translation or historical criticism, in this passage and many others Stanton claimed no special authority beyond her unique powers as a woman to reveal the "unprejudiced" meaning of biblical texts. Contrasting orthodox portrayals of Eve as seductive, Stanton invested her with the qualities of a Victorian "True Woman," lauding her "courage," "dignity," and "lofty ambition." Throughout The Woman's Bible, Stanton concentrated on the very passages commonly used to constrain women—Old Testament portrayals of women and the writings of St. Paul—as the targets for her feminist re-reading.
Although her Bible project seems to have been postponed over the next nine years, Stanton continued to voice her concern on clerical issues in Suffrage and Freethought papers. In 1892, for example, she opposed efforts by Christians to close the World's Fair on Sundays, an initiative which she viewed as an attack on the secular nature of government. In the same year Stanton officially resigned the presidency of NAWSA to devote her full-time energies to causes of her choice. By the fall of 1895, Stanton announced she was ready to begin serial publication of the Pentateuch in Clara Colby's Woman's Tribune. Almost immediately, The Woman's Bible generated controversy. Without advance warning, Stanton published a list of names as her Revising Committee including political opponents Frances Willard; British temperance leader, Lady Henry Somerset; and suffrage rival Carrie Chapman Catt, all of whom strenuously objected to the reference.
For the published volume, however, Stanton attempted to make amends. Trying to muster the support of the so-called revising committee, Stanton asked each woman for permission for the continued use of her name. Twenty-three women agreed. As a group, the committee lacked any obvious cohesiveness. It comprised several women ministers from liberal denominations, several women from Freethought circles, and suffragists either loyal to Stanton or disenchanted with the conservative tendencies of the movement. Stanton also tried, although unsuccessfully, to involve Jewish and evangelical women in The Woman's Bible. In addition, she pursued a number of international members, again promising little or no work in exchange for names and influence. Ultimately, the weight of the project fell to Stanton. Of the twenty-three committee members, only seven actually contributed to the text of the first volume. Stanton herself authored well over half of the commentaries.
While efforts to dismantle religious authority were waged by Freethought and Secularist advocates, Stanton's challenge was controversial because of her attempt to fuse her anti-Bible campaign with the woman's rights movement. Stanton pinned her last hopes of countering NAWSA's evangelical tide on the public discussion of The Woman's Bible at the convention of 1896. Despite Anthony's efforts, the controversies which erupted at the opening of the convention were "tabled" only in the most official sense. In the final session, opponents of The Woman's Bible raised the issue again, this time in the form of a convention resolution. Compared to the earlier critique of The Woman's Bible, this resolution was relatively brief and to the point. It stated, "This Association is non-sectarian, being composed of persons of all shades of religious opinion, and … has no official connection with the so-called 'Woman's Bible,' or any theological publication.
The debate that followed was "long and animated." Opponents of The Woman's Bible, led by influential NAWSA officers Carrie Chapman Catt, Rachel Foster Avery and Anna Howard Shaw, claimed that The Woman's Bible had driven potential suffragists from the movement. Catt, the woman who would assume Anthony's role as the organizational leader of the movement, strongly urged delegates to repudiate The Woman's Bible, especially given the extensive press coverage the initial debate had generated. (In fact, leading papers had covered the controversy rather extensively. A Washington paper, the Evening Star, immediately ran a multi-column background story on Stanton and The Woman's Bible. Other papers in Washington and New York headlined the Bible debate as the main event of the convention.) Without the repudiation, Catt argued, "we shall be considered to have endorsed the 'Woman's Bible' and we shall be put back many years."
Fears about public perception fanned the movement to censor The Woman's Bible. Opponents never discussed the text's content, per se. In fact, while the initial report had abused the text for its "pretentious title," its "jumble of content," and its lack of literary or scholarly value, by the convention's close, opponents had reduced their argument to a single but compelling factor: The Woman's Bible was damaging the cause.
Supporters of The Woman's Bible did not offer a united front. They included people with personal loyalties to Stanton as well as delegates who opposed the resolution's spirit of censorship. Colby and Blake addressed the issue of the text's negative impact by arguing that even if the book had damaged the cause, a resolution would not fix it. Other supporters argued that they had not met with opposition to The Woman's Bible in their organizing work. Even if they did, offered a delegate from New York, they should respond by saying they "swore by Mrs. Stanton as a suffragist and not as a theologian." Finally, several representatives called upon Susan B. Anthony, who had remained silent throughout the debate, to address the delegation. Anthony left her presidential chair and spoke from the floor. Anthony's lengthy speech concluded:
Neither you nor I can tell but Mrs. Stanton's Woman's Bible will prove the greatest thing ever done for woman's cause. Lucretia Mott at first thought Mrs. Stanton had injured the cause of woman's rights by insisting on the demand for woman suffrage, but she had sense enough not to pass a resolution about it.… If you fail to teach women a broad catholic spirit, I would not give much for them after they are enfranchised. If they are going to do without thinking, they had better do without voting.… You had better organize one woman on a broad platform than 10,000 on a narrow platform of intolerance and bigotry.
I pray you all, vote for religious liberty to each and all, without censorship, without inquisition. This resolution adopted will be a vote of censure. It cannot mean less.
Anthony's speech invoking the image of a broad platform opposing a narrow one precisely captured the fundamental question regarding the direction of the suffrage movement and the specific role of religion within that struggle.
Although in many regards Anthony had abandoned Stanton's campaign for a broad platform of woman's rights, her defense of Stanton before this body testified to their enduring friendship.
Despite Anthony's appeal, attempts by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and others to amend the resolution were made without success. The original resolution repudiating The Woman's Bible came to a vote. It passed by a margin of 53 to 41. The roll call of votes on this resolution does not indicate any geographical voting pattern. Although opponents had charged that The Woman's Bible had done its greatest damage in the South and West, delegates did not vote as a region or even as a block within states. Immediately obvious from the roll call, however, is that the resolution drew its support from a combination of Stanton rivals from the former American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Henry Blackwell, and a cadre of young, conservative officers known within the movement as "Anthony's lieutenants"—including Catt, Avery, and Shaw.
The controversies over Stanton and The Woman's Bible were a major factor in the broader transformation of the suffrage movement at the turn of the century. The leadership who triumphed in the Bible debate and the ideology they asserted dominated the movement into the twentieth century. By 1896 the young women who had been loyal to Anthony not only voted independently of her; they virtually engineered the Bible's repudiation. Stanton's attempts at mobilizing support for a broader view of woman's rights had failed. She had expected to force a liberal/conservative schism within the movement. She did not predict, however, that the Bible debate would actually cement this unlikely alliance of non-religious but politically pragmatic figures like Catt and Alice Stone Blackwell with more conservative evangelical women.
Scholars have associated the emergence of this younger, more conservative leadership with the "mainstreaming" of the suffrage movement—the simultaneous broadening of the constituency and narrowing of the political agenda. With Stanton censored and her supporters virtually ostracized, NAWSA experienced little dissension in solidifying a reform strategy which focused almost exclusively on the ballot as the means of redressing woman's social and political inequities. Stanton's failed attempts to return the movement to its earlier radicalism in fact had the effect of crystallizing the ideological direction for the twentieth century. Rejecting Stanton's attacks on conventional notions of religion and gender, NAWSA adopted a comparatively pragmatic strategy which catered to the most conservative elements in the movement. The controversies around The Woman's Bible not only illuminated the ideological differences among generations of suffrage leaders; they were one of the key points of contention which institutionalized those differences.
By attacking religious orthodoxy, Stanton's Bible directly challenged the growing conservativism of the woman's suffrage movement. Indirectly, she also challenged the construction of gender which relied on conventional notions of "woman's piety" and "separate spheres." For her nineteenth-century audiences, Stanton had undermined "separate spheres" in at least three ways. In the mode most familiar to women reformers, Stanton co-opted male activity—in this case, gender-bound biblical criticism—and claimed it as fair turf for women. More profoundly, Stanton asserted an analysis of the historical origins of "separate spheres." She argued in The Woman's Bible that "woman's divinely ordained sphere" was a creation of men who had manipulated the Bible to distort woman's true equality with men. Finally, and most provocatively, Stanton critiqued "woman's sphere" by charging that woman's piety and supporting religious networks were naive and short-sighted in their subservience to a male-dominated clergy, religious hierarchy, and a masculine God. This final critique backfired. With its heavy-handed reproach of biblical authority and woman's piety, The Woman's Bible was perceived by many as a wholesale attack on the very faith that had legitimated woman's "emancipation." The Woman's Bible did more to offend than to persuade its potential audiences.
Despite the limited renaissance The Woman's Bible enjoyed in the 1970s, scholars have neglected its role in the history of the nineteenth century. In at least two ways, our contemporary dismissal of The Woman's Bible parallels the NAWSA repudiation—in the meagerness of the written coverage of the controversies and in the interpretative weight given to the incident.
Any effort to reconstruct the past, of course, depends upon the sources that are left for us. In this particular case, the public sources—Anthony's history of the suffrage movement, the convention proceedings, the suffrage newspapers—give an incomplete picture of controversy. For example, in The History of Woman Suffrage Volume IV, which covers 1883 to 1900 in a matter of 1100 pages, the Bible debate is discussed in two, the majority of that space being devoted to Anthony's speech. Although Anthony and co-author Ida Husted Harper admit the convention of 1896, "was long remembered on account of the vigorous contest over what was known as the Bible Resolution," they tell us little else. A footnote contains a listing of the delegates and their votes. The official convention proceedings reflect the same skeletal coverage of the debates. The woman suffrage newspapers, a logical place to look for further discussion, either render partisan treatments or say nothing at all. Anthony complained in a letter to Blake, "The Woman's Journal of last week is here, and, tho this is the third issue since the convention, there is not the slightest intimation that either you or I dissented from The Woman's Bible resolution." According to Anthony, Alice Stone Blackwell, editor of the Woman's Journal, refused to print letters protesting the repudiation, claiming that more attention to this issue would just "hurt Miss Anthony's feelings … and they were quite enough hurt now." While Stanton and her supporters viewed this debate in terms of religious liberty, younger officers clearly were more interested in burying the controversy which they viewed as irrelevant, at best, to their cause. The sanitizing of key primary source material may in fact help to explain the lack of secondary attention to the topic. As Barbara Welter pointed out in her introduction to a 1974 reprint of The Woman's Bible, "Parenthetically (and paranoically) The Woman's Bible does not get so much as a footnote in the most comprehensive histories of American religion." Even Stanton's most recent biographer, Elisabeth Griffith, chose to downplay this incident. In her eagerness to restore Stanton to a position of prominence in the history of the suffrage movement, Griffith adopted a strategy of emphasizing Stanton's more "acceptable" reforms and perpetuates the assumption that The Woman's Bible is not central to understanding Stanton, the movement, or the time in which she lived.
Beyond Griffith's particular agenda lies another explanation for the lack of historiographical attention to The Woman's Bible. Stanton's Bible challenged—for both nineteenth-century audiences and twentieth-century historians—received notions about the nature of "woman's sphere." The public debates around The Woman's Bible have called into question the seemingly congenial marriage of woman's piety with woman's rights. Women's historians have for several generations engaged in a process of reconstructing the ideologies that accompanied middle-class white women's social and economic relocation out of the home and into the public realm. Drawing from the language of Victorian women, pioneers of this history introduced to our conceptual lexicon the "cult of domesticity," "true womanhood," and "separate spheres." Undergirding these ideologies is the assumption that religious activity—in the form of increased opportunities and enhanced moral authority—empowered women inside and outside the church and home.
We have privileged a unifying ideology, however, at the expense of internal contradictions and points of tension within these ideologies. Linda Kerber has recently argued that scholars have used the "separate spheres" paradigm variously to mean "an ideology imposed on women, a culture created by women, a set of boundaries expected to be observed by women." Clearly, the abundance of scholarship has not entirely satisfied questions of power in regard to "separate spheres." Furthermore, the concept of "separate spheres" has been liberally imposed on histories of women with seeming disregard for historical setting. The controversy surrounding The Woman's Bible, however, suggests that even within this limited context, the "woman's sphere" paradigm—as an imposed ideology, a created culture or a set of boundaries—does not encompass the diversity of viewpoints among the middle-class women to whom it was originally credited. Stanton's Bible and the controversies it provoked suggests that the ideology of "separate spheres" was, like the Scriptures themselves, undergoing revision.
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