Date of Award
8-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design
Committee Chair/Advisor
Dr. Michelle Smith
Committee Member
Dr. Charlotte Hogg
Committee Member
Dr. Caroline Dunn
Committee Member
Dr. Jordan Frith
Abstract
Submissive Daughters, Empowered Daughters: Conduct Rhetoric and Evangelical Women’s Authority explores how evangelical women rhetors navigate and rework patriarchal religious expectations through what I term conduct rhetoric. Building on the tradition of conduct literature, this project broadens the genre to include multimodal platforms—literature, radio/podcasts, television, and social media—used to instruct women in evangelical norms. Rather than passively accepting patriarchal constraints, evangelical women rhetors strategically adopt and reframe these constraints to construct rhetorical authority. Central to this study are two terms: affected piety and performative dissonance. Affected piety describes how women rhetorically present submission as the grounds for their authority, while performative dissonance captures the tension between their public endorsement of restrictive gender roles and their personal transgressions of them. Using these concepts, I demonstrate how evangelical women make space for their voices within traditions that ostensibly limit them.
Recommended Citation
Hill, Carrie, "Submissive Daughters, Empowered Daughters: Conduct Rhetoric and Evangelical Women’s Authority" (2025). All Dissertations. 4065.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/4065