A suffrage convention, a censored book, and a friendship that held the line—this is the 1896 showdown few of us were ever taught. We open the appendix to The Woman’s Bible and step into the room where NAWSA leaders tried to distance the movement from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s fiercest work. The resolution’s catty phrasing calling it the “so-called Woman’s Bible” was more than shade; it was strategy, signaling a turn toward (so-called) respectability and away from the root critique that Stanton believed blocked every legal gain: scripture used to justify women’s subordination.

We trace the fault lines through names, speeches, and a near-split vote. Charlotte Perkins Stetson offers a surgical amendment to keep the association non-sectarian without shaming dissent. Then Susan B. Anthony rises with a spine-of-steel defense of Stanton, warning that censorship narrows coalitions and that progress cannot survive if questioning sacred authority is off-limits. Her words could be used to-day: you can’t promise freedom with a gag order, and you can’t build a durable movement by appeasing fear.

Along the way, we explore why the Bible became the battleground, how the vote re-centered the suffrage movement, and what that decision cost subsequent generations. We connect the dots to today where Christian nationalism, selective literalism, and rights rollbacks test whether advocates will name the story that shapes the law. We marvel at the lives of victorian women whose lives spanned art, sociology, organizing, and risk. And we end with a poem that captures the ethos: be the rock that sets the boundary, not the tide that flatters and recedes.

If this shook your assumptions or filled a missing chapter in your mental timeline, share it with a friend, subscribe for the next deep dive, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway or maybe some of your own feminist history knowledge. We read every word.

LINKS!

The Woman's Bible Repudiated: https://sacred-texts.com/wmn/wb/wb75.htm

More about Charlotte Perkins: https://aeon.co/ideas/all-woman-the-utopian-feminism-of-charlotte-perkins-gilman

Video Bio: https://youtu.be/Cjw3-lM1Tyg?si=XuejpLTXjWVs_4-b

Her letter with her lovah: https://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/CreativeNonfiction/spring00/rabinowitz.html

This episode recorded at Bob's Basement Studio. Produced and edited by Sara Kaye Larson.

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Credits

Recorded at Troubadour Studios in Lansing, MI

Audio Engineer Corey DeRushia

Edited by Rie Daisies at Nighttime Girlfriend Studio

Music: ‘Shifting pt. 2 (instrumental)’ by Rie Daisies

Executive Producer Kathleen ML Rogers

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