Bible -- Commentaries; Bible -- Feminist criticism; Women in the Bible
I cannot agree with you that "the Bible degrades women from Genesis to
Revelation." The Bible, which is a collection of ancient literature,
historic, prophetic, poetic and epistolary, is valuable as showing the
status of woman at the time when the books were written. And the
advice, or the commands, to women given by Paul in the Epistles,
against which there has been so much railing, when studied in the light
of the higher criticism, with the aid of cotemporary {sic} history and
Greek scholarship, show Paul to have been in advance of the religious
teachers of his time.
All these commands that have offended us in the past appear in his
Epistles to the churches in cities of Greece, where marriage was bitter
slavery to women. Paul was aiming to uplift marriage to the level of
the great Christian idea, as he uttered it, in Gal. iii., 28: "There is
neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither
male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." Christianity is
simply the universal fatherhood of God, and the universal brotherhood
of man. And Paul was declaring this in the utterance which I have
quoted. All the unjust distinctions of race and of caste, all the
oppressions of slavery and the degradations of woman were effaced by
the two cardinal doctrines of pristine Christianity; and Paul seems to
have lived up to his teaching.
I cannot say that "Christianity has been the foe of woman." The study
of the evolution of woman does not show this. My later studies have
changed many of my earlier crude notions concerning the development of
woman. She has developed slowly, and so has man; and the history of the
past shows that every activity of man which has advanced him has been
shared by her.
There is so wide a belief among orthodox people, nowadays, in what
Professor Briggs calls "the errancy of the Bible," that I doubt if you
will be attacked, no matter how startling may be your heresies in Part
II. Nobody cares much about heresy in these days; and my desire to
withhold my name from your work, as an endorser, comes from my utter
ignorance of it, and from my belief that I should
disagree with you, judging from your letter before me.
Yours very truly,
M. A. Livermore.
My Dear Mrs. Stanton:--You have sent to me the following questions:
"Have the teachings of the Bible advanced or retarded the emancipation
of women? Have they dignified or degraded the Mothers of the Race?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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