I am currently working on a rhetorical biography of Lucy Rider Meyer (1849-1922), a Christian activist during the progressive era and one of the most influential women in the large and powerful Methodist denomination. Rider Meyer was a visionary educator, who opened the Chicago Training School for women interested in home and foreign missions work. She was an innovator in Christian social work, who established the Deaconess office, a new profession and avenue for women’s Christian activism. She was also a female STEM pioneer--earning a medical degree, teaching college chemistry, helping found Wesley Hospital in Chicago, and advocating for public healthcare. All of these achievements were made possible through her relentless rhetorical labor.

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Ultimately, I argue that Rider Meyer exemplifies the New Christian Woman and created professional avenues for thousands of other New Christian women in the late eighteenth-- and early twentieth centuries.