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

Epilogue: Ambiguous and Liminal Spaces

127 W hen 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 because feminist activism and religion are seldom cast as complementary belief systems. However, the line of demarcation dividing feminism and religion is a modern construction that can obscure and obstruct our work as rhetorical scholars and teachers. The neat borders that often exist in theory rarely exist in reality. A close examination of nineteenth -century women’s rhetorical activities reveals blurred and messy margins between private and public spheres and between religion and the pursuit of women’s rights and numerous social reforms. A view of our past—one that encompasses the everyday women that many of us find in our own lineage in addition to those exceptional figures we have begun to include in the rhetorical canon—can guide us in the present. Their stories warn us about the dangers of constructing rigid borders in our thoughts, our scholarship, and our classrooms. Susan Hill Lindley acknowledges the complex relationship that existed between religion and women’s political and social reform efforts even in the nineteenth century. She claims that religion: “provided the motives, means, ePilogue ambiguous and liminal spaces e amBiguous and liminal sPaces 128 and locus for much early reform, yet ‘religion’ in the form of clergy, biblical injunctions, and institutional churches sometimes opposed or restricted women ’s reform work. As a result, some women backed away from a given cause. Other women moved away from ‘religion,’ at least in its orthodox and institutional forms. Still others redefined the content of their faith and its implications for action, reinterpreting the Bible as they did so.”2 Lindley highlights the many ways in which women negotiated their religious beliefs and the reforms they pursued. For women, religion has offered both empowerment and oppression; however, an emphasis on oppression has often overshadowed religion as an emancipatory force. According to Phyllis Mack, this emphasis “leads us to ignore the indisputably significant historical fact that in the history of Western culture, it was devout Christian women who demonstrated the greatest degree of agency, particularly that element of agency that involves activity in the public sphere.”3 The first American women to speak before large male and female audiences were female preachers and evangelists, bolstered by their devout faith and prophetic calls. Early public speeches by women such as Maria Stewart and Angelina Grimké, who dared to broach social and political issues before mixed audiences, are also replete with scriptural references augmenting their arguments and their right to speak. Indeed, women’s religious upbringings and their beliefs often emboldened their activism. In the nineteenth century, many early female abolitionists and suffragists were Quakers, fortified by Quaker doctrine, which granted women equal authority under God. In fact, three Quaker women, Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, and Mary Ann McClintock, collaborated with Elizabeth Cady Stanton to write the “Declaration of Sentiments” and organize the Seneca Falls Convention, which was held in a Methodist church. Indeed, churches have repeatedly served as sites for grassroots organization and activism. Modern examples include the civil rights movement and recent rallies for immigration reform. Other nineteenth-century, women such as Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul were also influenced by their Quaker roots. Paul organized the nonviolent Silent Sentinels, who waged protests for women’s rights in front of the White House from 1917 to 1919. Phoebe Palmer, leader of the Holiness Movement, and Frances Willard, president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, were two of the most celebrated female speakers in the nineteenth century. Both were members of the Methodist church, and for a brief period, Willard even traveled as an evangelist with the famous revivalist D. L. Moody. Sojourner Truth also traveled the country speaking as an itinerant minister and a women’s rights activist. Nancy Hardesty also links Stanton, Willard, Palmer, Lucy Stone, Antoinette Brown, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Paulina Wright Da- amBiguous and liminal sPaces 129 vis to Charles Grandison Finney, the popular revivalist, who later became the president of Oberlin College. Finney’s revivals throughout the northeast in the 1820s and 1830s urged crowds, predominantly filled with young, middle -class women, to save their sin-ridden communities. These calls to...