This important collection, edited by two leading scholars in the field, reflects the ‘religious turn’ in gender history seen over the last ten years. In contrast to the previous two decades, feminist scholars have become more willing to acknowledge the influence of spiritual conviction, and a nuanced, more judicious, picture has emerged of the influence of religion on women's private selves and public roles. Cultural historians have also contributed to this development, but historians of religion have, according to the editors, remained peripheral due to their unwillingness to discard class as their dominant category of analysis. Callum Brown is cited as an honourable exception and his work, along with that of other key authors, receives regular consideration in a volume which functions as both a survey of the current state of the field and a clarion call for historians of religion and the family to engage with gender and cultural historians in wider-ranging analyses. The first essay, by Sarah C. Williams, provides a sustained argument for this objective. The editors start from the assumption that women related to religious ideas, institutions and cultures in ‘multiple and conflicting’ ways, which the essays explore over a time period continuing from the well-established historiography of the nineteenth century into the less-charted terrain of 1900–40. Pamela Walker provides a survey of recent writing on women preachers, while Rhonda Semple focuses on women's contributions to three mission fields. Susan Mumm points out that writing on female philanthropy has been biased towards large and longstanding organisations, and supplies a valuable corrective with her account of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) and the Girls Friendly Society (GFS). More research of this kind is clearly needed. Julie Melnyk looks at the theological writings of nineteenth-century women, including hymns, and discovers an ‘image of Christ as loving, selfless and nurturing’. Carmen Mangion calls for the greater recognition of ‘unfashionable, pious women’ who chose to dedicate their lives to Protestant or Catholic sisterhoods. In a wide-ranging survey of women, religion and reform, Clare Midgley shows that although the Evangelicals Elizabeth Fry and Josephine Butler were ‘deeply egalitarian and radical’, their tradition was losing ground by the end of the nineteenth century. The ‘religiously inspired mission of secular social reform’ of Unitarians Mary Carpenter and Octavia Hill pointed the way forward. Joy Dixon considers the period after 1870, when Christians were challenged by the ‘higher criticism’ and by science, and demonstrates the wide range of spiritual beliefs which were now considered as alternatives. Jacqueline DeVries, one of the editors, notes the challenge posed to historians by this diversity of religious cultures, and focuses on the ‘distinctive feminist spirituality’ of the suffrage movement. Sue Morgan, the other editor, contributes a major essay re-examining Christian women's writing and activism around sex in three parts: the changing constructions of marital female sexuality, women's anti-vice campaigns and the sexuality of single women. The impact of this volume is, as the editors intend, to disrupt previous assumptions about ‘the feminisation of religion’ and to demonstrate the value of new approaches by historians who are willing to engage with both the variety of women's religious (including non-Christian) experiences and the challenges of twentieth-century ‘secularisation’.