Nineteenth-century AME preacher Julia Foote self-published her spiritual autobiography twice during her itinerancy; the text—a blend of personal and collective narrative and sermonic rhetoric—enabled her to enter the more public, political discourse of religious activism. Foote engages in national sociopolitical debates, uses publically available histories, and manipulates genre to create a de facto church service over which she can preside. In essence, Foote’s text is a performative subgenre of the spiritual autobiography—the itinerant book—that literally circulates in print culture as an activist text and figuratively circulates within the psychic fervor of late nineteenth-century American Protestantism.

Scholarship across the fields of rhetoric, history, and religion credits Frances Willard for her activist work, most notably her contribution to the nineteenth-century temperance movement. Although this scholarship references Willard's religious motivations, it is silent about one of the causes that Willard was committed to, women's preaching, and rarely cites her book, Woman in the Pulpit. By offering a close reading of the rhetorical and theological features of Woman in the Pulpit, this essay (1) suggests that Willard introduces a feminist theological resolution to the separate spheres ideological debate of the nineteenth century—the prevailing discourse that men should lead in political/public space, and women should occupy domestic/private space; and (2) recasts Woman in the Pulpit as a central text in Willard's repertoire—a magnum opus of sorts that represents her feminist brand of Christian Socialist thought.