This is an important study, of immediate relevance to the Church of England's continuing free and frank discussions on sexuality, for it reveals a background of theological confusion, fluidity and innovation which most disputants have forgotten. It is neatly and effectively structured by topics, which manage to double as a chronological timeline, since the Church's worries have focused on different issues in a surprisingly linear fashion, despite overlaps: first marriage and the rights of wives within it, then the role and acceptability of female religious orders, then women's suffrage, women's ordination, contraception and finally homosexuality. The surprise of that last theme is that in this book we have only arrived at the 1950s – not only that, but the church authorities were then leading the way in agitation for social change and greater tolerance. With equal unexpectedness, the debate over the ordination of women to the priesthood is largely set in the 1920s: Jones comments (p. 105) that for almost fifty years thereafter, its proponents seem to have made a tactical decision to press for gender equality in lay ministry and between deacons and deaconesses. All the more strange, since few in the Church, including the Commission set up to consider the matter in 1935, were able to come up with any good reasons why women should not be ordained priest, except that ‘there are no practical reasons to justify it’ (p. 104).

A constant theme is the background of theological conflict between Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals from the 1850s onward: the two groups brought diametrically-opposed principles to matters sexual as to so much else, rendering illusory any claim that the post-1833 Church of England has ever had a united view on ethical questions. On marriage policy in particular, throughout Jones's chosen period, Anglo-Catholics were consistently more opposed to change than Evangelicals, on sacramental grounds. The reverse has been the case in more recent debates on marriage equality, where the large proportion of gay men among Anglo-Catholic clergy has no doubt encouraged a less hard-line attitude than in past debates on purely heterosexual marriage. Indeed, a theme of Jones's book is the gradual insertion of pragmatism and common sense into ecclesiastical debates. The broad middle ground in the Church was also always there to sway the discussions, alongside the Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals: it was this amorphous group which spearheaded the acceptance of formulae for equal vows for husband and wife in the Church Assembly's debates on the 1928 marriage service, in the face of opposition from both extremes, alike justifying their intransigence with reference to a divinely-ordained subordination of women to men.

Rarely, indeed, was the Church simply a force opposing change. Jones points out that the brand-new Church Assembly got equal suffrage (1920) before the parliament of the realm: it reflected the evolving opinions of the English middle class more exactly than its secular equivalent. On contraception, the official transformation of Anglican pronouncements from condemnation to cautious acceptance between the 1908 and the 1930 Lambeth Conferences was a remarkably speedy U-turn on one of the twentieth century's new moral conundrums. It is interesting to find Bishop Charles Gore, clear-sighted as ever, making a prescient direct connection in 1925 between the acceptance of contraception and the acceptance of homosexuality (pp. 158–9) – of course, he disapproved of both. On homosexuality, at last Jones provides a proper account of the crucial role which the Church of England Advisory Board for Moral Welfare played in the lead-up to its decriminalisation in 1967. His single mention of that fascinating pioneer Derrick Sherwin Bailey of the CEABMW whets one's appetite for further consideration of Bailey's part in the liberalisation of British official attitudes to a subject which had been an elephant in the rectory drawing-room since the emergence of the Oxford Movement.

The book remains close to its doctoral origins, and an alert editor should have picked up peripheral howlers: no book on the Church of England should be talking about ‘the Rev. Seymour’ or ‘a Reverend Weldon’. On p. 47, Mary Ward's Institute of the Blessed Virgin is misdated to 1686, and London's Royal Foundation of St Katharine wrongly said to have been monastic (worse still, on the strength of its website information). More seriously for the book's theme, Jones thinks (pp. 102, 115) that the churching of women was obsolete in the Church of England in 1930: on the contrary, churching had another four decades of real liturgical use, as Margaret Houlbrooke demonstrates in her study Rite out of time (London 2011). And a book dealing with these matters should not believe (p. 35) that Henry viii desired ‘divorce’: he desired annulment, which as Jones well knows, is a very different thing, and which accounts for that rotund monarch's belief that he had only ever had three wives. But one can forgive Jones much for resurrecting so many wonderfully dotty statements from long-deceased Anglican bishops. The prize must surely be won by Lord Rupert Ernest William Gascoyne-Cecil, not a character from Kind hearts and coronets but bishop of Exeter, whose favourable pronouncements on women's ministry at the 1920 Lambeth Conference (quoted p. 114) deserve mature consideration: ‘I think that when you read the classics, the Arabian nights or modern French books, you will come to the conclusion that the only healthy thing for a church is to have women ministering to women and men ministering to men.’