Women's Deathbed Pulpits: From Quiet Congregants to Iconic Ministers

Abstract

This essay identifies memoirs (obituaries) as the primary space women initially occupy in Methodist Magazine, the church's first successful periodical. Based on a study of 154 memoirs published in Methodist Magazine from 1818–25, this essay explores how memoirs operated as rhetorical composition intended to motivate and instruct the living as much as to elegize the dead. By exposing rhetorical strategies used in depictions of persons “dying well,” specifically the roles assigned to women, this essay claims that women's memoirs transformed their deathbeds into pulpits, elevating them to ministers in death—positions they were precluded from holding in life.

Notes

¹I thank RR peer reviewers Vicki Tolar Burton and Jan Schuetz for their valuable feedback, and Kate Ronald, Sarah Robbins, and Connie Mick for helpful responses to drafts of this essay.

²Sarah Tomlinson's memoir was written by her sister.

³Gregory Schneider describes a dialectic of social religion with both iconic and instrumental moments (151).

⁴Collins's later publications appear under the name Vicki Tolar Burton.

⁵These calculations include those memoirs extracted from British periodicals. Going forward, I have limited my examination to memoirs written by and about American Methodists with the exception of two Canadians. In the Northeast some Methodist ministers' circuits crossed the border into Canada.

⁶It is important to note that authors and editors still controlled which extracts were included in memoirs; thus they could use these selections to construct individuals in certain ways.

⁷Methodists in good standing were invited to participate in quarterly, circuit-wide love feasts. These love feasts brought together all the congregants from the different churches on a minister's circuit to address business matters and share worship. During these gatherings members were encouraged to share their testimonies and discuss their spiritual failures and triumphs.

Journals of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Vol. I, 1796–1836. New York: Carlton and Phillips, 1855.

Methodist Magazine, (New York), 1818–1828. From American Periodical Series Online. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2000.