Up until recent years, most of my life I was under the assumption that there was a brand of feminism that was generally good and should be accepted outright–what some have referred to as “first-wave” and “second-wave” feminism–but that, at some point, the movement was hijacked by a more radical version that most people, especially Christians, didn’t accept. I was led to believe that feminism was good and innocent in its conception, but only later, in more recent times, became radicalized, implying that we ought to reject the radical versions (though even that is also increasingly in question among Christians), but accept the first waves of feminism.
All that being said, however, it wasn’t until the last few years that I was forced to reconsider my rosy assumptions about the early feminists. After a series of negative experiences with feminism, I started to examine things more closely. Before long, I started to consider the potential alternative that feminism might have been darkened from the outset; that maybe the whole project was stained with un-Christian motivations from the beginning.
It started with me choosing to read some of the founding figures of the movement myself, rather than taking other people’s word for it. I wanted to actually listen to them for myself. And, needless to say, what I have come to discover about some of the early feminists has been more than mildly disconcerting. It’s been shocking, actually.
This began with peeling back the curtain on one of the most influential voices in the feminist movement. Growing up, the name that I heard most often in association with feminism was the name of Susan B. Anthony, the leading voice in the suffrage movement. But what most people don’t know is that Anthony was really not much more than a mouthpiece for the movement. She actually wasn’t the intellect in the driver’s seat. That designation belonged to someone else–the true intellectual engine behind the feminist movement, as well as Anthony’s best friend: namely, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
In a biographical account of Stanton’s life and relationship with Anthony, it was said that “Stanton provided the ideas, rhetoric, and strategy” while “Anthony delivered the speeches, circulated petitions, and rented the halls.” The biography goes on, putting it simply, “Anthony prodded and Stanton produced.” In other words, Stanton and Anthony were devoted partners in their fight for women’s rights. While Susan B. Anthony came to be hailed as the heroic voice of the movement, Stanton was the intellectual fuel–the actual substance of the movement. In fact, Stanton was the one who penned the famous Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, which was to be presented and signed at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, the first women’s rights convention ever organized.
But that wasn’t the only thing Stanton wrote and drafted. Stanton also wrote her own version of the Bible. She dubbed it The Woman’s Bible, with the first volume being released in 1895 and second volume in 1898, quickly becoming a best-seller that was translated into multiple languages. In a future series of posts, perhaps I’ll dive deeper into The Women’s Bible and its numerous faults, but for now, I want to briefly introduce a few of the things she said that shocked me when I first opened it up to read–words which encapsulated Stanton’s stated motivations for rewriting the Bible, and words which injected the first doses of cognitive dissonance into my assumptions about the early feminists.
Stanton writes in her preface to the second volume, “We have made a fetish of the Bible long enough. The time has come to read it as we do all other books, accepting the good and rejecting the evil it teaches.”
To say the least, the forthrightness in this statement shocked me. She couldn’t be clearer. She took up this project because she thought the Bible not only full of contradictions, but that it taught many evils, especially evils concerning women. She figured herself fit for the task of refashioning the supposed Word.
Stanton goes on to state quite boldly,
“[The] Bible, with its fables, allegories and endless contradictions, has been the great block in the way of civilization. All through the centuries scholars and scientists have been imprisoned, tortured and burned alive for some discovery which seemed to conflict with a petty text of Scripture. Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on earth.”
This isn’t just a random female voice from the 19th century. This was the supposed intellectual powerhouse behind the feminist movement as a whole–a Mount Rushmore figure in the early feminist movement.
Much could be said in critique here, as well as much can be critiqued about many of the other writings of the early feminists, and perhaps I’ll do that at a future point. I still have more to learn. But for now, it’s best to let Stanton’s project of rewriting the Bible and her expressed motivations for her project impress something upon us as Christians: Namely, that in light of such information, maybe we have a right to step back and be skeptical about the feminism movement as a whole. Maybe we’re permitted, or even morally obligated, to call into question not just its most recent waves, but the whole sea of motivations that marked it from its outset and the ideas that fueled it.
Maybe it’s not just third wave feminists that are problematic who we often see as bearing rotten fruit. Maybe it’s the case that feminism, in its earliest stages, was incompatible with Christianity. Maybe it was never truly about justice, but actually about reimagining God’s intended order for men and women by refashioning God’s own words to suit their liking.
Or perhaps that’s not the case. One thing is guaranteed us, however: the permission to call feminism and its motivations into question, and to break ourselves free from the pressure to view its early days and early figures with rose-colored glasses. Because maybe, just maybe, the tree could be poisoned at the root. And if that’s the case, then the only option left is to cut the tree down.
Colton Banks 