(10) On the seventh day, when the king was merry with wine, he ordered Mehuman, Bizzetha, Harbona, Bigtha, Abagtha, Zethar, and Carcas, the seven servants in attendance on King Ahasuerus, (11) to bring Queen Vashti before the king wearing a royal diadem, to display her beauty to the peoples and the officials; for she was a beautiful woman. (12) But Queen Vashti refused to come at the king’s command conveyed by the eunuchs. The king was greatly incensed, and his fury burned within him.
Bible Heroines: Being Narrative Biographies of Prominent Hebrew Women- Harriet Beecher Stowe (1878)
"It is true that the thing required was, according to Oriental custom, an indecency as great as if a modern husband should propose to his wife to exhibit her naked person. Vashti was reduced to the place where a woman deliberately chooses death before dishonor. The naive account of the counsel of the king and princes about this first stand for woman's rights--their fear that the example might infect other wives with a like spirit, and weaken the authority of husbands--is certainly a most delightful specimen of ancient simplicity. It shows us that the male sex, with all their force of physical mastery, hold everywhere, even in the undeveloped states of civilization, an almost even-handed conflict with those subtler and more ethereal forces which are ever at the disposal of women."
"The beauty and grace of a woman were the means of preserving the seed from which the great Son of Man and desire of all nations should come."