Beyond the Pulpit

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

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Contents

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pp. vii-viii

Acknowledgments

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pp. ix-x

I am indebted to so many people for their assistance and encouragement throughout this project. First and foremost is Kate Ronald, who willingly waded through early drafts and provided valuable responses and sage guidance since the inception of this project. ...

Introduction

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pp. 1-17

A small group of Methodist women brought Ruth Short back to life. Long before she died, my grandmother disappeared behind the shroud of dementia, and I had somehow forgotten the lively woman she once was. Following her funeral, some women from the church prepared a bereavement dinner for our family. ...

1. Dying Well

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pp. 18-35

Harriet Neale led an exemplary life; however, she is memorialized more for the way she died than the way she lived. By dying well, Neale became a holy messenger and a model Christian demonstrating the strength and power of her faith. According to her memoir, when Neale became sick, she knew that her illness would prove fatal. ...

2. Women’s Deathbed Pulpits

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pp. 36-52

Using both the ethos and pathos of her deathbed, Sarah Tomlinson stressed the “necessity of conversion” and warned her visitors “not to persecute religion as she had done.”¹ While her exhortations were directed at family and friends, who stood vigil by her bedside, through the publication of her memoir ...

3. Contained Inside the Ladies’ Department

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pp. 53-69

In this epigraph, an excerpt from the Christian Advocate (CA) Ladies’ Department, the picture that emerges of a good wife is a tireless servant devoted to the happiness and well-being of her husband. Through advice such as this, likely written by a man and dispensed to women in its national newspaper, ...

4. Stepping Outside the Ladies’ Department

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pp. 70-104

The “History of Amelia Gale,” appearing on the front page of the June 20, 1828, Christian Advocate (CA), tells the story of a poor widow living in England who spent most of her life eking out an existence by carrying a gaming board to fairs and wakes. Late in life, Amelia was awakened by a minister’s preaching, ...

5. A Magazine of Their Own

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pp. 105-126

In her essay titled “Female Training,” initially read before a college for teachers and later reprinted in the Methodist church’s Ladies’ Repository (LR), Mrs. Dumont acknowledged the persistent bias against female education. She asserted that while the “day of woman’s proscriptive seclusion from the advantages of intellectual culture ...

Epilogue: Ambiguous and Liminal Spaces

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pp. 127-134

When the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote passed in the House of Representatives in 1918, the women standing in the gallery celebrated by singing the Doxology, a refrain ritually sung in many Protestant churches.¹ This image of ardent first-wave feminists praising God seems peculiar today ...

Notes

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pp. 135-154

Bibliography

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pp. 155-164

Index

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pp. 165-169

Back Cover

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