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

Abstract

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.