The Woman Who Read the Bible For the First Time
Katharine Bushnell created Christian feminism—and the future?
Published in
10 min readJun 23, 2022
A few years ago I set out to figure out what God thought about sex. Many scholarly books had footnotes citing a strange book with a radical reading of the Bible—published by a woman in 1921.
I kept an eye out for more, and a hazy story began to fill in. She had been a self-taught Bible scholar who self-published a book documenting how God didn’t disfavor women. She’d been famous for awhile, then died forgotten.
But for resurrection stories there’s Jesus and Katharine Bushnell.
In 1971, a Christian fan did the first digging.
Ruth Hoppin found Bushnell’s old pastor. He remembered the elderly woman he’d known as a young man. He recalled her as cheerful.
“Her work was like a rock dropped to the bottom of the ocean,” he added. “Kerplunk, it was gone, the end of it.”
But a new activity called Christian feminism was forming, and Bushnell’s book, God’s Word to Women, was their text. Other women had protested ‘patriarchal’ readings of the Bible, but as Catharine…
