The story Cordelia Moyse tells about the Mothers’ Union from its founding by the religiously and socially conservative wife of a rural Anglican rector in the late nineteenth century through its evolution into an engine of empowerment for women of color in the global south today impresses for a number of reasons. First, it rests on a solid foundation of research. Moyse was given exclusive access to the papers of the organization’s Central Council housed at Lambeth Palace in London, and, although she notes that these papers obscure the voices of rank-and-file members in the organization’s branches in both the metropole and the periphery, she nevertheless deftly manages to reveal the fissures that developed between the Central Council and the branches over issues like divorce law reform, ecumenism, and branch autonomy.

Second, Moyse situates her analysis of the Mothers’ Union in the context of her wide-ranging reading in and mastery of the secondary source literature pertaining to British religious and women’s history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hence, she highlights how this religious and once emphatically nonpolitical organization operated as a source of power and agency for women. This enabled them to defy the Anglican hierarchy’s increasing open-mindedness on matters of divorce and birth control, a stance that did not redound to the benefit of the Mothers’ Union, causing it to lose members. But it also allowed them to assert the value to society of women’s traditional roles as wives and mothers, a stance that led large numbers of women of color to join the Mothers’ Union beginning in the interwar period and extending into the postcolonial era in Africa in particular.

Finally, although Moyse is herself active in the Anglican Church and a member of the Mothers’ Union, her involvement does not inhibit her critical faculties. With respect to the Mothers’ Union’s mission in the global south, she condemns the organization’s pre–World War II policy of promoting “a universalist understanding of the vocation of womanhood based on monogamous marriage, pre-martial chastity and maternal responsibility within the nuclear family as a model of discipleship for indigenous women,” labeling it “a cocktail of Christian faith and Western cultural norms,” replete with unexamined colonialist and racist assumptions (140–41). She observes that the perspective of Mary Sumner, the organization’s founder, was blinkered, indeed “feudal” (32), when it came to class divisions within Britain, although the organization itself endeavored from its inception to build bridges between its middle-class and working-class members by emphasizing common prayer and their shared roles as Christian mothers, albeit under tremendously different living conditions. Nevertheless, throughout the nineteenth century the organization insisted that poverty originated in individual, especially maternal, moral failings and consequently resisted socialist, state-sponsored schemes to improve conditions as “anti-pathetic to the family and social order” (67).

The revelations of the ill health of army recruits during the Boer War caused the leaders of the Mothers’ Union to reassess that perspective and “to engage anew with the practical realities of many of its own members’ lives” (68). However, this reassessment was limited in that it led the leadership to adopt the prevailing eugenic thinking about the linkages between imperial greatness and the quantity and quality of the metropole’s population but not to temper its attitude toward socialism or to abandon its insistence that each mother was individually responsible for the material and spiritual condition of her children. As a consequence, during the interwar period the Mothers’ Union did little to address the needs of its working-class members. Indeed, it abandoned them to the care of government-sponsored programs, despite the organization’s rhetorical opposition to such devices. In the interwar period, the Mothers’ Union’s leadership did no more than moot a scheme for maternity and infant welfare centers for the wives of professional men and for the training of children’s nurses who could be employed by middle-class families. Moyse points out that this scheme was never actualized for a variety of reasons, but it certainly reveals the hidebound nature of the leadership’s class attitudes, which, along with its strident opposition to divorce law reform and failure to engage with the new notions about marital sexuality being promoted by Marie Stopes, marked the organization as hopelessly out of touch with modernity, not to mention reality.

After World War II, the leadership of the Mothers’ Union continued in its social and moral conservatism, refusing to reconsider its ethos even in the face of increasing criticism from the Anglican hierarchy, which was endeavoring to refashion the Church to make it relevant in a postwar era of challenges to authority and conventional sexual norms on the part of youth in particular. The only bright spot that Moyse notes in this period is the opposition to apartheid espoused by both the white and the indigenous branches of the Mothers’ Union in South Africa, especially after the Sharpeville massacre. However, things began to change in 1970 with the election of Susan Varah to the Worldwide Presidency of the Mothers’ Union. Her charismatic personality and diplomatic skills enabled her to pilot the organization through a difficult period of reform that led to the adoption of a new constitution in 1974. She had a vision for a remade Mothers’ Union, which that constitution actualized. Her vision incorporated autonomy for the branches and inclusivity of membership, enabling the organization to survive in the increasingly secular metropole and to flourish in the postcolonial periphery.

In her introduction to the book, Jane Williams, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, calls this history of the Mothers’ Union a “generous celebration” of an organization that “has proved itself a huge gift to Anglican Christianity throughout the world” (x). Yet Moyse’s skills as a historian actually make this volume more than a celebration because they enabled her to examine critically both the limitations and the successes of the Mothers’ Union, thereby making the book a fine contribution to British women’s and British religious history.