Kristien Suenen's monograph about four Belgian nuns during the nineteenth century contributes to the growing interest in Catholic women during the modern age. Much like Relinde Meiwes's Arbeiterinnen des Herrn: katholische Frauenkongregationen im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2000) about convent life in Germany, this book shifts the focus from the male hierarchy to the “interaction of women and religion” (12). Although the emphasis in Humble Women, Powerful Nuns on women's agency, predominant feminine cultural tropes, and male clerical power converges with research by other scholars, it also includes innovation. Rather than investigating women's history at the cultural or institutional level, Suenens highlights the biographies of four women religious, exploring the compelling tension between their subservience to patriarchal leadership and pursuit of autonomy and opportunity. The lives of Anna de Meeûs (1823–1904), Fanny Kestre (1824–1882), Antoinette Cornet (1820–1886), and Wilhelmina Telghuys (1824–1907) are placed in the larger context of Belgian Catholic history. Their individual stories are linked to larger conceptual ideas about how religious women exercised power. Suenens successfully engages with “the layered discourse and ambiguous position of female religious in nineteenth-century society” (24).

Suenens's comparative analysis of four founders of congregations rests upon rigorous empiricism. While the geographic location and generation of the women are similar enough for a strong comparison, her selection of female religious leaders accounts for the needed class, ethnic, and urban-rural diversity. The biographical investigation of life stories facilitates a clear narrative and access to personal documents and the sorts of details only available about individuals. The author shows the representativeness of de Meeûs, Kestre, Cornet, and Telghuys by connecting their lives to a broader historical context. With special attention to economic, legal, religious, and gender history, the strategies, challenges, and accomplishments of all four women are critically analyzed. Suenens proves that the growth experienced in their congregations occurred in an era of rapid expansion of female convent life in Belgium. She writes, “Small Belgium was—even in absolute numbers—one of the centres of female convent life” (199). This “group portrait” is also linked to the biographies of other well-documented European women of their era. She successfully demonstrates the importance of her historical subjects and exploits the vast array previously unexplored ego-documents from their archives.

This monograph is distinguished by its use of the “‘double-voiced’ approach” to analyze the agency of these four nuns under the male leadership of the Catholic Church. In explaining this concept, Suenens writes, “In order to exist and survive, women had no choice but to express themselves in the dominant language of men, often confirming female docility, passivity, and subordination. However, women did integrate echoes of another, sometimes opposing ‘muted voice’ of female agency into their apparently conformist writings” (24). For example, Suenens reminds readers that Catholic women involved in the post-revolutionary religious revival of the early nineteenth century felt compelled to conform to the Church's emphasis on penitential suffering. Yet the era after the revolution also called for social action as part of the needed atonement for the excess of the period, and this angle provided women religious opportunities to shift their rhetoric and behaviors in ways that created opportunities. The prominence of “double voiced discourse” became more evident later in the book when the author illustrates how women, such as de Meeûs, utilized a dominant rhetoric of female humility and submission when interacting with powerful male partners whom they needed as allies to grow their own power (81–87). However, de Meeûs's correspondence that was layered with submissive language consistently included requests and approvals necessary to grow congregations, increase professional opportunities, and enhance her presence in the public sphere.

In addition to supporting the “double-voiced concept” of feminine agency with much archival evidence, Suenens also effectively sheds light on the larger narrative of nineteenth-century Catholicism. De Meeûs, Kestre, Cornet, and Telghuys both shaped and were shaped by their era's struggle over the place of religion in the modern world. For example, the early to mid-nineteenth century promoted Romantic and affective piety, eucharistic devotion, prayers to the Virgin Mary, and veneration of the Sacred Heart, especially for women religious. Suenens describes how the Christocentric religious culture around these devotions promoted a double-edged “passion paradigm,” which encouraged feminine self-sacrifice and suffering as well as avenues for agency and empowerment. Despite relying on religious rhetoric about feminine submissiveness, they still tailored these religious tropes to support a unique path of independence from domesticity as nuns. She writes, “In reconstructing the stories of their lives, Kestre, de Meeûs and Telghuys used the religious language of the sacraments or rituals in order to escape the compelling bourgeois gender patterns of marriage and motherhood and to legitimise that escape route” (113). The book also analyzes the evolution of ultramontane thinking and the culture wars between Catholics and liberals during the second half of the nineteenth century. Suenens suggests that the 1850s were a decade of increased discipline by the Church followed by a period of militant Catholic identity and “siege mentality” throughout the 1860s and 1870s. The rigidity and orthodoxy of this age would make it an unlikely one to identify patterns of feminine emancipation. Yet the polarization of conflicts such as the School War in Belgium from 1879 through 1884 offered opportunities for women in leadership roles to expand their sphere of influence. For example, Teghuys started a new boys school during this struggle between the Church and the secularizing state. In the process, she still found ways to protect her own power and autonomy from male leadership despite the pressure to conform in a period of such mobilization.

The book adds to the considerable scholarship about gender and Belgian Catholicism, evoking Tine van Osselaer's The Pious Sex: Catholic Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity in Belgium, c. 1800–1940 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013). It also adds to the research about the role of women in other European countries shaped by the rise of ultramontane approaches, such as Germany during the Kulturkampf. Suenens consolidates the historiography of the last fifteen years that complicates the “feminization of religion” thesis that first noted the importance of women to institutional Churches during the 1990s. With hope, this book will be read by scholars of religion and used to inspire even deeper inquiries into the intersection of gender and religion.