While revivals and awakenings have long been fertile terrain for religious scholars mapping the evolving theological landscape of Protestant America, the broader historical community has typically required a more substantial payoff in cultural and political insights as the price for their attention. More important, the market for monographs that clarify the nation's history of race, class, and gender oppression has been especially strong, and Thekla Ellen Joiner's study of turn-of-the-century revivalism in Chicago is certainly constructed to meet this demand.

Joiner neatly divides her attention among three revival moments in the Windy City's history: the Chicago World's Fair of 1893; the 1910 Chapman-Alexander Simultaneous Campaign; and the 1918 Billy Sunday Revival. At the center of all three spiritual drives are conservative middle-class Protestants, and what most interests Joiner is their ongoing crusade to maintain bourgeois evangelical values as the controlling moral center of the culture. The darkness looming for these religious malcontents is an emerging modernity marked by an easy accommodation of alcohol, individualism, moral relativism, and materialism. Most alarmingly, such “sins in the city” augured a fatal disruption of long-standing gender roles. These vanguards of twentieth-century fundamentalism could welcome modernity's technological wonders that might speed the gospel message, but they resisted its assault on a gender division of spiritual labor that kept women at the center of family and community moral order.

The opening chapter offers only a breezy account of evangelical theology, and the social gospel movement of the age remains on the margins. Joiner is a cultural historian, and although she acknowledges her subjects' primary interest in the transcendent fate of lost souls, it is the ground campaigns of these biblical literalists that most interest her. As with all studies of American revival movements, key personalities provide an organizing center, and Joiner features Dwight L. Moody, Wilbur J. Chapman, and Billy Sunday in these roles. Male centerpieces aside, it is the women in the ranks who emerge alternately as the featured protagonists and victims of the revival movement.

Joiner argues that as modernity burdened men with corporate obligations tethered to the new economic structures of industrial capitalism, it also physically and psychologically alienated masculine identity from the moral power of women. Equally troubling, the new order tempted women to abandon their historic roles as moral guardians and embrace a new, radical individualism that elevated personal freedom and opportunity above family and social obligations. To contain these twin threats, revivalists ironically deployed the public voices of evangelical women to call wayward sisters back to the private domestic centers of moral authority where female spiritual power could work its redemptive ways on the men of the house. But this was public power with a deferential twist. Joiner notes that evangelical activists such as Emma Dryer chafed under a strategy that invited “women into public places as representatives of evangelicalism,” but only insofar as they affirmed “assigned gender roles” and “promoted this idea within their work” (55–56). Any further indulgences, male clergymen cautioned, led only to moral degradation, with the city's thriving prostitution rings yielding the bitterest fruit of female independence.

Always unimaginable to evangelical leaders, Joiner contends, was the possibility that women wanted a new order of individual opportunity that made such “sins” worth the risk. Yet by 1918, the Billy Sunday revival had to accommodate a new order of female engagement with public culture. Joiner effectively traces the development of a new message that abandoned an earlier emphasis on female innocence and vulnerability and instead assaulted the wanton lusts of women in the marketplace who were clearly “out of control.” This “feminization of sin” convinced evangelicals that corruption had burst the traditional confines of brothels and bars to infect popular culture at all levels. Women now had permanent access to the pleasures of public space, and more than a few of them were enjoying the adventure.

Historians who warm to postmodern interpretation will appreciate Joiner's deep engagement with evangelical stratagems presented as symbolic rituals of oppression designed to contain the personal freedom encouraged by the new urban commercial landscape. These “highly choreographed social rituals” (242) may have showcased moral restoration and women's spiritual power, she argues, but implicit in the structured discourse these leaders employed were much darker ambitions—preserving white power, denying female freedom, and sustaining middle-class economic dominance. Significantly, Joiner's featured characters are rarely explicit about such hegemonic ambitions. Consequently, her theoretical supports are essential in sustaining the coherence of an argument that depends heavily on the implied meanings and purposes that she finds in evangelical texts.

This is a well-crafted study that will particularly please those scholars who share Joiner's analytical approach and deep social commitments. Her final chapter is a somewhat distracting cautionary note that links her historical subjects to the nation's current crop of evangelical leaders. The book can stand on its own merits as a welcome addition to the scholarship on early twentieth-century revivalism without direct assaults on the agendas of Trent Lott and James Dobson or the portrayal of contemporary evangelicals as “bunkered” in the “prophylactic” security of “personal devotion and family rituals” (235–236).