Although often thought of as a masculine genre, women writers effectively employed the sermon not only to enter doctrinal and other religious debates but also to create a broader space for women within the public sphere. In using this distinctively religious genre, women writers as diverse as Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Laetitia Barbauld gave a moral legitimacy to the participation of women in a wide range of public issues. Their sermons presented an image of the reforming woman who could shape the public sphere through religion; constructing a moral public sphere became a Christian duty for women, as Harriet Guest argues. These writers helped create a “Christian civic virtue,” structured around public virtues such as benevolence, that could both incorporate and challenge the more masculine Roman civic virtue that dominated contemporary representations of civic duty.

In works such as Barbauld’s Civic Sermons, More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education and Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, sermonic elements dominate the structure of the work. For example, these texts all explicate particular Bible verses; utilize typographical and syntactical constructions, such as italics and rhetorical questions, to evoke the performative nature of the sermon; and issue “calls to action.” Barbauld, More and Wollstonecraft were all urging “females” to “put away childish things” and become “women” who were involved in their own self-development, their education, the well-being of their families, and the state of their society. These works are also, of course, presented as treatises which allowed the writers to assert the rationality and weight of their arguments and of the women who wrote them. Barbauld, More and Wollstonecraft argued for a thinking, feeling woman who could both comprehend and perform her Christian duties; thus their use of the treatise-sermon implied that a woman’s life should be based not only on Christian principles, but also on her ability to “reasonably” and independently apply those principles to her duties.

Through the image of the benevolent, and, at times, maternal, Christian woman, Barbauld, More and Wollstonecraft offered women an avenue into the public sphere, particularly in reference to slavery and aid to the poor. Julie Ellison argues that the fusion of fancy and sensibility opened up the public sphere to a feminine and feeling-based sense of public duty, but I would argue that it was more the fusion of sensibility and Christian virtue into a Christian civic virtue that, in part, authorized these women writers to comment on and participate in their society. In looking at these three writers together, one is struck by how similar their positions became, in part because of the generic similarities of their writings. One can see how the sermon lent itself both to a strong and polemical statement but also to a patronizing tone. For example, all three advocated both the abolition of the slave trade and the importance of helping the poor, but both the British poor and the African are presented as peoples whom middle-class women could both “save” spiritually, economically and politically; the “oppressed” needed the guidance that only a properly educated Christian woman could perform.

The genre of the sermon allowed these writers to articulate a Christian civic virtue that both created a space for the participation of women in the public sphere and also demanded that participation.