Phyllis Martin's new book joins a number of recent studies that consider the complex, troubled, and often troubling role that Catholic evangelization played in parts of the world once under French rule. The originality of Martin's contribution rests in her focus on the experiences of women, first within the workings of the missions of the French Moyen-Congo, and then within the post-independence republic. The book argues persuasively that a host of local conditions – most notably the devastating impact of the slave trade, colonial labour exactions, and diseases – make women particularly central to understanding the social, economic, and political history of lower Congo. Anxieties about low birthrates in the region have meant that motherhood has long been a contested construct, acting as both a means for women to promote their own interests as well as a cause of their vulnerability. The bulk of the study explores how Catholicism offered a space for women to form communities to ‘mediate their individual and collective priorities, often as mothers, in troubled times’ (p. 3).

Martin's first four chapters detail Catholic missionaries' progress, especially with women, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Staffed by religieuses of the Sisters of Saint-Joseph of Cluny, the missions started humbly, receiving orphans, women prisoners, and other displaced people ‘gifted’ to them by administrators, riverboat captains, and traders. The sisters trained girls in both piety and practicalities in the hopes that they would become successful Catholic wives and mothers in their communities, roles that proved essential to the growth of the early twentieth century church. Spread across the region often as wives of catechists, these mothers instilled in their families and neighbours the religious values taught to them, allowing Catholicism to spread beyond the confines of the missions. While women served Catholicism well, the church in turn offered women a means to traverse the complex power dynamics wrought by the presence of a host of religious, colonial, and African players. In wonderfully illustrated cases from the archives, Martin demonstrates how women throughout the colonial period often played husbands off priests, and priests off colonial officials, exploiting local tensions to their advantage.

The final two chapters continue into the period after independence that witnessed the closing of mission schools and limited the reach of the remnants of a European church. The Second Vatican Council allowed Catholics to make a ‘church of the people’ freed from French and Latin liturgy and European oversight. But in the face of violence that included the torture of clerics and a decidedly anti-clerical socialist political environment, the future of the church was far from certain. Again, Martin asserts, women were central to the redefinition and survival of the church in the 1960s and beyond. Women formed church-based communities, called mabundu in Kikongo, which helped meld Catholicism with local beliefs, practices, and traditions. The postcolonial church, became essentially a ‘church of women’ as it was mothers who continued to play the role of teachers, organizers, and spiritual leaders. As in the era of the missions, the postcolonial church also provided women with a space to organize politically as well as spiritually. As Martin shows in a short epilogue, vibrant women's fraternities were not only inclusive spiritual collectives, but also political organizations that, in the civil violence of the 1990s, demanded peace, provided aid, and addressed reconciliation on a national stage.

There is much to admire in this book. By putting women's motivations and experiences front and centre, Martin offers a rigorous study of Catholic evangelization that eschews the hagiography that often bogs down many works on missionaries. The result is a clearly written and well-researched book based on extensive archival material that brings some of Martin's characters into vivid detail. The study's geographical focus, which is limited primarily to the region around Brazzaville, is forgivable considering the broad chronological scope that spans more than a century and bridges seamlessly the divide between the colonial period and independence. The study is, however, somewhat closed to the outside world and some readers might hunger for greater comparisons with neighbouring regions and other religious traditions within Congo. There is little reflection, for example, on how Catholic women's experiences differed from those of women who found community and spiritual fulfilment outside of Catholicism. Such insights might have brought into relief the significance of the Catholic story to the broader social and political history of the region. These minor reservations aside, as a focused case study, Martin's book represents an excellent contribution to the fields of colonial and Central African history, missionary and religious history, and gender studies.