I need to begin this review with the caveat that I am not a disinterested bystander to the history Elizabeth Flowers recounts. Given my own Southern Baptist upbringing, my research and publication on the battles of the 1980s, and my insider participation in some of the spin-off organizations, I read this book with more than the usual scholarly interest. What I have seen in this book, then, is very familiar territory, but it is territory Flowers has mapped in very interesting new ways. She not only got the story right, but she also sharpened and clarified the analyses that have previously been on the table. Her focus on questions of gender and power allowed new parts of the story to emerge, and as such, places this story in its larger historical and theoretical context.

The book does not dwell long on the early history of women in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), but it makes some key points nonetheless. Flowers documents both the strength of early SBC women's voices as they organized their Woman's Missionary Union (WMU) and the degree to which women's fundraising repeatedly rescued the early denomination. She notes the denomination's cooptation of WMU's budgetary autonomy in the 1950s, but the failure of triumphant conservatives to capture control in the 1990s. Both WMU's longstanding nurture of a “women's space” and its insistence on a discourse of “call” meant that WMU would be the hothouse from which the SBC's women pastors would emerge.

That natural evolution did not go unchallenged, of course. Ordaining women became, in fact, the symbol dividing progressives from conservatives in the 1980s battles. Ironically, the first ordination of a Baptist woman came in 1964 and caused barely a ripple of controversy. But fifteen years later, churches were being disfellowshiped; thirty years later, professors were being fired. Women in the pulpit had become the defining issue. As Flowers argues, all the noise was about inerrancy, but a literal Genesis has little everyday impact on most Baptists. Who stands in their pulpit is a much more tangible symbol.

Flowers points to several key ways in which gender operated as a mobilizing force for Southern Baptist conservatives. As part of the larger conservative political transformation of the post-sixties period, leaders deftly linked any move toward gender equality to the most radical of the feminist agenda and to issues of “moral downfall” and “perversion.” These links to larger culture war issues increased the urgency, visibility, and salience of the conservative cause in the SBC. More critically, SBC conservatives were able to enhance the legitimacy of their argument by disentangling gender and race. Their moves in the 1980s and 1990s to apologize for slavery and for opposition to civil rights made it more difficult for progressives to tar conservative opposition to women's power with the brush of racism.

New to me in this accounting of the conservative movement is Flowers's attention to the “women's ministry” (as distinct from the “women in ministry”) movement. Around 1980, conservative women began gathering in conferences and retreats to extol the joys of traditional womanhood and godly submission—to minister to each other's personal spiritual needs. Flowers takes seriously the theological intellect and organizational savvy of these women. They struck a responsive chord with a new generation of Baptist women, working out a theology of “complementarianism.” This larger conservative women's movement has been well documented in other historical and sociological research that might have been more thoroughly mined in Flowers's analysis. Nevertheless, she uses her account of these Baptist women leaders to show how their work added fuel to the conservative movement's fires.

Not new to me is Flowers's account of the “moderate” denominational leadership, with its corporate mentality of compromise. In the 1950s and 1960s, these leaders had built the SBC into the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., with organizations and programs to meet a church's every need. In those days, minor conservative skirmishes could easily be sidestepped and compromised. That history of success made it hard for moderates to recognize the way the landscape had changed by the end of the 1970s. When they did, even as they fought back, they were repeatedly willing to sacrifice women's equality for “peace.” It is one of the revolutionary aspects of the Alliance of Baptists that such moderate male prerogatives were so quickly banished. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the more middle-of-the-road post-SBC group, eventually caught up, but its early years were often a gendered tug of war. One of the most telling pieces of evidence Flowers presents is that the two states with the fewest women pastors are the two states where moderates have retained control of the state convention. So long as the old moderate guard found a way to retain power, it was at the expense of women.

One might have hoped at the end for a theoretical summing up. Where and how did Southern Baptist women (and by implication other women) gain the power to preach? What social currents and organizational mechanisms most effectively blocked their access to the pulpit? That sort of generalizing is, of course, more my domain as a sociologist than Flowers's domain as a historian. What she has effectively done here is to use all the tools of the social historian—from archives to interviews to direct observation—to tell a compelling story. This is well-trodden territory, but by bringing a feminist lens to the task, Flowers looked in new places and saw new things in old stories. This book is a significant new contribution to our understanding of an important era in the history of America's largest denomination, and it is a significant contribution to the body of historical scholarship on American religious women.