Elizabeth Cady Stanton And The Woman’s Bible

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leader of feminist movement, scholar of Christian theology and prolific writer, was born in 1815 and died in 1912. Her religious views, though seldom researched into, are in fact significant in the history of Christian theology and the later development of feminist theology. This paper aims to conduct a study on Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s religious viewpoints by performing a textual analysis of her work, The Womans Bible, her autobiography, Eighty Years and More, and speeches.Stanton attributed the inferiority of women to the biased reading of biblical texts concerning women by traditional theologians, and therefore, in the Woman’s Bible she reinterpreted the biblical texts about women from a woman’s perspective.The study on Stanton’s religious thoughts revealed the following findings. First, Stanton found that many creeds of Christian church would marginalize women. Woman’s freedom and equality couldn’t be achieved without a battle against the oppressive teachings. Second, Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed that the Bible shouldn’t be rejected completely:it could work as a moral guide for people and in the benefit of women’s emancipation. Therefore, Stanton didn’t become an atheist or an agnostic despite the rise of Darwinism and science in her times.This study enriches the scholarly work on Elizabeth Cady Stanton and American Christian religious history.