Feminist Forerunners and a Usable Past: A Historiography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Woman's Bible

In 1895 and 1898, Elizabeth Cady Stanton published The Woman's Bible, a two-volume edited compilation of woman-centered commentaries on biblical passages. Prominent clergymen reviled it and Stanton's fellow suffrage leaders disassociated themselves from it. The work was out of print until the 1970s, when The Woman's Bible found a new home among second-wave feminist scholars of religion, who saw in Stanton a feminist forerunner and in her Bible a validation of their own efforts. Few historiographic accounts of this second-wave religious studies scholarship yet exist; Mace contributes to these emerging historiographical conversations by examining the leading role Stanton has played in second-wave feminist theology and biblical studies. The author also contextualizes Stanton's reception in relation to that of two other historical feminist figures, Frances Willard and Matilda Joslyn Gage, and argues that of these three, Stanton has offered contemporary feminist scholars of religion the more "usable" past.