Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) issued The Woman’s Bible in 1895, a prophetic act which deserves continuous appreciation.

“Do not speak out concerning the errors, illusions and patriarchal prejudices of the Bible,” Stanton was advised. “You will create such a furious response that you’ll jeopardise our fight for the right to vote.”

Stanton was not persuaded, declaring that the Bible is the chief enemy of women’s equality. Indeed, she exclaimed, “The Bible has been the great block in the way of civilization. The wonder is that women make a fetish of the very book which is responsible for their civil and social degradation.”

Refusing to postpone the controversy, she continued openly to oppose oppressive power, crying out unambiguously: “So long as tens of thousands of Bibles are printed every year, and circulated over the whole habitable globe, and the masses in all English-speaking nations revere it as the word of God, it is vain to belittle its influence.”

Elizabeth Cady dared openly to ask: “Does anyone at this stage of civilization think the Bible was written by the finger of God, that the Old and New Testaments emanated from the highest divine thought in the universe?” Nay, she proclaims, “The Bible treats women as of a different class, inferior to man or in subjection to him.”

Gathering a committee of women to issue a Woman’s Bible commenting on the view of women in the Old and New Testaments, she issued the first of the two volumes in 1895. It was edited and mainly written by her.

In 1895, the same year that The Woman’s Bible appeared, 6,000 people gathered in the Metropoliitan Opera House in New York City to honor Elizabeth’s 80th birthday. She was an excellent public speaker who then and there unequivocally affirmed that women must now demand an equal place in the church, including the financial transactions.

How did all this happen? In 1840, When Elizabeth married Henry Brewster Stanton, she and her social reformer husband immediately went to London to attend the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention. When she learned that women were excluded from being delegates, she met with the also excluded Quaker minister, Lucretia Mott, and they resolved to form a Women’s Rights Convention in the United States. The result was the 1848 Seneca declaration of the right of women to vote—the first such public demand ever made.

Two weeks later, when the convention was reconvened in the Rochester Unitarian Church, many more women and men signed this Declaration of Sentiment. In 1902 at age 86, she died in her sleep just after writing to President Theodore Roosevelt, urging him to declare himself in favor of women’s right to vote. The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America was adopted in 1920.