Stepping Outside the “Ladies’ Department”: Women’s Expanding Rhetorical Boundaries

Lisa Shaver

Study of the weekly Methodist newspaper Christian Advocate from its inception in 1826 to 1832 reveals that Methodist women came to assume important, public, and rarely acknowledged rhetorical roles.  More precisely, women moved beyond the confines of the newspaper’s “Ladies’ Department,” the back-page space to which “women’s concerns” were initially consigned. Through charting women’s migration in the Christian Advocate, the author argues that religious activities enabled women to emerge from the domestic sphere and engage in social activism that contravened accepted gender norms.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 4:00 pm and is filed under September 2008, Vol. 71.1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.