Beyond the Pulpit: Women’s Rhetorical Roles in the Antebellum Religious Press by Lisa J. Shaver (review)

In Beyond the Pulpit, Lisa J. Shaver explores the rhetorical roles ascribed to and assumed by women in the antebellum American Methodist Press. Shaver’s meticulous study of religious periodicals, including the Methodist Magazine, the Christian Advocate, and the Ladies’ Repository, argues that the church served as an empowering rhetorical space for women. Initially cast as models of piety and domestic evangelists, Methodist women gradually enlarged their spheres of influence and work, undertaking increasingly instrumental rhetorical roles as fundraisers, benevolent society organizers, Sunday school teachers, and assistant ministers. Such expansion was both reflected in and engendered by the Methodist church and its magazines, which, according to Shaver, functioned as a “liminal space between separate spheres” that allowed white, middle-class women to step outside the domestic sphere while continuing to abide by the accepted terms of social propriety in the era (p. 14).

Shaver’s examination is admirably lucid and tightly focused, and the material she uncovers will appeal to scholars interested in the relationship between gender and religion in the nineteenth century. Shaver accomplishes her explicit aims in the study—to contribute to and intervene in reigning paradigms in studies of United States religious history, rhetorical studies, and United States literary and periodical studies—and indeed the most significant contribution the monograph makes is in connecting these at times disparate scholarly discourses. In the study’s first two chapters, which examine Methodist Magazine memoirs (narratives of the lives and deaths of exemplary church members), Shaver claims that women occupied broader influential roles in the church than previous studies, such as Catherine A. Brekus’s Strangers and Pilgrims (1998) and Roxanne Mountford’s The Gendered Pulpit (2003), have acknowledged. Noting the quantity and character of women’s memoirs, Shaver demonstrates the significance of women’s roles as evangelical models, a conclusion that challenges the accepted narrative that women were increasingly silenced as the Methodist church underwent institutionalization in the nineteenth century. Shaver furthermore claims that memoirs reveal how Methodist women transformed the deathbed into a “pulpit,” a rhetorical space for women’s ministry. Highlighting the presence of women’s voices in these memoirs (even when authored by male ministers), Shaver challenges scholars of feminist rhetorical studies to consider the role religion played in the lives of female reformers and look beyond the “relatively small group of ‘loud’ women’s rights activists” for a more complete picture of women’s rhetorical roles in the nineteenth century (p. 131).

While Shaver’s contextual and textual analysis is thorough and convincing, Beyond the Pulpit’s central argument largely reaffirms existing narratives about the manner in which antebellum feminine ideals facilitated women’s gradual expansion into the political and professional public sphere. In chapters three through five, which focus on the Christian Advocate, its Ladies’ Department column, and the establishment of the Ladies’ Repository in 1841, Shaver devotes much analysis to the construction of the cult of true womanhood in antebellum United States culture and its promotion in Methodist magazines. In these chapters, Shaver deconstructs the separate spheres binary that underpinned such gendered expectations, showing how women used their prescribed roles as domestic evangelists to expand their influence outside the home, becoming Sunday school teachers, benevolent society organizers, and missionaries. This expansion of rhetorical influence, according to Shaver, culminated in new roles for women that the Ladies’ Repository endorsed. Advocating equal education for women, it prepared women to engage in politics, professional writing, and even scriptural exegesis. Shaver persuasively demonstrates this evolution in women’s rhetorical roles; however, it remains unclear what distinguishes the rhetorical roles produced and reproduced in the Methodist press from the strategies employed by fiction writers and activists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frances Willard—two figures whom Shaver cites—who also expanded women’s rhetorical influence by drawing on accepted ideals of femininity. Shaver effectively shows that...