Abstract
Undermining centuries of religious tradition in terms of the status of women in society, Stanton and Eddy inverted theological argument and created an interpretative space from which to challenge a singular definition concerning creation in Genesis and prophecy in Revelation. Identification of the maternal nature of the Godhead allowed them to represent God in feminine terms, destabilizing centuries of historically accepted patriarchal argument. The writers’ identification of “elect” womanhood in these two books, the first and the last of the Bible, will form the nucleus of the argument of this final chapter.
Jesus Christ raised women above the condition of mere slaves, mere ministers to the passions of men, raised them by His sympathy, to be Ministers of God … there shall arise a woman, who will resume, in her own soul, all the sufferings of her race, and that woman will be the Saviour of her race.
—Florence Nightingale, Cassandra
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Notes
Louisa May Alcott read Science and Health, and visited Eddy twice in 1876. See the magazine (Quarterly Magazine THE MARY BAKER EDDY LIBRARY for the BETTERMENT of HUMANITY) published by The Mary Baker Eddy Library, Issue No. 2, Summer, 2001. Frances Hodgson Burnett read Eddy’s textbook, appearing to draw on its philosophy for her novels. She turned to its healing principles later in life. See G. Gerzina, Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Unpredictable Life of the author of The Secret Garden (London: Chatto & Windus, 2004).
L. P. Powell, Mary Baker Eddy A Life Size Portrait (London: Nisbet & Co. Ltd., 1930), 132.
S. McFague, Metaphorical Theology, Models of God in Religious Language (London: SCM, 1983) 194.
S. McFague, Models of God Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (London: SCM Press, 1987), 24.
R. Peel, Mary Baker Eddy—The Years of Discovery (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977), 198.
S. Woods, Lanyer A Renaissance Woman Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 139.
S. McFague, Metaphorical Theology Models of God in Religious Language (London: SCM Press, 1983), 15.
J. P. Heimmel, God is Our Mother; Julian of Norwich and the Medieval Image of Christian Feminine Divinity, (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1982), 70–71.
A. Day, Romanticism (London: Routledge, 1996), 45, 59.
P. Lang (ed.), Religions and Discourse, “Towards a Different Transcendence Feminist Findings on Subjectivity, Religion and Values”, (Bern: European Academic Publishers, 2001), 62, (Vol. 9).
For full text see L. Irigaray, Divine Women, Occasional Paper 8 (Sydney, Australia: Local Consumption Publications, April, 1986).
C. A. Newsom, S. H. Ringe (eds.), The Women’s Bible Commentary (London: SPCK, 1992), xiii.
Cullen Murphy suggests, “It is not going too far to say (as some have suggested) that The Woman’s Bible is the reason that an image of Susan B. Anthony and not Elizabeth Cady Stanton graces the one-dollar coin that was first minted in 1978.” C. Murphy, The Word According to Eve (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1998), 23.
T. Johnson, “Understanding Mary Baker Eddy” (Boston: New England American Studies Association, April 2002), 18.
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© 2010 Arleen M. Ingham
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Ingham, A.M. (2010). Woman, the Elect of God?. In: Women and Spirituality in the Writing of More, Wollstonecraft, Stanton, and Eddy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109940_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109940_6
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