19th Amendment and the Bible
Does anyone out there know 'how the Bible was used to keep women from having the right to vote?'
shareThe idea that "woman was made from man", that she was simply an extension from Adam's rib and therefore made to serve him is the logic behind believeing that women could not and should not form their own political identities or have any of the same social and political rights as men. Most men believed women weren't capable of being politically informed, that they wouldn't understand the delicate issues and would therefore vote for candiadtes based on looks, or simply ask their husbands to tell them who to vote for. The argument that women weren't mentally designed to be able to think about the same things men were was also one of the justifications for not giving suffrage to black people.
And long before the right to vote was granted, Stanton and Anthony led fights to allow women to own property and divorce abusive husbands and retain custody of their children. Women were their husband's property during most of the 19th century.
Finally, it was Stanton's foresight to look beyond just the political realm and ask the broader question of why men were so opposed to women being fundamentally equal beings. Why was the belief that women are subservient so entrenched in cultures around the world (and why is it still)?
And her answer was that the Bible's creation story made women second-class, an afterthought, not to mention the destroyer of Eden. So she wrote "The Women's Bible" which alientated her from her own movement because it was so incendiary. Stanton was steadfast that until we addressed these ingrained, root causes of inequality, women would never be truly free, right to vote or not.
The title "Not For Ourselves Alone" is really interesting in that these women realized that their struggle, though primarily for women, included all people who deserve the right to be truly free and have a voice. Oh, how much work will still have ahead! As a Christian, I still see the Bible being a hammer of injustice to those who want equality. Really superb PBS series.
shareThank you for the very educated response. It's interesting because I recently watched Makers about the womens right movement and roughly 100 years after Anthony and Stanton were fighting for the vote against religious opposition and stemming from women making a correlation between African American rights and Women's right the exact same cycle repeated itself. in the 60's women working for civil rights saw their own lack of power and took a stand. They also came up against extreme religious opposition based on their views of abortion. Very interesting. I wonder what kind of world we would be living in now if the out spoken feminists of the 60s worked with the same longevity to achieve their goals as Anthony and Stanton.