In this dissertation, I argue that ethos is generative as James Corder defines it. I seek to show that women preachers of the International Pentecostal Holiness Church who spent a significant amount of their careers in Oklahoma generated an ethos in their autobiographical texts and transcribed, edited interviews that constructed individualized as well as a social instantiations of ethos. I rhetorically analyzed these texts using five categories of ethos as a rubric for making connections between Corderian theory and my case studies: ethos as transformation, ethos as wisdom or authority, ethos in the stated motives and purposes in a text, ethos as charisma, and ethos as dynamic processes built from identification.

In chapter one, I lay out my theoretical perspective, situating it within the canonical history of rhetoric. In chapter two, I describe the historical and religious contexts that put my study of women preachers into a wide conversation of views on women preachers and show how my work is a participation in and a continuation of such conversations. In chapter three, I focus on the autobiographical texts from the late nineteenth through the middle twentieth centuries, comparing male constructions of ethos to female from members of the same group. In chapter four, I make connections between the older texts of chapter three and the twenty-first century interviews I collected and transcribed in 2004 in order to demonstrate paradigm shifts that have occurred, as well as to show how new instantiations of ethos are grounded in localized histories as well as larger ones. In chapter five, I turn to a discussion of the nature of truth inside of epistemic rhetorics. Since generative ethos is aligned with epistemic rhetoric, how we construct ethos within a group is tied to our sense of the nature of truth. Particularly interesting is my connection of truth and ethos to the Holy Spirit.