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
Keywords
Biblical Interpretation Conservative Woman Proof Text Woman Poet Narrative Poem
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Notes
- 1.Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Revising Committee, The Woman’s Bible (Seattle: Coalition Task Force on Women and Religion, 1974).Google Scholar
- 2.Cf. Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) on Stanton, pp. 13–17.Google Scholar
- 3.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.Google Scholar
- 4.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.Google Scholar
- 5.Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar
- Perry Miller, “The Puritan State and Puritan Society” Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956).Google Scholar
- 6.On Higher Criticism see Philip Gura, The Wisdom of the Word (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981);Google Scholar
- Ira Brown, “Higher Criticism Comes to America,” Journal of Presbyterian History 38 (1960), p. 206;Google Scholar
- 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.Google Scholar
- 7.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.Google Scholar
- Kathleen Kern, We are the Pharisees (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1995).Google Scholar
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- Ann Douglas, The Eeminization of American Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1977)Google Scholar
- 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).Google Scholar
- 11.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;Google Scholar
- 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;Google Scholar
- 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.Google Scholar
- 13.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.Google Scholar
- Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women 1746–1892 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
- 16.See Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 166–190 on the Higher Criticism and literary developments.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 17.Barbara Welter, “Something Remains to Dare,” Introduction to The Woman’s Bible (New York: Arno rept. 1974), p. xix.Google Scholar
- 18.Cf. Alicia Ostriker, Feminist Revision and the Bible (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 63–67.Google Scholar
- 19.David Porter, The Art of Emily Dickinson’s Early Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966),CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Cristanne Miller discusses the hymnal basis of Dickinson’s prosodies in A Poet’s Grammar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).Google Scholar
- 20.Richard Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1974), p. 119.Google Scholar
- 22.Ernest Lee Tuveson discusses the “Battle Hymn” and American Millennialism in Redeemer Nation (Chicago; The University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 197–202;Google Scholar
- James Moorhead, American Apocalypse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).Google Scholar
- 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.Google Scholar
- See also Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990), pp. 205–206.Google Scholar
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© Shira Wolosky 2010