Luciferian emancipation in nineteenth-century women's-rights writing

Per Faxneld's Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Oxford University Press, 2017) documents an extensive rhetorical tradition within the period's women's-rights writing: the deliberate framing of Lucifer or Satan as the true emancipator of women against Christian patriarchal doctrine.

The rhetorical move was direct. Gage's book — Faxneld's principal American case — identifies the Christian church as the primary historical institution responsible for women's subjugation and systematically rereads the Genesis story to identify the serpent, traditionally identified with Satan, as the giver of knowledge to Eve, and thus as the ally of women in their attempt to acquire independent knowledge against the priestly interdiction. In this reading, Christianity is the villain and Satan the liberator.

Gage was not an isolated voice. Faxneld's book documents the same rhetorical move across the American radical feminist and freethought press of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Moses Harman's Lucifer, the Light-Bearer (Kansas, 1883–1907) was an anarchist, freethought, and women's-rights weekly whose masthead invoked Lucifer as the emancipatory principle against Christian marriage law. Voltairine de Cleyre, Elmina Slenker, and other American radical writers made variants of the same theological argument. In continental Europe the same rhetorical strategy is documented in French, Swedish, and German first-wave feminist literature; Faxneld tracks it as a coherent transnational rhetorical practice.

The theological move was calculated. Nineteenth-century patriarchal law — coverture, women's exclusion from higher education and the professions, marital-consent doctrines that made rape within marriage impossible in law — was framed and enforced through Christian scriptural authority. To reject the patriarchal legal order was, for many nineteenth-century women's-rights writers, to reject the theological order that underwrote it; Satan was the theologically available figure that stood against that order. The rhetorical adoption of Lucifer was, on the primary-source record Faxneld reconstructs, a conscious editorial choice by the women writers themselves.

Faxneld's monograph is a peer-reviewed academic work of about four hundred pages of primary-source citation. The record it establishes is the earliest documented layer of what this tract surveys.