Frances Willard, Phoebe Palmer, and the Ethos of the Methodist Woman Preacher

Abstract

This article attempts to analyze the ineffable quality of ethos in a case study anout Frances Willard, contending that she succeeded with conservative middle-class audiences by invoking the ethos of the Methodist woman preacher, which she may have learned from her mentor Phoebe Palmer. Methodism encouraged women's moral activism, and Palmer, foreshadowing Willard's agenda, worked for many causes, all the while maintaining a genteel True-Womanly persona. Willard testified to Palmer's spiritual influence on her, and her speaking style also reflected Palmer's blend of intense commitment, spiritual restraint, refined appearance, sound logic, and seemingly artless eloquence. Both women's rhetoric came to seem dated in their final years, yet both left lasting legacies of social change in their communities.

Notes

1. Here are the relevant texts:

• Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church. (I Corinthians 14:34–35 [Bible, King James Version])

• I will therefore that men pray every where, lifting up holy hands, without wrath or doubting. In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array; but (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works. Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety. (I Timothy 2:8–15 [Bible, King James Version])

• And here is an example of how these texts were used to silence nineteenth-century women activists (in this case, anti-slavery speakers Sarah and Angelina Grimké): Protestant minister Albert Folsom makes an explicit connection between the Pauline sanctions and another public reform issue in his 27 August 1837 sermon against “Abolition Women”:

• If it is not permitted for women to speak publicly upon the subject of religion, it verily is no part of their right or privilege to be heard on the subject of slavery. If it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church upon one topic, it is no less shameful for her to raise her voice upon any other theme. And in all instances of the kind, females go counter to the established opinion of the world, and the express commands of Holy Writ. (1, italics in original)