Book Review

Canada and the United States

Kathi Kern's new book is more than a study of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Woman's Bible. It is the first serious examination of the thought of this towering figure in the history of feminist theory. Stanton has been the object of several biographies, but her bold thinking about the roots of women's subordination has never been submitted to the detailed examination it deserves.

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Kern's work deals with the long, vexed relationship of feminism to Protestant Christianity. Kern joins the chorus of historians who have rejected a simple opposition between secular and religious thought in analyzing the intellectual roots of antebellum women's rights. She establishes that much of the evidence of Stanton's youthful rejection of evangelical Protestantism, especially her famously compelling story about her adolescent spiritual suffering at the hands of Charles Finney, was a later construction. Not until the late 1870s did she embark on a crusade to expose Christianity as the wellspring of woman-hating ideology. The consequences both for her and for the woman suffrage movement were profound. In response to the publication in 1895 and 1898 of the two volumes of The Woman's Bible, American suffragism repudiated not only Stanton but with her an entire generation of progressive feminist thinkers as it entered into the twentieth century. In a perverse way, Stanton was proven right. "Religion mattered too much to too many" to receive the sort of fearless critique for which she had called (p. 129).

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