Women of Faith and Religious Identity asks how religious women activists—whether they were Catholic, Jewish, or Protestant—helped maintain a public place for religion in a society that was often guided by secular and scientific values. The work is deeply rooted in comparative archival research. Machen has combed through French archives, not only from one faith tradition or across Christian organizations but from women's voluntary organizations across religious traditions. Machen uses sources from these individual archives to explore the mobilization of French laywomen at the turn of the twentieth century. She also places the evidence of these women's activisms within a broader cultural context to see how and why religious men welcomed women doing God's work as well as how the work that these women did “promoted democratic, egalitarian practices within religious communities and the French nation” (3). Ultimately, Machen argues that religion was a foundational part of the story of French women's equality even as it was also women who helped keep religion socially significant in France.

This is a short book and reads quickly. Chapters 1–4 work through the intertwined problems of religious identity and public action in a modern, secularizing, France. Chapter 1, “Religious Identity and the Challenge of Feminism,” convincingly demonstrates how religious communities (Protestant, Jewish, or Catholic) offered women a network of support for feminist demands. This was not only—and sometimes not even—suffrage and civic equality but also involved an increase in religious equality. Chapter 2, “The Development of Women's ‘Ministries’ in France,” argues that declining numbers of men shaped religious communities such that women became central to the public mission of religion. As vital agents for faith (whether by social action or missionizing), women gained spiritual and even social authority. Chapter 3, “Political Engagement, Community Voting Rights, and Women's Pastorate,” further evidences how women became part of the imagined political and democratic leadership. Through women's work, religion was “a visible public force in French society and . . . an attractive opportunity for women's public engagement” (72–73). Chapter 4, “Faith for Social Progress,” examines women's engagement with philanthropy, especially social work and reform legislation. As with the rest of the book, Machen's concern is primarily the cultural and social meaning that leaders placed on their work, not the impact it had on the recipients of aid but on the women who directed and led the programs. The experience of gathering together for a common good was also part of a process whereby women demanded authority for their religious practice and for themselves.

Chapters 5 and 6 move religious women's concerns into new contexts. Chapter 5, “A Voyage of Faith,” uses the archives of women's voluntary associations to think about how religious women, primarily in Europe, encountered modern problems of work, migration, and social change. Some of these organizations looked similar in intent to those of chapter 4 and therefore offer historical clues for ways in which social feminism, tied to religious ideals, was not merely an indicator of something unique in French feminism but also offers insight into the impact of religious belief in a modern and global world. Chapter 6, “Battling for God and Nation,” examines Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in the union sacrée. Ironically perhaps, this chapter is one where Machen is most skilled at weaving in both theological and social differences between religious adherents, insofar as each enunciated the ways it provided a necessary foundation to the French nation that it served and further made individual women into the “public face and voice of their communities” (150).

Machen's book, which traces similarities across Judaism and different denominations of Christianity, is an important historiographical intervention. Indeed, readers of James Chappel's Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Harvard University Press, 2018) might quite helpfully read this book alongside his. Although Catholic Modern moves forward in time from Machen's work and Catholic Modern has received more attention, perhaps in part because of its political analysis, Machen's work reminds us that women had done (and were doing) much of the physical work of modernizing and community building that changed the face of churches, not only Catholic but also Protestant and Jewish. If women were not always receiving a great deal of official attention, that may have even been to the good where women's equality was concerned.

Of course, in such a compact work as Machen's, the fact that each chapter deals with material from Protestants, Jews, and Catholics means that sometimes differences are mentioned without being discussed, and some similarities begin to feel surface rather than significant. To that point, both the introduction and the conclusion, which discuss the tensions over laïcité, point to an ongoing problem with the relationship between church and state—not only in France—that more attention to the problem of difference might have illuminated. This reader would have welcomed more direct engagement with this tension. Even if the modern era was beyond the purview of the book, the problem of what it might have meant in the early twentieth century to insist that one could be both patriotic and not entirely willing to protect others from one's own claims of religion could have been more deeply problematized. In the end, however, this is a book that is timely, interesting, and well researched. It situates women not only in the history of religion but in the history of public life and offers those of us in the postsecular world a great deal of food for thought.