Reading Rambo

If you will remember, in 1895, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other noted feminist writers published The Woman's Bible , which reexamines the Bible from a 19th century feminist perspective. It is the shit. The second book of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible, and something Christianity has in common with Judaism) is Exodus. Exodus has the story of the Israelites fleeing Egypt, Moses parting the Red Sea, the creation of the Ten Commandments, and the journey to the Promised Land. Basically it's this movie: 80-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton once again comes out swinging with: The question naturally suggests itself to any rational mind, why should the customs and opinions of this ignorant people, who lived centuries ago, have any influence in the religious thought of this generation? BUT SHE GOES ON. Women have had no voice in the canon law, the catechisms, the church creeds and discipline, and why should they obey the behests of a strictly masculi...

In 1895, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, then 80 years old , published the first part of a project she and the other women working on it called The Woman's Bible . One of its main purposes was to argue against the idea that women should be subservient to men, and to trample upon the notion that it was God's will they be so. This book is startling, shocking, and astonishing. It reads like an essay by 1960s radical feminists (except when Stanton uses words like "tergiversation"). It seems that when they can, they use the Julia Smith translation , which I'd never heard of, for reasons explained in that Wikipedia article. Side note, but I'd like to point out that that translation apparently retails for appx $20,000  because there are basically no copies of it. The Woman's Bible was published in two parts, in 1895 and 1898, and looks at the women in the Bible, as well as verses that have been used for centuries to justify their subjugation. As Clara Bewick Col...