Women's Rights in American Feminist Thought: Murray to Stanton

Introduction

This paper compares, contrasts, and places in their American intellectual context the thought of three pioneering American feminists: Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820), Sarah Moore Grimke (1792–1873), and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902). Examined side by side, these writers illustrate the profound shift that occurred in United States intellectual history during the course of the nineteenth century.

Murray's works exemplify the world of the Enlightenment. Her rationalism is apparent in an argument for women's rights that is mainly concerned with female education. She pays less attention to the problem of biblical texts supporting female subordination than does Sarah Grimke, whose work appeared fifty years later. By the time Grimke was writing, the United States was deep in the thrall of a religious revival. The nature of that revival — which drew on conservative Romanticism's reaction against rationalism — brought the authority of the Bible to the fore of social thought. Grimke, along with other contemporary feminists, was obliged to decisively confront conservative Christianity's emphasis upon female subordination.

Stanton, whose major writings were produced fifty years after those of Grimke, represents a more polarized phase of American culture. By the time she produced her principal works, she had been exposed to the most progressive currents of European thought. This put her greatly at odds with her fellow American feminists who, as the result of yet another religious revival, were even more steeped in Christianity than earlier generations of feminists. Seeing the dangers of a feminism dominated by Christianity, Stanton went on the offensive in a central work of the feminist canon, The Woman's Bible. Her literary activity in the 1890s reflects her perception that American feminism might soon be overwhelmed by women for whom religion was more important than emancipation.

This paper argues that although feminist thought demonstrates considerable progress in the century between Murray and Stanton, this progress was at odds with the growing influence of evangelical Christianity in American life as a whole. Murray and Grimke were both converts to varieties of evangelical Protestantism who drew considerable intellectual and emotional nourishment from strands of Christianity that encouraged, or at least did not discourage, their personal development. Unlike Murray and Grimke, Stanton did not convert to evangelicalism; instead, she launched upon a secularizing trajectory that took her beyond Christianity toward Comtean Positivism and rationalism. Unlike her predecessors, moreover, she acknowledged the problems inherent in any attempt to square Christianity with feminism. Yet she never rejected the Bible completely, and she is appropriately viewed today as a pioneer of feminist biblical criticism.

Judith Sargent Murray converted from Congregationalism to Universalism in 1774 — that is, from the Calvinist theology of salvation for only the Elect to the doctrine of the salvation of all souls. She was prepared as early as 1780 to engage with conservative Christian opposition from a liberal Protestant position (Behnke 10–11). Universalism's theology of universal salvation, premised at least partly on the equivalence of female and male souls, was less the starting point for an attack on conservative Christian orthodoxy than it was the moral foundation of her own personal striving for intellectual self-realization. Although her feminist work includes an inescapable religious element, the emphasis falls upon the liberation of female intellectual energies.

Judith Sargent Murray and Enlightenment Feminism

In 1790 she completed and published in The Massachusetts Magazine an essay entitled "On the Equality of the Sexes," which she had begun in 1779 (Harris xxi, xxiv). The essay is principally a defense of the proposition that women's intellectual powers are equal to men's. In order to overcome the traditional male disparagement of female intellectual capacity, Murray addressed two subjects: first, the nature of female education; and second, what scripture has to say about women. Female education had to be dealt with because, at the empirical level, there is an apparent contradiction between the principle of equality between the sexes and the reality of female under-achievement in the public sphere. Like most early feminists, Murray had to explain for her readers the central role played by education in developing — or, in the case of females, failing to develop — human potential. She argued that reason and judgment are faculties women are rarely able to cultivate, given the traditional emphasis upon educating women for domestic functions only (5). She also reminded her readers that society manifests strong prejudices against learned women (6).

The problem of scripture arises because Murray's feminism is rooted in Christian theology. If, as Universalism implies, female souls are equal to male — for "the same breath of God animates, enlivens, and invigorates us" (8) — the problem for feminists is why sexual equality is not demonstrated throughout the Bible. Conceding that "there are many passages in the sacred oracles which seem to give the advantage to the other [i.e., male] sex," Murray sought refuge in the problematic view that such passages were "wholly metaphorical" (9). After reminding her readers that some men mentioned in the Bible were less than perfect (9), her argument founders and she reverts to the theme of unsatisfactory female education. Without doubt, her tentative attempt to enlist the Christian "oracles" in the cause of feminism is the weakest and least convincing element of her argument.

Instead of confronting the scriptures directly, therefore, Murray argued in deductive terms: since women possessed souls, they had as much right as men to survey the wonder and beauty of creation:

"In astronomy she might catch a glimpse of the immensity of the Deity, and thence she would form amazing conceptions of the august and supreme Intelligence. In geography she would admire Jehovah in the midst of his benevolence; thus adapting this globe to the various wants and amusements of its inhabitants. In natural philosophy she would adore the infinite majesty of heaven, clothed in condescension; and as she traversed the reptile world, she would hail the goodness of a creating God." (6–7)

This was a striking argument that made the development of female intellectual potential inseparable from the worship of God. While it is certainly useful as an argument for elevating the standard of female education, however, it falls far short of a cry for female emancipation.

Sarah Moore Grimke and the Authority of Scripture

Religion's relationship to feminism is more thoroughly explored in Sarah Moore Grimke's more ambitious Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman (1838). What had changed in the fifty years since Murray's essay was published was that the battle for the liberation of women's intellectual abilities appeared to have been won. By the 1830s, well-educated women existed. The shift now occurring — precipitated by the antislavery movement — was toward the use of female abilities to intervene in debates of social importance. Like other feminist antislavery advocates, Sarah Grimke gained notoriety as an outspoken female advocate of the antislavery cause.

In 1838, Grimke, who had converted to Quakerism around 1818 — apparently because it was compatible with her passionate commitment to antislavery (Lerner 8) — found herself vilified by the press and rebuked by the Congregationalist ministerial association of Massachusetts for her participation in an abolitionist lecture tour of New England in 1837–38. What was controversial, however, was not so much her antipathy to slavery — although the Congregationalist clergy had long sought to stifle criticism of slavery — as the idea that a woman should dare to speak out publicly on a matter of such importance (Behnke 20; Lerner 19).

Grimke responded to her critics by publishing a work that forcefully defended her right to speak. Addressed to Mary S. Parker, president of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Grimke's Letters dwelt at length on the Bible, which was the ultimate source of the conservative view that women were commanded by God to restrict their endeavors to the domestic sphere. Grimke shared Murray's conviction that the meaning of scripture had been "perverted" in the interests of men. Almost everything that has been written about "the sphere of woman," she argued, "has been the result of a misconception of the simple truths revealed in the Scriptures." She cited, in particular, erroneous translations, and professed a low opinion of the 1611 King James Bible (221). In an examination of the creation narrative, she discerned no grounds to believe that God had created woman as an inferior creature. Both genders, she insisted, were formed in God's image and endowed with equal dignity and responsibility.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton represents the most advanced and most contested point in the nineteenth-century arc of American feminist thought. Unlike Murray and Grimke, Stanton did not find in Protestant Christianity a sufficient foundation for feminist argument. Exposed to the most progressive currents of European thought — including Comtean Positivism and secular rationalism — she came to view the Bible itself as an instrument of women's oppression rather than a resource to be reinterpreted in feminism's favor. Her major writings, produced roughly fifty years after Grimke's, reflect a cultural moment in which yet another wave of evangelical revivalism had made American feminism even more entangled with Christianity than before. Stanton saw this entanglement as a danger and responded with her most provocative work, The Woman's Bible, in which she subjected the biblical text to systematic feminist criticism.

Conclusion

Examined together, Murray, Grimke, and Stanton trace a century of evolution in American feminist thought, each thinker pushing the argument for women's rights further than her predecessor while navigating the constraints imposed by the religious climate of her era. Murray's Enlightenment rationalism provided a foundation in the equal spiritual dignity of women and men; Grimke's scriptural analysis armed feminists against conservative clerical opposition; and Stanton's secularizing turn opened the possibility of a feminism not bound by Christian premises. Yet this intellectual progress unfolded against a broader cultural current moving in the opposite direction. The successive waves of evangelical revival that swept American society across the nineteenth century deepened, rather than weakened, the hold of conservative Christianity on public life. The tension between feminist progress and evangelical resurgence that Stanton identified in the 1890s was not resolved in her lifetime, and it remained a defining feature of American social thought well into the following century.