SA(L)VAGING THE WOMAN’S BIBLE: READING INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES ACROSS CONTEXTS by KRISTJANA MADDUX (Under the Direction of Bonnie J. Dow) ABSTRACT This thesis argues that the Woman’s Bible, over its 100+ year lifetime, became a pliable cultural symbol, exploited by various interpretive communities to serve their argumentative ends. The Woman’s Bible was compiled and published by American woman suffragist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in the 1890s, but was promptly denounced by her suffrage colleagues. In the decades that followed, the Woman’s Bible was put to argumentative use by anti-suffragists, who used it to demonstrate the radicalism of the woman suffrage movement. The book was not re-published until the 1970s, when it became a symbol of Christian feminist liberation. In each of these cases, the book was read according to the terministic screens and structures of relevancy unique to each interpretive community Reading the Woman’s Bible across its contexts of reception allows for insight into the intersections between two social movements: feminism and Christianity. INDEX WORDS: Woman Suffrage, Anti-suffrage, Feminist Theology, Reception Studies, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Woman’s Bible SA(L)VAGING THE WOMAN’S BIBLE: READING INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES ACROSS CONTEXTS by KRISTJANA MADDUX B.A., University of Puget Sound, 2001 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS ATHENS, GEORGIA 2003 © 2003 Kristjana Maddux All Rights Reserved SA(L)VAGING THE WOMAN’S BIBLE: READING INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES ACROSS CONTEXTS by KRISTJANA MADDUX Major Professor: Bonnie J. Dow Committee: Kevin M. DeLuca John M. Murphy Thomas M. Lessl Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2003 iv DEDICATION For Rachel, May you be nurtured and grow in the faith of our courageous mothers and foremothers— Karen, Jan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Coalition Task Force—and all the others who have challenged what it means to be a Christian and a feminist. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to thank Celeste Condit and Kristan Poirot who convinced me to come to Georgia in the first place. I’m glad I took the risk. And I want to thank the Speech Communication faculty at Georgia generally for creating and maintaining the rigorous but supportive intellectual environment that exists in this department. I especially want to thank the members of my committee. I want to thank my advisor, Bonnie Dow, for introducing me to the Woman’s Bible, and first wave feminism more generally; for reading terribly unstructured drafts of thesis chapters and helping me find the arguments in them; for handing me a tissue—“here, hon”—at the right moments; and for being great to work with on CSMC (and for forgiving my mistakes!). I want to thank Kevin DeLuca for thoughtful and challenging comments on papers; for gentle (?) teasing; for reassuring meetings; and for encouraging me to be an activist and an academic. I want to thank Tom Lessl for agreeing to join the thesis committee of a young M.A. student who had barely spoken to him, and for reminding our department and our field that religion is an important topic for scholarly inquiry. And I want to thank John Murphy for great conversations about politics and war, and for all of his great ideas—even short, informal conversations with Murphy tend to include gems of wisdom. I only wish I’d been taking notes more often. I also want to thank my undergraduate mentor, Jim Jasinski, for introducing me to the academic study of rhetoric initially. More specifically, I want to thank Jim for teaching me how to read a text closely (with the “proverbial fine-toothed comb,” or vi Lanham’s “lemon-squeezer”); for replacing my middle-English root verbs with Latin root verbs; and for convincing the admissions committee at Georgia to admit me to their program. As much as I may have whined about Athens, GA, I have had a great experience here over the past two years. I especially want to say thank you…to the students in my co-hort for your collegiality, and especially to Laura for bringing the Gilmore Girls into my Tuesday nights. ...to Justin, for supporting me through my first year, especially for listening to me cry every Wednesday night of my first semester. ...to Jen for Thursday night must-see-tv laundry nights. ...to the happy hour crowd—Tex, Ken, Tasha, John, Ashli, Ben (and Ben deserves credit for the thesis title!), et al—for Fridays at Tasty World. ...to the Georgia Bulldogs for two great seasons of Saturday afternoon football, including one SEC championship. …to the Presbyterian Student Center for dinner and fellowship on Sunday nights. ...and to my family for keeping me up on 7th Heaven when my Monday nights were busy, and for all the support we’ve given each other, even through a rough year. Many thanks to all of you. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1 THE BOOK “THAT SCORCHED AND EXPOSED THE CHURCH AND CLERGY AS GROTESQUEL[LY] MALE-ORIENTED”: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WOMAN’S BIBLE AND AUDIENCE- CENTERED CRITICISM.............................................................................1 The Development of the Woman’s Bible ......................................................4 Critical Perspective......................................................................................22 Outline of Subsequent Chapters ..................................................................34 2 “ALL THE TROUBLE AROSE FROM A MISNOMER”: THE WOMAN’S BIBLE’S NINETEENTH CENTURY INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES.........................................................................................37 “I thought it would be a good idea”: Public Ambiguity About the Woman’s Bible.......................................................................................................39 Christianity and the Woman’s Rights Movement in the 1890s...................52 The Woman’s Bible and its Interpretive Communities in the 1890s...........60 Conclusion...................................................................................................80 viii 3 “BRISTLING FROM COVER TO COVER WITH CHEAP WIT AND BLASPHEMY”: THE WOMAN’S BIBLE AS AN INVENTIONAL RESOURCE FOR ANTI-SUFFRAGISTS .................................................83 The Development of Anti-Suffrage Ideology .............................................85 “The Suffragists had a new version of the Bible:” Anti-Suffragists Use the Woman’s Bible to Serve their Arguments .............................................99 Conclusion.................................................................................................110 4 “PROMOT[ING] THE EQUALITY OF WOMEN IN ALL AREAS OF RELIGIOUS LIFE”: THE WOMAN’S BIBLE’S LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES......................................112 Feminism and Christianity in the Late Twentieth Century .......................113 “It can be a ‘springboard’ for discussion”: Coalition Task Force Statements About the Woman’s Bible....................................................................121 “A valuable keynote to the future historian”: The Woman’s Bible and Feminist Theologians ..........................................................................135 Conclusion.................................................................................................149 5 “T HEY LIVE TRUTH AND DO NOT FEAR ITS LIGHT”: CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS .............................................................................152 “The ambiguous feminist heritage of Elizabeth Cady Stanton”: The social movement significance of the Woman’s Bible’s reception .................159 “To resonate with different people in different historical contexts”: Implications for rhetorical theory........................................................165 ix REFERENCES ................................................................................................................170 NOTES.............................................................................................................................186 1 CHAPTER ONE THE BOOK “THAT SCORCHED AND EXPOSED THE CHURCH AND CLERGY AS GROTESQUEL[LY] MALE-ORIENTED”: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WOMAN’S BIBLE AND AUDIENCE-CENTERED CRITICISM The questions of whether or not a Christian can be a feminist and a feminist can be a Christian run as deep as the shared history of Christianity and the movement for woman’s rights. Since the beginning of agitation for woman’s rights in the United States, activists within the movement have argued over the role of the Bible in prescribing woman’s position. In the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton identified a fundamental divide between her co-workers on the subject of the Bible. While some found the Bible too sacred to criticize, others argued that it was hopelessly patriarchal and unworthy of analysis or use. Stanton hoped her publication of the Woman’s Bible1 in 1895 (volume 1) and 1898 (volume 2) would reconcile this divide, and in her introduction to the Woman’s Bible, she identified and responded to these two classes of objections. On the one hand, she quoted a woman who wrote to say that it was “’ridiculous’ for ‘women to attempt the revision of the Scriptures’” (10). In contrast, she went on to describe, “again there are some who write us that our work is a useless expenditure of force over a book that has lost its hold on