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73 G 3 Defenses of Women’s Preaching: Dissenting Rhetoric and the Language of Women’s Rights Chapter 1, on women’s humanist treatises and dialogues on women’s education , traced the development of a women’s theory of rhetoric based on conversation as a model of discourse. Chapter 2 examined the continuance of this model in Anglo-American conduct books by women for women that further acknowledged the gendered circumstances of communication. This chapter introduces a parallel strand of women’s rhetorical theory—women’s defenses of women’s preaching. From the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Christian women published defenses of women’s preaching—until they successfully gained the right to preach. In these defenses, even though women are arguing for women’s right to public speaking, they yet assume conversation as a model for preaching. Furthermore, they enter this public realm by means of arguments about their domestic roles as mother, caretaker, healer, and helper. This chapter considers works by Margaret Fell, Jarena Lee, Lucretia Mott, Ellen Stewart, Catherine Booth, and Frances Willard. Some of these women were famous and their works saw multiple editions (Fell, Mott, Booth, and Willard), and the others, while not famous, recorded, like their more famous sisters, industrious traveling preaching careers (Lee and Stewart). These six have been chosen out of the dozens of defenses of women’s preaching because they span the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries and the transatlantic Protestant religious network. Moreover , they are representative of the full range of genres of defenses of preaching and epitomize a vvariety of argumentative strategies. Through conservative strategies of biblical close reading, women’s defenses of women’s preaching argue for a radical goal: women’s public speaking in church or religious assembly. The women who composed these treatises joined a public 74 Defenses of Women’s Preaching debate about scripture, claiming that Paul’s restrictions on speaking in church applied only to some women and constructing lists of biblical women who were prophets or preachers. Moreover, these defenses experiment with forms of rhetorical argument based on collaborative authorship and dialogic authority. Interestingly, however, women’s defenses of women’s preaching often modified definitions of the sermon in the direction of catechism or conversation, giving up the site of the public sermon to male authority only to seize witnessing and moral persuasion as distinctly appropriate to women.1 Still, the goal of these defenses was to confront women’s differences from men as speakers in order to claim some space for women’s public speaking. By the nineteenth century, English and American women who preached increasingly saw themselves as a transatlantic community, sharing arguments and defending each other across the ocean. Why should defenses of women’s preaching be included under the category of rhetorical theory? From Plato, Cicero, and Quintilian on, a central question of rhetorical theory has been “who is the ideal orator?” In Plato’s Gorgias, for example, Socrates argues that it is not the man who uses rhetoric for power over others who is the ideal, but rather the man who controls himself for the good of the state and his own soul. In Cicero’s De Oratore, the rhetoricians seated in a garden debate whether the orator should be a specialist in the law or an eclectic philosopher who has a broad range of knowledge. In his massive Institutes, Quintilian offers a lifetime program of education and requirements for the orator and counters Plato’s skepticism by a definition of eloquence as the good man speaking well. Augustine carries this question into sermon rhetoric when, in the last book of De Doctrina Christiana [On Christian Doctrine], he explores the virtue required of the preacher who persuades with his life as example. The unspoken assumption throughout these debates about rhetoric, though, is that the ideal orator is also always male and usually of privileged class.2 Defenses of women’s preaching, then, belong in the history of rhetorical theory because they also enter the debate over the question “who is the ideal orator?” In Women’s Speaking Justified (1666), Margaret Fell argues that the ideal orator or preacher is one who is gifted by God with the light, whether the person is male or female. Jarena Lee’s The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee (1836) defines the ideal orator or preacher as one who has been called by God—and if God calls “ignorant fishermen” (37) to preach, then he also may inspire women to preach. Lucretia...

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