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53 i n this epigraph, an excerpt from the Christian Advocate’s (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, the Methodist church promoted women’s roles as wives and mothers as Christian endeavors. In doing so, the church helped turn the domestic sphere into both a sacred space and a confining space. Even as the church claimed that women were integral to the church and society, the Ladies’ Department column drew tight borders around women’s proper roles and proper sphere. Soon after the church began publishing the weekly CA, its popularity far surpassed that of Methodist Magazine (MM). In fact, the CA quickly became one of the most popular periodicals in antebellum America and the most powerful and far-reaching evangelical tool for the church. As such, it is another important site for examining the rhetoricity of the religious press. Although the CA contained both secular and religious news, the primary intent of the paper was to advocate Christianity by showing God’s work under way across the new republic. The CA presented consistent images of individuals carrying out Christian missions, including itinerant ministers’ efforts to expand MethchaPter three contained inside the ladies’ department The good wife is one who ever mindful of the solemn contract she hath entered into, is strictly and conscientiously virtuous, constant, and faithful to her husband; chaste, pure, and unblemished in every thought, word, and deed: she is humble and modest from reason and conviction, submissive from choice, and obedient from inclination: what she acquires by love and tenderness she preserves by prudence and discretion: she makes it her business to serve, and her pleasure to oblige her husband, as conscious that every thing which promotes his happiness must in the end contribute to her own. —Ladies’ Department, Christian Advocate, 1832 e contained inside the ladies’ dePartment 54 odism across the country through new and growing Methodist societies, revivals , and camp meetings. The paper showed the emergence and popularity of Bible, tract, Sunday school, and benevolent societies led and managed by local laypeople. Reports on the establishment of missions among North American Indian tribes as well as correspondence from missionaries dispatched to foreign lands were also regularly featured in the newspaper. Additionally, the CA targeted and delivered advice to important constituent groups, including ministers, children, and women, through a series of regular columns, including the Ladies’ Department. As opposed to MM memoirs, which presented women on their deathbeds, the CA from 1826 through 1832 shows women very much alive, assuming and being assigned to rhetorical roles as domestic evangelists, benefactors, benevolent organizers, and volunteers in the church’s evangelical outposts. The CA initially consigned “women’s concerns” to the back-page Ladies’ Department column, and prescribed women to the roles of wife, household manager, mother, and domestic evangelist inside the domestic sphere. Later, the CA shows women assuming instrumental roles in their efforts to grow and expand the Methodist church and its missions. Ultimately, these changing depictions of women in the CA chart women’s expanding boundaries in the periodical, in real life, and outside the church’s control. In the same manner that women were assigned to the domestic sphere in society, the CA’s Ladies’ Department designated a particular space for women in its newspaper—with this latter space reinforcing the former. Both spatial consignments demonstrate what Michel Foucault identified as the fundamental relationship between space and the exercise of power.1 Recent work by cultural geographers has also shown how spatial assignments often operate as exclusionary processes. David Sibley highlights powerful groups’ propensity to monopolize the most desirable spaces, relegating weaker groups to less desirable spaces. Similarly, Edward Soja warns that everyday spatial assignments are not always innocuous; their consequences can be significant. Gillian Rose further asserts that for feminists, “one of the most oppressive aspects of everyday spaces is the division between public space and private space” and the way this divide has been used to maintain patriarchal power.2 Thus, the church’s efforts to spatially assign women to the domestic sphere through its advice column can be seen as an attempt to limit women’s access to power and ensure their subordination to men. Antebellum America increasingly used space to both map and symbolize appropriate gender roles. According to the nineteenth-century...

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