ABSTRACT
Surprisingly little work has been done by rhetoricians on Sarah Grimké and Margaret Fuller, considering that these first-wave feminist rhetors published the first widely circulated feminist rhetorics in America (see Bartlett, Conrad, Lerner, and Urbanski).1 One reason for this oversight may be that Grimké and Fuller used religious discourses as sites of production for their rhetorics.2 Grimké and Fuller developed the religious discourses of Protestantism and transcendentalism into Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Woman in the Nineteenth Century’, respectively. Protestantism and transcendentalism offered much more empowering discourses for Grimké and Fuller than the dominant discourses available to them as women in nineteenth-century America. Ironically, the discourses of Protestantism and transcendentalism that have predominantly been associated with men enabled Grimké and Fuller to recover serious rhetorics of women’s issues from previous trivializations in the popular press, publishing their views as scholarly texts.
