Abstract
In 1895, Elizabeth Cady Stanton compiled a Woman’s Bible, collecting verses and commentary exposing “women’s subordination [as] reiterated times without number from Genesis to Revelations” (II. 8).1 Stanton’s Woman’s Bible was too radical even for the progressive National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, which repudiated it. But it was nonetheless widely read, and stands as a culmination of a century of biblical controversy in religion, scholarship, and politics. Such biblical controversy extends well beyond women’s issues into much of America’s political and cultural life. But Stanton’s feminist understanding of the Bible as an authority implicating political, legal, and social powers particularly illuminates American women’s poetry, in which biblical revision constitutes a distinctive sub-genre. Albeit from a wide variety of religious and ideological positions, many women poets display an acute awareness of the Bible’s power to define models, morals, and social strictures.2
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Notes
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Revising Committee, The Woman’s Bible (Seattle: Coalition Task Force on Women and Religion, 1974).
Cf. Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) on Stanton, pp. 13–17.
Carolyn De Swarte Gifford discusses the politics of Biblical interpretation in “American Women and the Bible,” in Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship, ed. Adela Yarbro Collins (Cico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), pp. 11–34, pp. 17–21.
Barbara Brown Zikmund, “The Struggle for the Right to Preach,” in Women and Religion in America Vol. 1, eds. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), pp. 193–241.
Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)
Perry Miller, “The Puritan State and Puritan Society” Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956).
On Higher Criticism see Philip Gura, The Wisdom of the Word (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981);
Ira Brown, “Higher Criticism Comes to America,” Journal of Presbyterian History 38 (1960), p. 206;
George M. Marsden, “Everyone One’s Own Interpreter? The Bible, Science, and Authority in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” in The Bible in America, eds. Nathan O. Hatch and Mark Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 79–100.
Nina Baym discusses women’s Biblical participation, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), p. 47.
Kathleen Kern, We are the Pharisees (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1995).
See Mark. A. Noll, “The Image of United States as a Biblical Nation,” in The Bible in America, ed. Nathan Hatch and Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 39–58.
Ann Douglas, The Eeminization of American Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1977)
James Brewer Stewart, “Abolitionists, the Bible, and the Challenge of Slavery,” pp. 32–40, in The Bible and Social Reform ed. Ernest R. Sandeen (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982).
Cf. Dorothy C. Bass, “Their Prodigious Influence: Women, Religion, and Reform in Antebellum America,” in Women of Spirit, eds. Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 280–300;
Barbara Brown Zikmund, “Biblical Arguments and Women’s Place in the Church,” in The Bible and Social Reform, ed. Ernes R. Sandeen (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 85–98;
Martha Tomhave Blauvelt, “Women and Revivalism,” in Women and Religion in America, eds. R.R. Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), pp. 1–45.
Cf. Yolanda Pierce, “African-American Women’s Spiritual Narratives,” Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing, ed. Dale Bauer and Philip Gould (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 122–142.
Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women 1746–1892 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
See Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 166–190 on the Higher Criticism and literary developments.
Barbara Welter, “Something Remains to Dare,” Introduction to The Woman’s Bible (New York: Arno rept. 1974), p. xix.
Cf. Alicia Ostriker, Feminist Revision and the Bible (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 63–67.
David Porter, The Art of Emily Dickinson’s Early Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966),
Cristanne Miller discusses the hymnal basis of Dickinson’s prosodies in A Poet’s Grammar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Richard Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1974), p. 119.
Ernest Lee Tuveson discusses the “Battle Hymn” and American Millennialism in Redeemer Nation (Chicago; The University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 197–202;
James Moorhead, American Apocalypse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).
Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, “Women in Social Reform Movements,” in Women and Religion in America, Vol. 1, eds. Rosemary Ruether and Rosemary Keller (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), pp. 294–303, pp. 301–302.
See also Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990), pp. 205–206.
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© 2010 Shira Wolosky
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Wolosky, S. (2010). Women’s Bibles. In: Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113008_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113008_7
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