Margaret Meuse Clay, who barely escaped a public whipping in the 1760s for preaching without a license; "Old Elizabeth," an ex-slave who courageously traveled to the South to preach against slavery in the early nineteenth century; Harriet Livermore, who spoke in front of Congress four times between 1827 and 1844--these are just a few of the extraordinary women profiled in this, the first comprehensive history of female preaching in early America. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Catherine Brekus examines the lives of more than a hundred female preachers--both white and African American--who crisscrossed the country between 1740 and 1845. Outspoken, visionary, and sometimes contentious, these women stepped into the pulpit long before twentieth-century battles over female ordination began. They were charismatic, popular preachers, who spoke to hundreds and even thousands of people at camp and revival meetings, and yet with but a few notable exceptions--such as Sojourner Truth--these women have essentially vanished from our history. Recovering their stories, Brekus shows, forces us to rethink many of our common assumptions about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American culture.

In Conversational Rhetoric, Jane Donawerth traces the historical development of rhetorical theory by women for women, studying the moments when women produced theory about the arts of communication in alternative genres-humanist treatises and dialogues, defenses of women's preaching, conduct books, and elocution handbooks.

The continued importance of Christian rhetorics in political, social, pedagogical, and civic affairs suggests that such rhetorics not only belong on the map of rhetorical studies, but are indeed essential to the geography of rhetorical studies in the twenty-first century. This collection argues that concerning ourselves with religious rhetorics in general and Christian rhetorics in particular tells us something about rhetoric itself—its boundaries, its characteristics, its functionings. In assembling original research on the intersections of rhetoric and Christianity from prominent and emerging scholars, Mapping Christian Rhetorics seeks to locate religion more centrally within the geography of rhetorical studies in the twenty-first century. It does so by acknowledging work on Christian rhetorics that has been overlooked or ignored; connecting domains of knowledge and research areas pertaining to Christian rhetorics that may remain disconnected or under connected; and charting new avenues of inquiry about Christian rhetorics that might invigorate theory-building, teaching, research, and civic engagement. In dividing the terrain of Christian rhetorics into four categories—theory, education, methodology, and civic engagement—Mapping Christian Rhetorics aims to foster connections among these areas of inquiry and spur future future collaboration between scholars of religious rhetoric in a range of research areas.

Early American Methodists commonly described their religious lives as great wars with sin and claimed they wrestled with God and Satan who assaulted them in terrible ways. Carefully examining a range of sources, including sermons, letters, autobiographies, journals, and hymns, Jeffrey Williams explores this violent aspect of American religious life and thought. Williams exposes Methodism's insistence that warfare was an inevitable part of Christian life and necessary for any person who sought God's redemption. He reveals a complex relationship between religion and violence, showing how violent expression helped to provide context and meaning to Methodist thought and practice, even as Methodist religious life was shaped by both peaceful and violent social action.

Joy A. Schroeder offers the first in-depth exploration of the biblical story of Deborah, an authoritative judge, prophet, and war leader. For centuries, Deborah's story has challenged readers' traditional assumptions about the place of women in society. Schroeder shows how Deborah's story has fueled gender debates throughout history. An examination of the prophetess's journey through nearly two thousand years of Jewish and Christian interpretation reveals how the biblical account of Deborah was deployed against women, for women, and by women who aspired to leadership roles in religious communities and society. Numerous women-and men who supported women's aspirations to leadership-used Deborah's narrative to justify female claims to political and religious authority. Opponents to women's public leadership endeavored to define Deborah's role as "private" or argued that she was a divinely authorized exception, not to be emulated by future generations of women. Deborah's Daughters provides crucial new insight into the history of women in Judaism and Christianity, and into women's past and present roles in the church, synagogue, and society.

Building on the interpretive stases from the ancient Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, Arguing over Texts presents a method for analyzing the types of disagreement people have over textual meaning and the lines of argument they use to resolve those disagreements in various contexts, including law, politics, religion, history, and literary criticism.

The feminine script of early nineteenth century centered on women's role as patient, long-suffering mothers. By mid-century, however, their daughters faced a world very different in social and economic options and in the physical experiences surrounding their bodies. In this groundbreaking study, Nancy Theriot turns to social and medical history, developmental psychology, and feminist theory to explain the fundamental shift in women's concepts of femininity and gender identity during the course of the century—from an ideal suffering womanhood to emphasis on female control of physical self. Theriot's first chapter proposes a methodological shift that expands the interdisciplinary horizons of women's history. She argues that social psychological theories, recent work in literary criticism, and new philosophical work on subjectivities can provide helpful lenses for viewing mothers and children and for connecting socioeconomic change and ideological change. She recommends that women's historians take bolder steps to historicize the female body by making use of the theoretical insights of feminist philosophers, literary critics, and anthropologists. Within this methodological perspective, Theriot reads medical texts and woman- authored advice literature and autobiographies. She relates the early nineteenth-century notion of "true womanhood" to the socioeconomic and somatic realities of middle-class women's lives, particularly to their experience of the new male obstetrics. The generation of women born early in the century, in a close mother/daughter world, taught their daughters the feminine script by word and action. Their daughters, however, the first generation to benefit greatly from professional medicine, had less reason than their mothers to associate womanhood with pain and suffering. The new concept of femininity they created incorporated maternal teaching but altered it to make meaningful their own very different experience. This provocative study applies interdisciplinary methodology to new and long-standing questions in women's history and invites women's historians to explore alternative explanatory frameworks.

In the nineteenth century the United States was ablaze with activism and reform: people of all races, creeds, classes, and genders engaged with diverse intellectual, social, and civic issues. This cutting-edge, revelatory book focuses on rhetoric that is overtly political and oriented to social reform. It not only contributes to our historical understanding of the period by covering a wide array of contexts--from letters, preaching, and speeches to labor organizing, protests, journalism, and theater by white and Black women, Indigenous people, and Chinese immigrants--but also relates conflicts over imperialism, colonialism, women's rights, temperance, and slavery to today's struggles over racial justice, sexual freedom, access to multimodal knowledge, and the unjust effects of sociopolitical hierarchies. The editors' introduction traces recent scholarship on activist rhetorics and the turn in rhetorical theory toward the work of marginalized voices calling for radical social change.