Fourteen-year-old Uldine Utley stood poised on the mammoth stage of Madison Square Garden before a vast sea of strangers on Halloween evening in 1926. This night encompassed her final service of a four-week, two-sermons-a-day evangelistic campaign in New York City, where the crowds had responded enthusiastically to the diminutive, blue-eyed, fair-haired evangelist, outfitted in her customary white robe, hose, and shoes, with a bulky, leather-bound Bible held high in her petite right hand. No venue could be more appropriate for the climactic conclusion of her evangelistic campaign. Madison Square Garden, dubbed the “palace of pleasure,” had a long tradition of staging the unusual since its 1874 incarnation as P. T. Barnum's Monster Classical and Geological Hippodrome, when it hosted a circus of elephants, Japanese acrobats, tattooed fire eaters, and female chariot drivers. Now, five decades later, scheduled between prize fights, six-day bicycle races, beauty contests, and horse shows, another curiosity was drawing crowds by the thousands to this legendary venue. Why did the crowds gather in droves to hear Utley preach? They came because she was a girl evangelist.

While historians have stumbled across Uldine Utley in recent years, the phenomenon of girl evangelists that Robinson and Ruff uncover extends far beyond Utley. The authors, an uncle and a niece, he in Religious Studies and she in Sociology, team up to undertake painstaking primary source research to unfold a story yet untold about well over one hundred girl evangelists who held revival services in the 1920s and 1930s across the United States. These very young evangelists have escaped the notice of historians, despite the bourgeoning bibliography on American women evangelists within the last fifteen years, particularly since the publication of Catherine Brekus's Pilgrims & Strangers: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). For this reason alone, this book offers a substantial contribution to the historiography of women in North American religion.

Based almost entirely upon newspaper articles, Robinson and Ruff demonstrate that during the 1920s—“a good time to be young and talented” (3)—girl evangelists attracted crowds to revivals across the country in similar fashion to child movie stars, like Shirley Temple. The authors argue that the press not only helped to fashion the image of girl evangelists but also to catapult their popularity, particularly in contradistinction to flappers. Girl evangelists became the leading example in the press of “the traditional or old-fashioned girl” as opposed to the “outrageous and free flapper ideal” (52–53). At the same time, Robinson and Ruff recognize that the potential for sexual allure also surrounded girl evangelists whose purity and innocence remained on public display.

The book is divided into sixteen short chapters. After the opening chapter which describes the phenomenon of girl evangelists, the next several chapters provide basic, introductory material on America in the 1920s, from the religious marketplace of fads and fantasies to a very brief glance at women preachers. The discussion of girl evangelists commences in earnest in chapters 6 and 7, where the authors compare and contrast them with the flappers. A chapter then follows on “the poster child of girl evangelists,” Uldine Utley. The authors then turn their attention to the childhood these girls experienced by considering such topics as family life, friendships, and schooling. At the same time, these girls had to work and preach in an adult world, a reality which prompts the authors in chapter 10 to analyze their sermons, theological training, denominational affiliation, and the call to preach.

Chapter 11 investigates aspects of the girls' evangelistic meetings, from preparation and planning to staff and marketing. A closer look at their sermon tone and topics provides the subject for chapter 12. The authors then assess in chapter 13 how the media portrayed girl evangelists, mostly in newspapers but also briefly in radio, novel, and film. Chapter 14 reflects on criticisms hurled against these girls, including those who objected to women preachers and those who saw them as an advertising gimmick to attract crowds. While such criticisms contributed by the 1940s to a steep decline in girl evangelists, Robinson and Ruff suggest that the stress of a staggering workload night after night also became a prohibiting factor. The penultimate chapter, aptly titled, “Exiting the Stage,” takes into account the reality that the “career of the child actor or of the girl evangelist had a built-in expiry date” (142). The final chapter revisits the 1920s as a time in America when oddities like girl evangelists found a niche.

Maintaining a clear, overarching organization and thesis for the book through sixteen short chapters requires enormous finesse, and it is here that the book falls short. The many, short chapters are not arranged in a well-defined order or trajectory. For instance, the chapter on Uldine Utley in the middle of the book is disconnected from the chapters that precede and follow it, and several themes, like the media's presentation of girl evangelists and the marketing of revivalism, are repeated unnecessarily in more than one chapter. In addition, there is a lack of serious engagement with the extensive secondary literature on revivalism that would help integrate girl evangelists into the larger story. Still, the book's merit stems from the significant recovery work accomplished by Robinson and Ruff concerning these neglected girl evangelists.