The past several years have seen the emergence of a number of excellent monographs on the history of Southern Baptist women, including studies of their journey to the pulpit as ordained ministers and their carving out of new avenues of service within a largely conservative, patriarchal denomination. Carol Crawford Holcomb's Homes Without Walls is a helpful addition to this growing scholarly literature. In this volume, Holcomb argues that the Progressive Era leaders of the Woman's Missionary Union of the Southern Baptist Convention were shaped in their social ethics by progressivism and the social gospel, although in ways that were determined by their southernness and location in a conservative denomination.

Holcomb describes the formation of the Woman's Missionary Union (WMU) as an act that was somewhat subversive even in its beginnings. The women who chose to form this auxiliary group did so knowing that many of the men of the Southern Baptist Convention found the idea of a separate women's organization threatening. In fact, these emerging leaders did have tendencies that Southern Baptist men typically did not display: they revealed an ecumenical spirit, cooperating with and drawing ideas from other Protestant women's groups; more importantly, they drew on new theological currents that imagined sin as social and not exclusively individual. Holcomb rightly identifies the social gospel and progressive ideas about organizational efficiency and bureaucracy as two sides of the same ideological coin, showing that both of these deeply influenced early WMU leaders such as Annie Armstrong and Fannie Heck.

These early leaders had no interest in overtly resisting the ideals of “true womanhood” that defined American women during the Victorian period, but like so many other women of the Progressive Era, these leaders used the idea of feminine domesticity to move into social action, noting that the protection of the Christian home made concern for the state of society outside the home's walls imperative. Although Annie Armstrong, the WMU's first corresponding secretary, was able to develop enormous, but largely informal, power within the SBC through her development of the organizational apparatus that came to provide a large share of the funding for Southern Baptist missions both during her lifetime and today, WMU leaders soon came to imagine a role for Southern Baptist women that was much larger than simple fundraising. Under the euphemism of “Personal Service,” WMU leaders began to encourage local WMU members to engage in social ministry that was overtly shaped by those leaders’ encounters with the social gospel.

In close readings of WMU publications, personal correspondence, and organizational records, Holcomb shows how hard WMU leaders worked to introduce rank-and-file Southern Baptist women to progressive social ministries. Pamphlets and newspaper columns laid out rather progressive ideas about the relationship between the message of Christ and social problems, and the WMU eventually developed a training school in Louisville that prepared women to work in a number of emerging WMU sponsored social ministries. The most important of these were an emerging series of “Good Will Centers” that were self-consciously modeled after emerging settlement houses, including Jane Addams’s Hull House. Holcomb notes, however, that the continuing centrality of evangelism and religious teaching at these institutions, along with their failure to develop a truly progressive mission of social reform, tends to mark them to contemporary eyes as missions rather than true settlement houses. This, along with the continued paternalism that haunted the WMU's efforts to cooperate with African American Baptist women, helps illustrate the fact that WMU progressivism was always shaped by the southern nature of the organization.

Holcomb's volume is always persuasive when it shows where WMU leaders absorbed their progressivism and their social gospel-inspired sense of what sin and salvation must be. She also offers some tantalizing hints pointing toward the idea that the WMU was the soil in which ideas forbidden to Southern Baptists, such as ecumenism, interregional cooperation, and the social gospel itself, were allowed to grow. This helps to explain why gender became such a fault line in the struggles that rocked the SBC in the late twentieth century and is an authentic and welcome scholarly contribution.

The shadow side of these hints, however, is Holcomb's reluctance to recognize that many Southern Baptist women, perhaps more than a few, may have found the social ideas that the Progressive Era leaders of WMU offered in their pamphlets and columns to be misguided. Holcomb's careful, exhaustive research shows that many local WMU groups failed to offer the national organization requested reports on their “Personal Service.” Those that did often included activities such as Bible and food distribution that really did not rise to the level of social intervention for which national leaders hoped. When explaining this failure to engage in Personal Service, Holcomb offers a number of explanations, all plausible: that women “failed to grasp the aims of Personal Service” (128) or that the message was “complicated and difficult to communicate” (129). Beyond this, though, Holcomb never truly weighs the possibility that some local Southern Baptist women may have rejected the social gospel of their leaders outright, owing to predictable Southern Baptist conservatism.

With that said, even raising this question of historical explanation is only possible because of the careful, clear portrait of the early WMU and its social ministries that Holcomb provides. She is utterly forthright about the fact that WMU's leaders were unusual in their high socioeconomic status and proximity to northern, urban problems through the location of their Baltimore headquarters, and she knows that their embrace of the social gospel has much to do with these circumstances. Altogether, Holcomb has made an important contribution to the growing literature on Southern Baptist women, a body of work that helps historians better understand American Protestantism and the South more generally.