Elizabeth Cady Stanton: freethinker and radical revisionist.

As a rule, critics and revisionists of religious doctrines and "holy books" live uncomfortable and dangerous lives. Their work is subject to condemnation and blacklisting, they tend to become isolated, and even their lives are sometimes threatened.

Witness the persecution of Indian-born writer Salman Rushdie and Bengali writer Taslima Nasrin, to name only two of the most notable contemporaries.

The great nineteenth-century American orator, writer, and organizer Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was no exception. Stanton believed that orthodox religion was the prime oppressor of women. Her highly controversial writings and speeches outraged many members of the clergy, the church-going public, and even some church-going feminists. These elements managed to make the later years of Stanton's life difficult and sometimes bitter. In spite of a growing spiritual isolation, Stanton persevered, becoming ever more uncompromising in her advocacy of freethought and the separation of church and state, as well as her attacks on the Christian church and on the literal truth of the Bible.

In the last decade of her life, Stanton began to turn inward, becoming almost an existentialist long before that philosophy was formally enunciated. In a speech entitled "The Solitude of Self," she said:

There is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced. It is more hidden than the caves of the gnome; the sacred adytum of the oracle; the hidden chamber of Eleusian mystery, for to it only omniscience is permitted to enter. Such is individual life. Who, I ask you, can take, dare take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?

Elizabeth Cady was born to an upper-middle-class New York family and was educated at Emma Willard's Troy Seminary, considered one of the best educational institutions then available to young women. In school, she displayed a sharp wit and keen intelligence. Her appearance was impressive. She was large and powerfully built and possessed tremendous vitality. After graduation, she was trained in the law by her father (a noted jurist) and became a student of legal and constitutional history. In 1840, she married abolitionist organizer Henry Stanton and through the next 15 years gave birth to seven children.

A turning point in Stanton's intellectual development was her acquaintance with Lucretia Mott, the famous Quaker abolitionist. Mott encouraged Stanton to read the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Robert Own the Elder, Frances Wright, and Angelina and Sarah Grimke--all of whom became seminal influences in the development of Stanton's philosophy.

Another transforming moment for Stanton was when she met Susan B. Anthony. Although their temperaments were different, and they often argued about strategy and tactics, Stanton and Anthony became inseparable comrades in the struggle to achieve social equality for women. Anthony, who never married, helped sustain Stanton during the times when her activities and ideas were opposed by her father, her husband, and most of her other friends. When appearing together, the two women made a striking contrast. Anthony, who wore her long, straight hair twisted back into a discreet bun, was thin and bony and grew ever gaunter with age; whereas Stanton, whose enormous round head was crowned with an awe-inspiring halo of thick curly hair, continued to gain weight, so that in her eighties she weighed over 240 pounds and was proud of it.

Stanton's name is associated with a lifetime of writing, speaking, and organizing for feminist, working-class, and antislavery causes. Stanton conceived and organized the first women's rights convention. Early on, when domestic duties kept her at home much of the time, she wrote newspaper articles for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune and for Amelia Bloomer's Lily. Through these articles, Stanton gained admirers, including Sara Grimke and Lucy Stone.

With Stone, Mott, and Anthony, Stanton organized the American Equal Rights Association to bring the women's rights movement more into conjuction with the drive for black suffrage. When this organization collapsed at the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, Stanton and Anthony founded a boldly radical feminist newspaper called the Revolution, for which Stanton wrote many articles calling for women's control over their own persons in marital relations; liberalized divorce laws that would recognize marriage as a legal contract like other contracts; radical improvement of prisons, poor houses, and insane asylums; and even an end to state-authorized prostitution. Using the newspaper as a launching pad, Stanton and Anthony founded the national Woman Suffrage Association.

Later still, Stanton proposed a third party to represent labor and women's interests. Far ahead of her own time (and perhaps even of ours), she held that such a third party should push for infant day-care centers for working mothers as part of the public-school system, free school lunches, public colleges for working-class youth, abolition of capital punishment, an end to police brutality, equal justice in the courts for the poor and the rich, and a peaceful transition from wage labor to cooperation and international peace.

Stanton's work for the advancement of women culminated in a revision of the Bible named, by Stanton, The Woman's Bible. In 1895, under Stanton's leadership, an international committee composed of liberal reverends, social activists, and freethinkers (including Mrs. Robert G. Ingersoll) began work on The Woman's Bible. Initially, this group of 23 women tried to enlist the help of several women internationally recognized in Hebrew and Greek scholarship and well versed in biblical criticism. However, these people were afraid their reputation would be sullied by taking part in what might prove to be an unpopular project, so they did not participate.

The method of revision was straightforward. Each woman on the committee purchased two Bibles in English and ran through them from Genesis to Revelation, marking all the texts concerning women. The passages so marked were cut out and pasted in a blank book with commentaries written underneath each passage. An independent advisory committee made the final revision, based upon these passages and comments.

Basically, the charge of the revision committee was to expose the contradictions and counter the traditional teachings and interpretations of the Bible with regard to women. Chief among these teachings was that woman was made an inferior being--after man, of man, for man, and subject to man. As Stanton wrote, "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."

From Genesis, for example, one commentator stated:

The most important thing for a woman to note in reading Genesis is that that portion which is now divided into the first three chapters (there was no such division until about five centuries ago) contains two entirely separate and very contradictory stories....It is now generally conceded that someone ... at some time ... copied two creation myths on the same leather roll, one immediately following the other.... The differ ... in the order of the creative acts. In one story male and female are created simultaneously, both alike in the image of the gods after all animals have been called into existence. Hence, joint domination over the earth is given to woman and man, without limit or prohibition. In the other story, man is sculptured out of clay, before any animals are created and before female man has been constructed. Here, woman is punished with subjection to man for breaking a prohibitory law.... My opinion is that the second story was manipulated ... in an endeavor to give heavenly authority for requiring a woman to obey the man she married.

And from Deuteronomy:

The best commentary on these texts is that no revising Committee of ecclesiastics has found it necessary to make any suggestions as to whom the commandments are addressed. Suppose we reverse the language and see how one-sided it would seem addressed only to women. Suppose these were the statements. Here is a great lawgiver and he says: "Thou art to keep all God's commandments, thou and thy daughters and thy daughter's daughters, and these are the commandments: "Thou shalt honor thy mother and thy father. Thou shalt not steal nor lie. Thou salt not covet thy neighbor's husband, nor her field, nor her ox, nor anything that is thy neighbor's."' Would such commandments occasion no remark among biblical scholars?

And from Judges, concerning Jephthan's vow to sacrifice whoever first came out of the doors of his house to greet him if he returned victorious from war, the commentary compares the situation of Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son Isaac with Jephthan's actual sacrifice of his daughter (who is nameless in the Bible):

Does the New Testament bring promises of new dignity and of larger liberties for women? When thinking women make any criticism of their degraded position in the Bible, Christians point to her exaltation in the New Testament, as if under their religion, a woman really does occupy a higher position than under the Jewish dispensation.... In fact, her inferior position is more clearly and emphatically set forth by the Apostles than by the Prophets and the Patriarchs. There are no such specific directions for women's subordination in the Pentateuch as in the Epistles. We are told the whole sex was highly honored in Mary being the mother of Jesus. Surely a wise and virtuous son is more indebted to his mother than she is to him and is honored only by reflecting her superior characteristics. If a Heavenly Father was necessary, why not a Heavenly Mother? If an earthly Mother was admirable, why not an earthly Father? The Jewish idea that Jesus was born according to natural law is more rational than is the Christian record of the immaculate conception by the Holy Ghost, the third person of the trinity. These biblical mysteries and inconsistencies are a great strain on the credulity credulity of the ordinary mind.

Concerning the Book of John:

Is it not astonishing that so little is in the New Testament concerning the mother of Christ? My own opinion is that she was an excellent woman and the wife of Joseph, and that Joseph was the actual father of Christ. I think there can be no reasonable doubt that such was the opinion of the authors of the original Gospels. Upon any other hypothesis it is impossible to account for their having given the genealogy of Joseph to prove that Christ was of the blood of David. The idea that he was the Son of God, or in any way miraculously produced, was an afterthought, and is hardly entitled now to serious consideration.

On the Book of Acts:

It can easily be shown that the Christian church admitted women into her regularly ordained ministry during the first two hundred years of Christianity....one thing is clear ... the time has arrived when all women should be informed of the true status of their sex in the ministry of the primitive church.... Among scholarly Christian theologians, no questions are now more unsettled than are the queries: who wrote the Gospels? In which of the first three centuries did they assume their present shape? And at what time did Peter and Paul live and quarrel with each other concerning Christian polity? As for the passages now found in the New Testament Epistles of Paul, concerning women's nonequality with men and duty of subjection, there is no room to doubt that they are bare-faced forgeries, interpolated by unscrupulous bishops during the early period in which a combined and determined effort was made to reduce women to silent submission, not only in the church, but also in the home and in the state.

The Woman's Bible was officially disowned by the national American Woman Suffrage Association at its 1896 annual convention, and Stanton was not even invited to speak. During the debate on the resolution to disassociate the association from the book, Susan B. Anthony, president and director of the convention, left the chair and spoke eloquently against adoption of the resolution. Anthony said:

The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires.... The question is whether you will sit in judgment on one who has questioned the divine inspiration of certain passages in the Bible derogatory to women. If she had written approvingly of these passages, you would not have brought in this resolution because you thought the cause might be injured among the liberals in religion. In other words, if she had written your views, you would have considered a resolution unnecessary.... When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I myself shall not stand upon it.

Despite Anthony's plea, the resolution was adopted 53 to 41. Continuing controversy and furor surrounding Stanton and The Woman's Bible almost split (for the second time) the suffrage movement and had farreaching effects on its leadership and strategy after 1896.

Today, we might wonder how people who were struggling to change laws and customs denying women the right to vote, to hold public office, to own property and wages in their own names, to divorce abusive or alcoholic husbands, and to retain custody of their children upon divorce could possibly have opposed The Woman's Bible, as mild and as dignified in its criticism as it may now seem. Yet, one must keep in mind that Christians in Stanton's time were not used to biblical exegesis, particularly coming from such a secular source as a committee of mostly lay women. Also, there were those in the suffrage movement who felt--perhaps with some justification--that women needed all the allies they could get and that to anger powerful and influential clergy was a stragetic error.

Stanton was one of a relative few in her day who saw the profound connections between the images and treatment of women in religious scripture and canon and the images and treatment of women in secular life. Stanton's concerns, ideas, and accomplishments have endured and continue to influence the feminist movement and other movements for progress in the twentieth century. Because of Stanton (and other outstanding women before and since), there is developing a vocabulary and a set of concepts by means of which we are coming to understand the history and the effects of patriarchy. It is easier for us to see the connections between different aspects of women's oppression and to draw the various strands together because we stand on the shoulders of giants.