Bible -- Commentaries; Bible -- Feminist criticism; Women in the Bible
III. There will be two or more editors to bring the work of the
various committees into one consistent whole.
IV. The completed work will be submitted to an advisory committee
assembled at some central point, as London, New York, or Chicago, to
sit in final judgment on "The Woman's Bible."
As to the manner of doing the practical work:
Those who have been engaged this summer have adopted the following
plan, which may be suggestive to new members of the committee. Each
person purchased two Bibles, ran through them from Genesis to
Revelations, marking all the texts that concerned women. The passages
were cut out, and pasted in a blank book, and the commentaries then
written underneath.
Those not having time to read all the books can confine their labors
to the particular ones they propose to review.
It is thought best to publish the different parts as soon as prepared
so that the Committee may have all in print in a compact form before
the final revision.
E. C. S.
August 1st, 1895.
INTRODUCTION.
From the inauguration of the movement for woman's emancipation the
Bible has been used to hold her in the "divinely ordained sphere,"
prescribed in the Old and New Testaments.
The canon and civil law; church and state; priests and legislators;
all political parties and religious denominations have alike taught
that woman was made after man, of man, and for man, an inferior being,
subject to man. Creeds, codes, Scriptures and statutes, are all based
on this idea. The fashions, forms, ceremonies and customs of society,
church ordinances and discipline all grow out of this idea.
Of the old English common law, responsible for woman's civil and
political status, Lord Brougham said, "it is a disgrace to the
civilization and Christianity of the Nineteenth Century." Of the canon
law, which is responsible for woman's status in the church, Charles
Kingsley said, "this will never be a good world for women until the
last remnant of the canon law is swept from the face of the earth."
The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world,
that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned
before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced.
Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period
of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to
play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material
wants, and for all the information she might desire on the vital
questions of the hour, she was commanded to ask her husband at home.
Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up.
Those who have the divine insight to translate, transpose and
transfigure this mournful object of pity into an exalted, dignified
personage, worthy our worship as the mother of the race, are to be
congratulated as having a share of the occult mystic power of the
eastern Mahatmas.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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