Susan Shaw was “raised right.” As a southern “lady,” she crossed her legs, properly addressed elders, dressed up for church, and dutifully memorized a weekly Bible verse. Shaw grew up in Georgia in the 1960s and 1970s, and her identity was inextricably linked to her southern culture and religion as a Southern Baptist. From the time she was a young girl through college, for Shaw life outside of home and school meant church on Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday nights, not to mention a few social outings, prayer circles, visitations, missionary speakers, and choir tours sprinkled throughout the week. Shaw maintained her link with Southern Baptist culture and went to Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, for graduate work. After eight years of teaching at Baptist colleges and finding a church home in another denomination, Shaw is now a professor of women's studies at Oregon State University. In God Speaks to Us, Too, she blends memoir, interviews, and history to explore the ideological and pragmatic contradictions of women in Baptist life.

Using her own experiences as well as those of family and friends to frame her initial questions, Shaw branches out to conduct more than 150 interviews with a variety of Baptist women, including those who no longer attend Baptist churches. She seeks to understand how participants construct their identities, particularly in relation to gender and the Southern Baptist Convention's changing ideological stance on women over the past three decades. Some of the methodological challenges of this work include sorting out exactly what a current or former Southern Baptist identity entails as well as the changing and contested meanings over who and what is considered a part of Southern Baptist culture. Shaw incorporates into her personal narrative the historical origins of Southern Baptists, the changing roles of women over the last several decades of the twentieth century, and most important, the era of the early 1980s through the early 1990s when theological conservatives took control of the denomination, thus altering the roles and expectations for women in Southern Baptist churches, seminaries, and ministry.

In order to connect the diverse experiences of Southern Baptist women, Shaw organizes their shared identities around eight broad themes that categorize Baptist women's lives: experiences of salvation and baptism; the authority and importance of the Bible; food, hospitality, and friendship; race; missions; submission and family; relationship to feminism; and soul competency. She includes perspectives from conservative women, like Dorothy Patterson, who support the current Southern Baptist Convention, view the Bible as inherent and infallible, embrace a gendered hierarchy and complentarianism between husband and wife, and reject feminism. More moderate women, such as Carolyn Weatherford Crumpler, the former executive director of the Women's Missionary Union and active Cooperative Baptist Fellowship participant, regard the Bible with utmost authority but not as inerrant or infallible, tend to view gender relationships in more egalitarian terms, and have varying allegiances to the goals of feminism. Shaw also includes perspectives from more progressive women who identify themselves as feminists and tend to see the Bible as inspirational and filled with messages about social justice. Some of these women attend moderate Baptist seminaries, but many are former Southern Baptists who now align themselves with Alliance of Baptists, American Baptists, or another denomination, or have left church life all together.

Shaw's study contributes to work on evangelical women and agency. She argues that despite the diverse understandings of their roles as women in church and home life, all of the women interviewed share the Baptist principles of soul competency and the priesthood of believers. Part of the difficulty in collectively analyzing the variety of women in Baptist life is complicated by these Baptist notions of the freedom of the individual to have a personal relationship with God and local church autonomy. Shaw suggests that because of these individualistic and independent principles, even the most conservative Southern Baptist women have a “way of carving out their own agency” (95). In this way the woman who openly asserts that women should not be ordained, deacons, or pastors also has no qualms about confronting her male pastor after Sunday services to “kindly” tell him his interpretation of scripture is wrong or about manipulating her husband to get what she wants through making him believe it was his idea. Other women interpret these Baptist principles as a way to evaluate God's call on their lives or as a way of legitimating their authority to respond to a call—even if God is calling them into male-dominated ministerial positions.

Shaw's strongest contributions to the study of women's agency in conservative religious environments occur in her chapters on salvation and baptism, which include a fascinating look into the faith of children and conversion experiences, and the chapter on the legacy of missions education in Southern Baptist culture. She interweaves the development of girls and young women's independence, their broad exposure to world cultures, and the ability to interpret God's call on their lives with southern notions of propriety, beauty, and pageantry. It is within these two chapters that Shaw's interpretations of soul competency are the most poignant, highlighting the conflicting identities and practices of what it means to be a Southern Baptist woman.

At times Shaw's notes are scarce and contain errors (for example Exiled: Voices of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War [Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006] was edited by Carl L. Kell, not the Carl L. Hunt listed on page 278). I also found myself searching for references to seminal works on conservative Protestant women, such as Marie Griffith's God's Daughters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). I would be amiss if I did not mention that a book on gendered identities misidentified my gender. As a young, female graduate student, I wrote a master's thesis on Baptist women's contradictory identities in which I argued that despite much hope for more inclusion from Baptist women themselves, little structural change had happened to allow for even the smallest of reforms (175). Shaw mistakenly notes that I am a male scholar, and I wonder how this assumption influenced her reading of my argument.

Despite these slight errors, overall, Shaw's combination of humor, self-reflexivity, extensive Baptist history, and attention to the unique aspects of southern culture that construct Southern Baptist women's identities makes God Speaks to Us, Too a solid read for anyone interested in women and religion.