The core of this book is detailed and meticulous research into the influence of women in Scottish religious communities in the nineteenth century. To an extent this narrows the promise of the title, which points to the process by which Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth century transited from a tiny marginal recusant Church, to a more populous, public, and even, Kehoe argues, a national one, whose members increasingly played a role in Scottish civic life. However, Kehoe maintains, it was female religious who played a pivotal role in this process in various ways – as exemplars of female religious authority, school teachers and social welfare workers within their Church. In these roles they were instrumental in the de-ghettoising of Scottish Catholicism by helping to form respectable British Catholics in a largely Protestant state. Kehoe successfully demonstrates the contested nature of Scottish Catholicism, divided generally between recusant Scots, middle-class and aristocratic converts, and the immigrant Irish largely responsible for the increase in adherents. Kehoe also shows how this contestation was experienced in microcosm, within the converts themselves as nuns struggled with their varying ethnicities. The book also gives a valuable introduction to Scottish Catholicism in its opening chapters, which provide the context and background narrative of Scottish Roman Catholicism up the 1850s. The author rightly draws attention to the insularity of much Scottish historiography which has either largely overlooked the Roman Catholic dimension; or, in works by Catholic historians, has treated their Church too much in isolation from the wider Scottish context. However, while it is undoubtedly true that female religious constituted the overwhelmingly largest group of woman leaders in the Roman Catholic Church, this work might have carried its historiographical point further if more comparisons had been made with female religious leadership in other Scottish Churches, such as women's auxiliaries, mothers’ unions and even Episcopalian nuns, few though they were in comparison. This book is one of a burgeoning number of recent works on female religious in various orders and countries, but the detail and national scope of this study make it a very valuable addition to this field, and to the areas of Scottish nationalism and nineteenth-century British church history.