Study of the weekly Methodist newspaper "Christian Advocate," from its inception in 1826 to 1832, reveals that Methodist women came to assume important, public, and rarely acknowledged rhetorical roles. More precisely, women moved beyond the confines of the newspaper's "Ladies' Department," the back-page space to which "women's concerns" were initially consigned. Through charting women's migration in the Christian Advocate, the author argues that religious activities enabled women to emerge from the domestic sphere and engage in social activism that contravened accepted gender norms. (Contains 4 notes.)