In recent decades, increased scholarly attention has been devoted to analyses of gender and agency within conservative American religious traditions. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), with its tremendous size and conservative trajectory, has especially fascinated historians and ethnographers (not to mention members of the media). How, scholars wonder, have women understood and negotiated their roles in such a context?

Regina Sullivan's Lottie Moon skillfully examines such questions with respect to the woman Sullivan characterizes as “arguably one of the most celebrated, memorialized, and remembered women in southern history” (170). Moon, the eponymous catalyst of the SBC's Christmas offering for international missions, served as a Southern Baptist missionary to China from 1873 to 1912. Her legacy is appropriated each year by millions of Southern Baptists—from preschoolers to senior adults—as they embark upon ambitious fundraising efforts and urge renewed commitment to mission work. Moon is the closest thing that Southern Baptists have to a saint.

Sullivan positions her work as a scholarly study of Moon's life in contrast to the “artifice of legend” (2) that she contends previous hagiographies constructed. Indeed, Lottie Moon is quite well written and researched, filled with extensive primary source work and lacking romanticized portrayals of Moon's life. It is not, however, “the first comprehensive portrait of ‘Lottie,’” as the dust jacket claims. Sullivan's writing clearly displays the marks of a trained historian absent from earlier works. But most of the biographical details she presents are not strikingly different from those of Catherine Allen's The New Lottie Moon Story, published by the SBC's Woman's Missionary Union (WMU). Sullivan's conclusions about Moon's death (discussed below) are a notable exception.

Sullivan details Moon's journey from privileged Virginia schoolgirl to revered Southern Baptist missionary with a thoroughness that evinces years of study. Occasionally the book sags under the weight of numerous historical details with little analysis. One wonders why Sullivan devotes thirty pages to the founding of WMU (73–103), for example, and wishes for additional critical examination of topics such as Moon's changing racial attitudes (132–35).

Sullivan's analysis is evident, however, in her repeated thesis that Moon “relied on religious ideology and woman's rights language to argue for an expansion of women's sphere, for female equality in mission work, and for female organization” (1). Sullivan highlights Moon's insistence on single women's enfranchisement in missions meetings, her speaking to Chinese men, and her pioneering ministry in China's interior. Such actions, as Sullivan rightly concludes, were noteworthy for a female Southern Baptist missionary at the turn of the twentieth century. Sullivan's research thus helps reshape outmoded stereotypes of evangelical women as passive subordinates concerned only with private affairs. Lottie Moon makes a valuable contribution to historical understanding of women's agency in a denomination that at first glance appeared to be completely male-dominated.

However, Moon's gender constructs were more complex than Sullivan acknowledges. Paul Harvey, for example, notes that Moon at least appeared to oppose introducing Southern Baptist women to progressive “Northern ideas of womanhood,” as she phrased it (Redeeming the South [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997], 212). Both conservative and moderate Southern Baptists have appropriated elements of Moon's legacy for themselves, with varying degrees of historical accuracy. In her concluding chapter, Sullivan herself analyzes such divergent portrayals of Moon—especially of the circumstances surrounding Moon's death. Through a detailed appraisal of primary and secondary sources, Sullivan convincingly argues against the popular view (perpetuated by previous biographies) that Moon “purposefully starved herself to death” (155) in order to direct funds and food to the needy Chinese. Sullivan demonstrates that Moon instead died primarily from dementia, which caused her to be fearful about her finances and led to her rapid physical decline. Although her claims will be controversial among rank and file Southern Baptists, Sullivan is at her best here, analyzing the Lottie Moon story as “a site where memory is created to serve the needs of a community” (160). As Elizabeth Flowers has recently done in Fides et Historia (“From Southern Belle to She-Preacher,” [Winter/Spring 2011], 15–40), Sullivan demonstrates the fascinating and diverse ways that Southern Baptists have reshaped Moon's story throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to meet the perceived needs of their denominational context.

Although historians may disagree with elements of Sullivan's interpretation, few can deny that her work offers a well-researched and thought-provoking addition to the corpus of writings about Moon and other female evangelical missionaries. Lottie Moon ably advances scholarly understanding of the historical relationships of gender, power, and mission among Southern Baptists and other American evangelicals.