The Woman's Bible
1895
In 1895, at eighty years old, Elizabeth Cady Stanton turned her formidable intellect toward the most powerful weapon used to justify women's oppression: the Bible itself. The Woman's Bible is not a traditional religious text but a radical act of reinterpretation, a systematic challenge to every passage that had been weaponized to declare women inferior, subordinate, or spiritually secondary. Stanton and a committee of twenty-six women reread Genesis, Exodus, and beyond, exposing how centuries of male theologians had distorted Scripture to enforce gender hierarchy. The result is both scholarly and subversive, tracing the arc of biblical literature while demonstrating that its patriarchal interpretations were never divine decree but human invention. Stanton argued that women possessed both the right and the capacity to reclaim the spiritual authority that had been denied them. The book ignited fury across America. Suffragists who had fought beside Stanton for decades denounced it, fearing it would derail the suffrage movement. The National American Woman Suffrage Association formally distanced itself at their 1896 convention. Yet the public bought it in droves, making it a surprise bestseller. Stanton lost her place in the movement she had helped build, but she gained something more enduring: a testament to the radical proposition that women need not accept their spiritual subjugation as divinely ordained. For readers interested in the deep roots of feminist thought, the history of religious dissent, or the courage required to challenge sacred institutions.
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“Men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women, and in order to keep it in healthy working order, they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible.””
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman's favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish.””
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“To-day the woman is Mrs. Richard Roe, to-morrow Mrs. John Doe, and again Mrs. James Smith according as she changes masters, and she has so little self-respect that she does not see the insult of the custom.””
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“Men never fail to dwell on maternity as a disqualification for the possession of many civil and political rights. Suggest the idea of women having a voice in making laws and administering the Government in the halls of legislation, in Congress, or the British Parliament, and men will declaim at once on the disabilities of maternity in a sneering contemptuous way, as if the office of motherhood was undignified and did not comport with the highest public offices in church and state. It is vain that we point them to Queen Victoria, who has carefully reared a large family, while considering and signing...””
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“Think of the inconvenience of vanishing as it were from your friends and, correspondents three times in one's natural life.””
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“One would think that potential motherhood should make women as a class as sacred as the priesthood. In common parlance we have much fine-spun theorizing on the exalted office of the mother, her immense influence in moulding the character of her sons; "the hand that rocks the cradle moves the world," etc., but in creeds and codes, in constitutions and Scriptures, in prose and verse, we do not see these lofty paeans recorded or verified in living facts. As a class, women were treated among the Jews as an inferior order of beings, just as they are to-day in all civilized nations. And now, as then, men claim to be guided by the will of God.””
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“We cannot accept any code or creed that uniformly defrauds woman of all her natural rights.””
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire on the vital questions of the hour, she was commanded to ask her husband at home. Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up.””
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“The only points in which I differ from all ecclesiastical teaching is that I do not believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her, and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible. Whatever the Bible may be made to do in Hebrew or Greek, in plain English it does not exalt and dignify woman.””
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. The Woman's Bible. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-woman-s-bible-62706f80-ef3d-4945-bb45-06ce9f1d531e.Stanton, E. C. (1895). The Woman's Bible. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-woman-s-bible-62706f80-ef3d-4945-bb45-06ce9f1d531eStanton, Elizabeth Cady. The Woman's Bible. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-woman-s-bible-62706f80-ef3d-4945-bb45-06ce9f1d531e.
