While the past decades have brought us marvelous studies of Catholic sisterhoods, there is far less scholarship on American Catholic laywomen. The Laywoman Project is a long overdue exploration of how Catholic women began to rethink their roles in church and society under the impact of the “Spirit of Vatican II” and the “revolutions” of the 1960s. Henold concentrates on “highly active, largely nonfeminist” (2) women who were active in Catholic organizations and read Catholic magazines. She concentrates on the Theresians, the National Council of Catholic Women (NCCW), the Catholic Daughters of America (CDA), the Daughters of Isabella, and the magazine Marriage. The “laywoman project” is the evolution of such women as they came to understand their place in the changing world. Although Henold does include brief institutional histories, what is special about The Laywoman Project is how she uses these organizations to articulate Catholic women's history. These are not the “radicals” found in Henold's Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2008) but the politically moderate Catholics who populated most parishes.

The Laywoman Project begins with a prologue that provides the rationale for the first organization, the Theresians. The postwar Catholic population in the United States was expanding at a rate greater than the number of religious vocations. The popular religious media blamed this “crisis” on mothers who failed to cultivate pious homes and selfishly sought to keep their children out of religious life. To counter this, women created an organization to promote vocations to the sisterhood. Henold then charts how the Theresians (named after the Carmelite, Thérèse of Lisieux) changed from promoting the ideal that mothers must be ready to sacrifice all to support religious vocations to seeing that God calls all people in different ways to serve. In the process, they came to personally know more women religious and the distance between the laywomen and the sisters decreased.

In the next chapter, Henold argues that while the National Council of Catholic Women did not support the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), it must not be dismissed as a clear-cut example of female conservativism. The leaders of NCCW had to navigate between church authorities, Catholic feminists, and women who celebrated antifeminist identities. While distancing itself from the word “feminism,” the NCCW did teach that women had rights and that women needed to engage with the wider world. Embracing the charges of Vatican II, NCCW encouraged women to claim leadership roles by running for parish councils and to become active in the liturgy by serving as lectors and Communion ministers. Still, by the 1970s, the organization turned away from even “mild feminism” (104), and their ranks slowly diminished. Catholic women were increasingly pursuing wage labor and no longer had time for such activities, even if they were not put off by NCCW's increasing conservativism.

Chapter 3 moves away from organizations and analyzes how the magazine Marriage reflected the “quiet revolution” (105) going on in American parishes. The Benedictines of St. Meinrad's Abbey, Indiana, began publishing Marriage in 1959 for a white, middle-class, educated readership. By the mid-1960s, it had a lay editor and many women writers. Returning to themes begun in the prologue, Henold outlines Marriage's initial presentation of traditional Catholic “complementarity” (111) that understood womanhood as a fixed, eternal, and essential category. Increasingly, however, the magazine delineated the problems inherent in gender stereotyping. Especially in the reader comments column, women asserted alternative perspectives on housework and engaged in a conversation over issues like male headship and women's wage labor outside of the home. Debates over authority, power, and submission were being created. While at times the articles seemed contradictory and confusing, Marriage gave women a space to puzzle out their place in a changing world. By the 1970s, authors held that Catholic essentialism no longer was either fulfilling or working. Female diversity became a more acceptable model.

The final groups Henold includes are the Catholic Daughters of America and the Daughters of Isabel. These were conservative organizations of women who did not embrace even moderate change. For these Catholics, both feminism and the spirit of Vatican II threatened women's power at home and in the parish. Their status had been secured through obedience and loyalty, values that were now being challenged. Rebelling against Vatican II, these women became defensive and increasingly sided with other traditionalist Catholics. They found a place in anti-abortion activism and campaigned against the ERA. Henold demonstrates that Catholic women—as with Latter-day Saint and Evangelical Protestant women—were critical to the rise of the Religious Right.

In a brief epilogue, Henold skips to the present to point out that, in spite of his wanting female theologians and fair wages for women workers, Pope Francis upholds traditional Catholic complementarity. Decades of women who had provided thoughtful reflection on who they are and what they want from the world and their religion seemingly are being ignored by the contemporary church. Rather than leave her readers dejected, Henold provides three hopeful takeaways based on the history she has just narrated: (1) women must continue to speak fearlessly on questions of identity; (2) women's efforts have positively altered the Catholic Church and will continue to alter it; and (3) women made such change through communal, organizational efforts. In her final point, she returns to the problem that began the epilogue: male church authorities do not listen and, until women have authority over the clergy and can make decisions “that have weight” (194), substantial change will either be fleeting or glacial.

The Laywoman Project is an essential contribution to understanding how religious people navigated changes in postwar America. Its unpacking of Catholic complementarity provides insight into how other Christians perceived gender roles. While the chapter on the magazine Marriage stands out from the other chapters that center on women's organizations, it provides perhaps the clearest articulation of women struggling with social and religious change. Henold provides insightful interpretations sprinkled with humorous interjections. As historians struggle to understand how change occurs among non-radicalized Americans, The Laywoman Project delivers a perceptive summary of how Catholic women faced changes both in their religion and in their nation.