Part biography and testimonial to the long-troubled relationship between Christianity and feminism, Kristin Kobes Du Mez's book traces the life and work of Katharine Bushnell (1855–1946) in the context of Victorian Christianity and the evolution of feminism in the United States. Exploring her formative experiences, her work as physician, missionary, reformer, and ultimately, theologian and author, Du Mez uses Katharine Bushnell to explore the paradoxical liberation and restriction women find in the Christian faith. To that end, the book is both rich in original research and deeply connected to previous research on American religious history and Christian theological development within the American context.

A New Gospel for Women begins with an introduction that places Bushnell in the context of American social reform, Christian feminism, and American Christianity. Positioning her book as a corrective on past blind spots in these areas, Du Mez articulates a hope that readers in various fields might find insight and resonance in the life, the work, and the writing of Bushnell. Here we see the beginnings of Du Mez's attempt to use Bushnell to point to a universal and seemingly timeless tension between feminism and Christianity and to suggest that Bushnell may have overcome these tensions in ways that might be illustrative to Christians and feminists today.

The body of the book presents a chronological journey through Bushnell's life beginning in chapter 1 with her youth and her enculturation to American Methodism and the reform spirit infused throughout. Du Mez shows how Bushnell was influenced by a very particular late Victorian understanding of womanhood but was also enlivened by the “spiritual egalitarianism and female empowerment” of the Methodist faith (16). It was in the friction between a vibrant and self-defining faith and the restraints of social respectability that the conflict between Bushnell's feminism and Christianity first emerged.

In chapters 2 and 3, Du Mez describes how Bushnell, trained as a physician and inspired to do good work in the name of her faith, began to put her faith into action. Through travel in China and then as an advocate for the temperance and social purity movements, Bushnell began to fuse her Victorian socially conservative sensibilities with her feminist concern for the plight of women throughout the world and a distinctly colonialist attitude. The climax of this period of travel, missionary work, and reform comes in chapter 4 as Du Mez describes the existential crisis growing within Bushnell as she began to realize the ways in which her Christian faith was often the root cause of the injustices she experienced both at home and abroad.

In chapters 5 and 6, Du Mez describes Bushnell's response to these revelations in her formulation of a new theology for women and a new interpretation of the Bible as a way of rescuing her faith from the malicious ends to which it had been put. In drafting A New Gospel for Women, Bushnell reinterpreted the Bible in a way that left room for and even demanded equality for women and justice in the world. Yet, as Du Mez notes, one reason for the limited readership of this remarkable treatise is the quality of the writing itself. In need of a strong editorial hand, Bushnell's text can be hard to follow, and it is here that Du Mez provides a substantial service to those interested in the work and legacy of Bushnell. Du Mez performs a deft job of glossing over the rougher edges and bringing out the most significant and affecting sections of Bushnell's work, thereby opening the door for the audience to imagine what might have happened had it received the readership Du Mez seems to believe it deserved.

The book ends with two chapters discussing the effect and the legacy of Bushnell's work. Situating Bushnell and her book within an increasingly polarized religious landscape and the emergence of a new and more secular feminism, Du Mez explores why so few Christians, feminists, and historians have heard of Katharine Bushnell. She ends with a conclusion that explains why this omission matters and what might happen if we were to resurrect and reexamine the ways in which Bushnell directly tackled conflicts between Christianity and feminism still festering today.

With A New Gospel for Women, Kristin Kobes Du Mez offers an eloquent, thorough, and broad-reaching biography of an often-ignored reformer and theologian in American religious history. Putting Bushnell's story in the context of the transforming landscape of American Christianity and American social reform, Du Mez also demonstrates how attention to the formative influences and experiences of an individual living these changes allows the readers a richer and more nuanced understanding of that history. Du Mez's history fits well with other studies of particular women's movements and communities in American history such as Anthea Butler's Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and R. Marie Griffith's God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (University of California Press, 2000) in showing the ways in which women have found empowerment within the patriarchal systems of Christianity.

In the context of these works and the long history of Christian feminism they represent, Bushnell's process of self-discovery and theological evolution is nothing new. However, in the contemporary context of the 2017 Women's March, Supreme Court speculation about the future of abortion rights, and shifting societal paradigms of gender, marriage, and family, Bushnell's particular struggles, revelations, and theological conclusions have remarkable resonance today. As third wave feminism continues to expand the umbrella of feminism to a variety of ideologies and identities, the place of conservative values remains in question. In this way, though Bushnell's particular journey and struggles can only be understood within the particular historical context that Du Mez so adeptly reveals, she also touched on long-standing and as-of-yet unsettled questions that go to the heart of feminism and Christianity itself.