sign in sign up
<<
Home , Betty Friedan

Yael Leibowitz Victims, Warriors and Prophets: Biblical Women's Role In Israel'sSelfConcept

 EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT/AMERICAN SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT:  (1750-1820) Judith Sargent Murray: used metaphorical interpretations of the Adam and Eve story in her arguments for women’s suffrage. She paved the way for many of the new thoughts and ideas that began to surface.  1843: : was determined to learn the language of the bible- believing that if properly translated the Bib would support women’s rights….1843 she went to Oberlin college (first American college to accept men and women)- to learn Hebrew and Greek  (19-20 c) /Anna Julia Cooper: Black women who entered the struggle for women’s rights after the emancipation of slaves  1830-40’s: Jarena Lee: member of African Methodist Episcopal Church was reading the Bible in new ways ad using biblical interpretations to buttress her pro-women arguments  1893: : The Original Expose of Male Collaboration Against the Female Sex: became convinced that Christianity had degraded women in a variety of ways, especially through Scriptures, most especially in the Adam and Eve story, its Roman Catholic canon law and its advocacy of celibacy.  (1895/8) : The Women’s Bible: famously wrote the first women’s bible- a translation that affirmed women’s full humanity, vs the traditional male translations that were meant to hold women back (women were not scholars, and incidentally, it included many anti-Jewish tropes common in 19th c Christianity) but was important work, and in many ways foreshadowed many of the works that began surfacing a century later.  ca. 1894: Anna Ely Rhoads: SBL (Society of Biblical Literature): the “establishment” of biblical scholarship did not vote admission to a woman until almost fifteen years after the society was founded. Rhoads, educated at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Leipzig became their first female member. By the turn of the century four more women had joined the society. However, the earliest female members neither delivered papers at the society’s meetings, nor published them in its journal. The barrier to such full participation was not broken until the second decade of the 20th century.  1900: Dr Katherine Bushnell: God’s Word to Women: One Hundred Bible Studies on Women’s Place in the Divine Economy: a medical missionary to China and a Women’s Christian Temperance Union leader (not a credentialed biblical scholar)  1926: Reverend Lee Anna Starr: The Bible Status of Women: she, like Bushnell believed that the Bible, when correctly translated and interpreted supported women’s full humanity.  1955: Edith Deen: All the Women of the Bible: a Texas newspaper columnist gave detailed treatment to major women as well as an alphabetical listing of named women and a chronological listing of all unnamed women. It was the first attempt to be comprehensive (Deen was also not a specialist, and did not include all biblical women, and sometimes included details not provided in the text. Nevertheless, her work was acknowledged by later scholars that built on her classificatory and expositional points.)

 20th century: the second was rooted in the women’s movement, and civil rights movement  1963: Betty Friedan: : marked the second wave of in the US.  1964: Margaret Crook: Women and Religion: a professor of religion and biblical literature at and 39-year member of the SBL called for full and equal participation of women with men in crucial rethinking of ideas about God and Religion.  1967: Elsie Culver: Women in the World of Religion: took biblical scholars to task for their failures to research women’s status and roles in the Bible. (and suggested how important this research would be for contemporary women.) By the 1970’s, biblical scholars were taking up the challenge.  1974: Religion and : (ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether) contains programmatic essays, including several on women in Jewish Christian Scripture showing that the Bible contained both positive and negative material with respect to women.

“I face a terrible dilemma: Choose ye this day whom you will serve: the God of the fathers or the God of the sisterhood. If the God of the fathers, then the Bible supplies models for your slavery. If the God of sisterhood, then you must reject patriarchal religion and go forth without models to claim your freedom” (Phylis Trible: “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 41 [1973]:31)

(Based on “Feminist Biblical Scholarship”- by: Alice Ogden Bellis )