Contextualizing The Woman’s Bible

2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 564-577 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiana de Groot
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Women In The Bible ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Nuanced Understanding

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.

Slavery, Women's Rights, and the Beginnings of Feminist Biblical Interpretation in the Nineteenth Century

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-169
Author(s):  
Claudia Setzer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Negative Evaluation ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Elizabeth Cady Stanton ◽  
Abolitionist Movement

Progressive movements create social changes that reach far beyond their original contexts. Such movements challenge authoritative texts and interpretations in the culture, generate alternative understandings of authoritative works that may be applied to other struggles, create a social arena for the dissemination of ideas, create patterns of thought that may be re-constituted in other forms, and may leave intact some related social problems. The abolitionist movement demanded a confrontation with slavery in the Bible and the development of non-literal exegesis. It also provided a conduit for the new methods of European biblical scholarship, particularly through the preaching and writings of abolitionist Theodore Parker. Three nineteenth-century women, Sarah Grimké, Frances Willard, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in spite of differences in their biographies and religious commitments, shared similar methods of interpreting the Bible to argue for women’s rights. This article argues that habits of interpretation and knowledge of emerging historical-critical scholarship that these women learned in the abolition movement carried over into their fight for women’s rights. Like many nineteenth-century Christians, they subscribed to a belief in progressive revelation, occasional Orientalism, and a sometime negative evaluation of Judaism. Yet they show a remarkable anticipation of contemporary feminist biblical scholarship in their understandings of the effect of culture on interpretation, their view of gender as socially constructed, and their descriptions of God and Jesus as both male and female.

scholarly journals Sayyid Mumtaz Ali and ‘Huquq un-Niswan’: An Advocate of Women's Rights in Islam in the Late Nineteenth Century

1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail Minault
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Third Place ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Sometime in the late 1890s, Sayyid Mumtaz Ali visited Aligarh and happened to show Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan the manuscript of his treatise in defense of women's rights in Islamic law, Huquq un-Niswan. As he began to read it, Sir Sayyid looked shocked. He then opened it to a second place and his face turned red. As he read it at a third place, his hands started to tremble. Finally, he tore up the manuscript and threw it into the wastepaper basket. Fortunately, at that moment a servant arrived to announce lunch, and as Sir Sayyid left his office, Mumtaz Ali snatched his mutilated manuscript from the trash. He waited until after Sir Sayyid's death in 1898, however, to publish Huquq un-Niswan.

The “Incidental Relation” of Mother

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy A. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Birth Control ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Reproductive Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Sexual Relations ◽  
Reproductive Control ◽  
The Law ◽  
Social Reformers

This chapter explores Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s views on women’s reproductive rights. It traces the voluntary motherhood movement among women’s rights activists and social reformers, which endorsed women’s singular right to choose sexual relations and procreation. Stanton took this concept a step further, advocating eugenic ideas of enlightened motherhood as a method of birth control. The chapter juxtaposes Stanton’s work for reproductive control against the abortion movement of the latter nineteenth century, which eventually criminalized abortion in all states. Following Stanton’s interest in the trial of Hester Vaughan for infanticide, the chapter reveals how Stanton used the trial to expose gendered inequalities of the law, including women’s exclusion as judges, lawyers, legislators, and jurors.

The Extraordinary Nineteenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra E. Bonura
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Education ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Political Democracy ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Westward Expansion

This chapter places Pope in her 19th-century era and presents the major themes including immigration, westward expansion, the rise of industrial America, the growth of political democracy, women’s rights, temperance, public education, slavery, the Civil War, and more. The three periods of time—early, middle and late 19th century—show women’s advancement in the educational arena and their “call to teach.” The histories of Mount Holyoke and Oberlin are succinctly offered.

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