Rhetorical Sponsorship and Women Who Preach: Reimagining Sponsorship to Explore the Rhetorical Influences Surrounding Women Preachers

The purpose of this dissertation is to better understand the rhetorical influences that shape Wesleyan-Methodist women preachers’ lives and professional careers. To that end, this dissertation reimagines Deborah Brandt’s analytical framework of literacy sponsorship in conversation with feminist ecological thinking and rhetorical theory to forward a feminist ecological framework of rhetorical sponsorship, which uses ecological thinking to examine sponsoring influences within rhetorical ecologies. Drawing upon archival, quantitative, and qualitative data, this framework is used to explore three significant sites of rhetorical sponsorship—institutions, place, and memory—for Wesleyan-Methodist women preachers.

First, to explore how institutions function as sponsors for women preachers, this dissertation theorizes institutional sponsorship. A specific application of rhetorical sponsorship, institutional sponsorship offers a methodological intervention that advances efforts to recover lost and marginalized figures by analyzing the relationship between a figure and an institution. This model is illustrated with archival data surrounding Rev. Mary Will, a 19th-century Wesleyan-Methodist clergywoman.

Second, by blending quantitative data with a case study of Pastor Liz—a senior pastor in Boston—this dissertation examines how physical spaces associated with preaching serve as sponsors for Wesleyan-Methodist women preachers, focusing on how women derive power from preaching spaces. The data show that some women preachers draw upon the power of preaching spaces by committing ritual transgressions, movements that are outside the proper. The results are inconclusive, but it is possible that women preachers may be more likely than their male counterparts to commit ritual transgressions because they have a stronger sense of rootedness or place attachment in their preaching spaces.

Lastly, this dissertation explores the sponsorship relationship between memory and Wesleyan-Methodist women preachers. A deep sense of historical memory emerged as a common feature among successful women preachers in the qualitative data, and further analysis revealed that these women actualize memory through the hopeful jeremiad—a modified version of the jeremiad that is infused with activist hope. To demonstrate how memory serves as a sponsor and is actualized via the hopeful jeremiad, this dissertation focuses on the exemplar case of Rev. Dr. Jo Anne Lyon, the first woman elected to lead the Wesleyan denomination.