by ©2025 Sarah Becker

“From the inauguration of the movement for woman’s emancipation the Bible has been used to hold her in the ‘divinely ordained sphere,’” suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton age 80 wrote. “The canon and civil law; church and state; priests and legislators; all political parties and religious denominations have alike taught that woman was made after man, of man, and for man, an inferior being, subject to man.  Creeds, codes, Scripture and statutes are all based on this idea.”

In 1895 President Grover Cleveland was in the White House [D-NJ, 1883-1889 & 1893-1897]. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Sherman Anti-trust Act applied only to monopolies involved in interstate commerce; the Populist Party collapsed, and Stanton, born in 1815, published Part One of The Woman’s Bible.

“Woman’s suffrage is inexpedient,” Cleveland told the Ladies’ Home Journal. Inexpedient, as defined by the Oxford dictionary: “not practical, suitable, or advisable.”

“Man has his work,” Cleveland continued. “Woman has hers. But neither should invade the other’s province…It is a mistake to suppose that any human reason or argument is needful or adequate to the assignment of the relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in working out the problems of civilization.”

Said suffragist Susan B. Anthony to journalist Nellie Bly in 1896, “[B]icycling has done more to emancipate women than anything else…I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent.”

Formerly enslaved black males achieved the right to vote in 1870 [Amendment 15, Section 1, of the U.S. Bill of Rights]. Yet women, as represented by Stanton, Anthony and Frederick Douglass’ American Equal Rights Association [1866-1869] were excluded.

“The whole system needs changing, but men will never make changes,” Victoria Woodhull [1838-1927], a member of the Equal Rights Party and the first female candidate for President [1872] declared.

“No reform has ever been started but the Bible, falsely interpreted, has opposed it,” Stanton said. “When in the early part of the Nineteenth Century, women began to protest their civil and political degradation they were referred to the Bible for an answer. When they protested against the unequal position in the church, they were referred to the Bible for an answer.”

“All reforms are interdependent, and whatever is done to establish one principle on a solid basis, strengthens all,” Stanton believed. “Reformers who are always compromising have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.”

“We have many women abundantly endowed with capabilities to understand and revise what men have thus far written,” Stanton claimed, “but they are all suffering from inherited ideas of their inferiority; they do not perceive it, yet such is the true explanation of their solicitude, lest they should seem to be too self-asserting.”

“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,” Stanton said.

The Woman’s Bible success fractured the suffrage movement. So much so suffragists, especially younger members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, felt the loss of elective support. The problem, they said, was more than The Woman’s Bible’s sexist title. It was the ‘cult of domesticity.’

In January 1896 the National American Woman Suffrage Association held its 28th annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The Association rejected The Woman’s Bible stating “that this Association is nonsectarian, being composed of persons of all shades of religious opinion, and that it has no official connection with the so-called ‘Woman’s Bible,’ or any theological publication.”

Stanton, perturbed by public criticism, published Part Two of The Woman’s Bible in 1898. “Female suffrage will come,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice David J. Brewer said in December 1909.  “Not fully at once, but in varying steps…Women’s [broader] education, her increasing familiarity with business and public affairs, will lead to it.”

Former Republican Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 Bull Moose Party was the first national party to embrace woman’s suffrage.  According to the Party’s 1912 platform “The Progressive party, believing that no people can justly claim to be a true democracy which denies political rights on account of sex, pledges itself to the task of securing equal suffrage to men and women alike.”

The 19^th Amendment, the women’s 1920 suffrage amendment is law. Alice Paul’s 1923, 102 year-old Equal Rights Amendment suffers still. Speaker of the House, Southern Baptist and evangelical Mike Johnson’s 2025 women’s issue: abortion, of course. Did President Thomas Jefferson [DR-VA] not tell the 1802 Danbury Baptist Association that “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God…That the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions,” and that the 1791 Bill of Rights “builds a wall of separation between Church & State.”

“Religion,” the Danbury Baptist Association agreed, “is at all times and places a Matter between God and Individuals.”

I have supported the Equal Rights Amendment for more than 50 years,” outgoing President Joe Biden [D-DE, 2021-2025] said on January 17, 2005, “and I have long been clear that no one should be discriminated against based on their sex. We, as a nation, must affirm and protect women’s full equality once and for all.”

“On January 27, 2020, the Commonwealth of Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment,” Biden continued. “The American Bar Association (ABA) has recognized that the Equal Rights Amendment has cleared all necessary hurdles to be formally added to the Constitution as the 28th Amendment. I agree with the ABA and with leading legal constitutional scholars that the Equal Rights Amendment has become part of our Constitution.”

In August 2024 the ABA approved Resolution 601 “in support of installing the Equal Rights Amendment as the 28th amendment.” In part it claims “a deadline for ratification of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution is not consistent with Article V of the Constitution.” Unlike the past, today’s ABA membership is 41% female attorneys. See also, https://oldtowncrier.com/2024/09/01/womens-equality-in-2024/

“It is long past time to recognize the will of the American people,” Biden concluded. “In keeping with my oath and duty to Constitution and country, I affirm what I believe and what three-fourths of the states have ratified: the 28th Amendment is the law of the land, guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex.”

Sadly neither the Archivist nor Deputy Archivist of the United States agrees. For more information, visit https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2025/nr25-004

Women’s History Month is celebrated March 1-31. “We are a billion voices, Bright and brave; we are the light, Standing together in the fight,” 2021 Inaugural poet laureate Amanda Gorman, author of Girls on the Rise [2025] wrote. “In our hearts, we are the same: We are a power, a movement…We are Girl, Glowing and growing, Knowing where the wind is blowing. We are where change is going.”

Maybe “wind is blowing.” First Lady Melania Trump’s official White House portrait shows her wearing a black-designer pants suit: “boardroom pastiche,” Vogue said.  Gorman, born March 7, 1998, awaits her previously announced 2036 Presidential run.

Sarah Becker started writing for The Economist while a graduate student in England. Similar publications followed. She joined the Crier in 1996 while serving on the Alexandria Convention and Visitors Association Board. Her interest in antiquities began as a World Bank hire, with Indonesia’s need to generate hard currency. Balinese history, i.e. tourism provided the means. The New York Times describes Becker’s book, Off Your Duffs & Up the Assets, as “a blueprint for thousands of nonprofit managers.” A former museum director, SLAM’s saving grace Sarah received Alexandria’s Salute to Women Award in 2007.