Beyond the Pulpit: Women’s Rhetorical Roles in the Antebellum Religious Press

Introduction

1 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. My grandmother had not attended that small, red brick church in Hartford, Arkansas, in several years, but the faces of the women who served the dinner were still familiar to me from all the Sundays we had accompanied Grandmother to church. One of the women sang a solo during the funeral service, and when my sister and I told her how much we appreciated it, she explained that the first time she sang that song, Mrs. Short had approached her after the church service to ask if she would sing it at her funeral. Surprised by the request, the woman said, “Mrs. Short, I have never sung at a funeral.” To which my grandmother responded, “Well, I’ve never died, but I guess that won’t stop me.” That story about my grandmother prompted another and another until this small group of women with their casseroles, compassion, and wonderful recollections performed a miracle; they had resurrected the outspoken, loud-laughing, devout-Methodist woman who was my grandmother. Inaway,IguessIhavebeenstudyingMethodistwomenallmylife,butitwas justafewyearsagothatIencounteredthemintheacademy.Idistinctlyrememintroduction looking Beyond the Pulpit The contributions of women to Methodism were significant but more often assumed than acknowledged. —Dee Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, – e looking Beyond the PulPit 2 berthedaywhenIfirstlearnedaboutfemaleMethodistministersineighteenthcentury England while reading Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg’s “Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric” in The Rhetorical Tradition. Their introduction directed me to Vicki Tolar Collins’s article “Women’s Voices and Women’s Silence in the Tradition of Early Methodism.”1 Following this discovery , one of my friends gave me a copy of Adam Bede, so in a way, it was George Eliot’s fictional Dinah, along with Mary Bosanquet, Margaret Davidson , Sarah Crosby, and Ann Tripp, who piqued my curiosity about women in the early American Methodist church and helped forge in my mind the connection between women, American Methodism, and rhetoric.2 Hailing from a long line of Methodist women, the connection made perfect sense to me. Initially, I turned my attention to the pulpit. In her book Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America –, historian Catherine Brekus meticulously identifies the names of fourteen women preachers and exhorters in the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC), the first Methodist church established in the United States. Brekus also acknowledges nine women who were preachers in the African MEC and five women who preached in other Methodist denominations that emerged from the MEC, including the Reformed Methodists, Wesleyan Methodists, Primitive Methodists, and the Methodist Protestant Church.3 Among this list, women such as Julia Foote, Jarena Lee, Fanny Newell, Hannah Pearce Reeves, and Phoebe Palmer have increasingly garnered scholarly attention.4 However, in a church overwhelmingly comprised of women, and in a movement that rapidly swelled to the largest denomination in nineteenth-century America, this small group of courageous female ministers offers a limited glimpse of women during the American Methodist movement’s dramatic expansion in the first decades of the nineteenth century, especially considering that women preachers and exhorters were frequently viewed as radicals and barred from many Methodist pulpits. I began to consider my own experience growing up in the Methodist church. I was an adult before I heard a sermon delivered by a female minister , and it was 2002 before I belonged to a Methodist church where a woman presided as the senior pastor. In The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces, Roxanne Mountford shares a similar experience growing up in another denomination. She writes, “As a child, I never saw a woman preach; the only women who stepped before the pulpit gave announcements, led hymns, or told tales of missionary work in Third World countries.”5 In my own childhood, even though women were absent from the pulpit, I had always perceived that women ran the church. My Sunday school teachers and summer Bible school teachers were primarily women. Women raised money for the church’s foreign missions; women populated prayer networks; looking Beyond the PulPit 3 women prepared the bereavement dinners and comprised the altar guild, which seamlessly changed the colors of the altar cloths during Advent, Christmas , Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. On Monday mornings, women counted...