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

摘要

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.