Contextualizing The Woman’s Bible
Reading Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible in the context of other nineteenth-century women interpreters of Scripture and in the context of her development as a thinker and activist for abolition as well as women’s rights creates a more nuanced understanding of her work. Stanton’s two-volume commentary, published in 1895 and 1898, stands in a tradition of women reflecting on women in the Bible that began eighty years earlier. Her contributions are read in dialogue with other women interpreters, noting both similarities and differences. In addition, her writings in The Woman’s Bible are contrasted with an essay on the Decalogue which she wrote in 1860 to advocate for abolition. Here she writes as a reformer, and reads the Bible from a liberationist viewpoint. Stanton’s differing reading strategies are explored in their particular historical context so that developments in her own thinking are clarified.