ing the Scriptures, 2 vols., edited by Elizabeth Schüssler
Fiorenza (New York, 1993–1994).Many of Stanton’s works are being issued in a proposed six-
volume critical edition, with Ann D. Gordon serving as edi-
tor: The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan
B. Anthony; Vol. 1: In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840 to
1866 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997); Vol. 2: Against an Aris-
tocracy of Sex (New Brunswick, N.J., 2000). The contempo-
rary edition of Stanton’s autobiography, Eighty Years and
More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897 (Evanston, Ill., 1993), in-
cludes essays by Gordon and Ellen DuBois.
Biographical studies of Stanton include Alma Lutz, Created Equal:
A Biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815–1902 (New
York, 1940); Elizabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life
of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York, 1984), and Lois Ban-
ner, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for Women’s Rights
(Boston, 1980). The biography assembled by her children
Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary, and Reminis-
cences (New York, 1922) is heavily edited and unreliable. For
general background on the suffrage movement, Ellen Du-
Bois’s Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Indepen-
dent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869, 2d ed. (Ith-
aca, N.Y., 1999) remains the basic work on the period, while
the book accompanying Ken Burns’s documentary, Geoffrey
C. Ward’s Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (New York, 1999), pro-
vides a good introduction for the general reader. James E.
Goodman, “The Origins of the ‘Civil War’ in the Reform
Community: Elizabeth Cady Stanton on Woman’s Rights
and Reconstruction” in Critical Matrix 1, no. 2 (1985):
1–29, presents a detailed account of the immediate post–
Civil War divisions.
JENNIFER RYCENGA (2005)
STARBUCK, E. D. (1866–1947), was a prominent fig-
ure in the early academic study of the psychology of religion
in the United States and the first scholar to use the phrase
“psychology of religion.” Edwin Diller Starbuck was born in
Indiana to a devout Quaker farming family. After undergrad-
uate work at Indiana University, he went on to Harvard Uni-
versity, from which he received his master’s degree in 1895,
and then to Clark University, where in 1897 he received his
doctorate. In 1890 he was stirred by F. Max Müller’s Intro-
duction to the Science of Religion and decided to start studying
religion. In 1893, at Harvard, he circulated two question-
naires, one on sudden conversion and the other on “gradual
growth” toward religious commitment. In 1894 and 1895
he presented papers on his research before the Harvard Reli-
gious Union. After graduating from Clark University, he re-
mained there as a fellow in the late 1890s, together with
James H. Leuba.
Starbuck’s 1899 book The Psychology of Religion was
based on studies he started at Harvard under William James
and continued at Clark under G. Stanley Hall; it enjoyed
three editions, was reprinted several times, and was translated
into German in 1909. Starbuck had the support and encour-
agement of James in his work, but as Starbuck himself re-
ports in a frank autobiographical statement, there was some
tension in his relationship with Hall, and mutual criticism
is much in evidence.
After the turn of the century, Starbuck devoted most of
his creative energy to “character training” and devised selec-
tions of fairy tales, novels, and biographies that would con-
tribute to the moral education of the young. He taught a va-
riety of subjects at a number of institutions, including
philosophy at the State University of Iowa (1906–1930), and
philosophy (1930–1938) and psychology (1938–1943) at
the University of Southern California. Starbuck’s important
contribution remains his early survey of conversion cases,
which work was immortalized by James, who used Starbuck’s
data in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). While the
basic findings of the survey have been accepted, and seem to
fit with classical and modern notions of conversion, the theo-
retical construction seems hopelessly naive today. Together
with Hall, Starbuck regarded conversion as an adolescent
phenomenon, and had the data to show it. His findings are
still quoted today, and are beyond dispute, but his psycholo-
gy and his definition of religion as an “instinct” no longer
find serious adherents.
Starbuck’s attitude toward religion was clearly positive,
and he saw the importance of the psychology of religion as
contributing to religious education. According to James,
Starbuck’s aim in starting his research in the psychology of
religion was to bring about reconciliation in the feud be-
tween science and religion. According to Starbuck’s autobio-
graphical account, his interest in religion was very much an
attempt to answer, via systematic study, both doubts and cu-
riosities about religion. If one attempts an evaluation of Star-
buck’s work from the perspective of several generations, one
might conclude that it will be remembered more by histori-
ans of the field than by practitioners. His work may belong
with the classics of the field, but it must be numbered with
the unread classics, even among scholars.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Argyle, Michael, and Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. The Social Psychol-
ogy of Religion. Boston, 1975.
Beit-Hallahmi, Benjamin. “Psychology of Religion, 1880–1930:
The Rise and Fall of a Psychological Movement.” Journal of
the History of the Behavioral Sciences 10 (1974): 84–90.
Starbuck, E. D. The Psychology of Religion. London, 1899.
Starbuck, E. D. “Religion’s Use of Me.” In Religion in Transition,
edited by Vergilius Ferm, pp. 201–256. New York, 1937.
New Sources
Hay, David. “Psychologists Interpreting Conversion: Two Ameri-
can Forerunners of the Hermeneutics of Suspicion.” History
of the Human Sciences 12, no. 1 (1999): 55–73.
BENJAMIN BEIT-HALLAHMI (1987)
Revised Bibliography8732 STARBUCK, E. D.