Your Daughters Will Prophesy

Religion and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century Woman's Movement

Lisa Marie Gring-Pemble, Martha Watson

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781643365688, 9781643365671
• eBook ISBN: 9781643365695
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

How nineteenth-century women used the Bible to claim their voice on the moral questions of their day

Caught between their identity as Christians and social norms that silenced them, American women used scripture to claim moral and then rhetorical agency. They reinterpreted familiar biblical passages, recovered previously ignored stories about women, and contested passages used to circumscribe women's activities. By strategically adopting a rhetorical posture of dissent, these women became prophetic voices in American society. In Your Daughters Will Prophesy, Lisa Marie Gring-Pemble and Martha Watson analyze the argumentative resources four women—Jarena Lee, Sarah Moore Grimké, Lucretia Coffin Mott, and Frances Willard—used to counter gendered restrictions and gain access to platform and pulpit, catalyzing what became known as the woman's movement.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Your Daughters Will Prophesy
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• ONE Wellspring of Argument: The Reformation and the Opening of Discursive Space
• TWO Jarena Lee’s Religious Experience and Journal: A Nascent Feminist Hermeneutic
• THREE Sarah Moore Grimké’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes: The Bible through a Woman’s Eyes
• FOUR Lucretia Coffin Mott’s “Discourse on Woman”: Woman as God Meant Her to Be
• FIVE Frances Willard’s Woman in the Pulpit: Awakening Women to the Possibilities of True Womanhood
• Conclusion
• Appendix A. Brief Overview of Scholarship on Women and Rhetoric
• Appendix B. Contested Passages in Scripture
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index