In 1987 the sociologist Tom Inglis wrote Moral monopoly: the Catholic church in modern Irish society with a view to explaining how the Roman Catholic church had embedded itself so profoundly in Irish society. The book was controversial – described as ‘startling’ by John Whyte, the author of the seminal Church and state in modern Ireland, 1923–1979 (2nd ed., Dublin, 1980) – largely because of its unashamedly critical position. Inglis regarded the church ‘as a compulsory and coercive organisation’, which used ‘moral discipline’ to effectively eliminate ‘individual freedom’. While Inglis singled out the Irish mother as a crucial agent in the church's mission, he identified the control of women's bodies as central to the church's ability to gain and maintain control over Irish society for so long.

Inglis wrote in the wake of the second wave women's movement and the bitter debates of the 1980s, in which conservative and liberal Ireland fought for the country's soul. Women's history was little more than ten years old and the social history of twentieth-century Ireland was arguably even less developed. Cara Delay has written Irish women and the creation of modern Catholicism, 1850–1950 in a very different Ireland: the position of the Catholic church as a power bloc is unrecognisable (ironically, exceeding even Inglis's predictions of decline) prompting the current Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, to wonder if it is a ‘post-Catholic’ society (America: the Jesuit review, 20 May 2013). Women's history is a vibrant and busy research field and clearly informs Delay's approach, providing her with a rich historiography to draw upon. In many ways she flips Inglis's point of inquiry: she wishes to understand what Catholicism had to offer women. Delay seeks to explore the dynamic of Irish women's relationship with Catholicism, not just the church or the institution, but with its faith, practices and power.

The period between 1850 and 1950 spans the most important period for the creation of modern Irish Catholicism and Delay's principal thesis is that lay Irish women played an important part in that project. Her book accentuates two main binaries in Catholic women's relationship with their church: continuity and change, power and agency. While she is conscious of the intersections of gender, geography and class, she is primarily concerned with the former but is careful to note when class, in particular, played a significant part in women's possibilities for agency and power. She adopts a structure which allows her to contextualise women in Catholic culture before moving on to the creation and realities of a Catholic girlhood, the role of the Catholic mother and the Catholic household, concluding with more general reflections on gender and space, and women and priests.

This book is well written, thoroughly researched and engaging. The author emphasises sources that allow us to hear the voices of women, and stresses colour and texture where it can be found. In particular, Delay highlights women's role in the creation and consumption of Catholic material culture: pamphlets, prayer books, rosary beads, holy water bottles and medals, all of which made for a tangible, colourful and concrete religious experience for many Irish women and girls. However, where Delay excels is in her eye for the local and how it can reveal the global, as when, in 1913, Fr Moriarty reprimanded a local woman who had confronted him for his lack of deference to her family: ‘you claim to be a gentlewoman! … Tell me, Madame … have you cups and saucers on your table? … Have you asparagus for dinner? … If you have not all those appendages you are no gentlewoman’ (p. 223). And thus the church's role in bestowing and shaping ‘respectability’ is laid bare, as is the intimate connection between status and possessions. Middle-class Catholic materialism was sanctioned from the pulpit, after all it was these middle-class homes that fed the boom in devotional artefacts and institutional power.

Delay explores this relationship between the creation of the ‘Catholic household’ and ‘secular consumerism’: the church, she argues, fed the desire for ‘things’ through the increasing promotion of its devotional items. This is the strength of Delay's analysis – hers is a history that accommodates ostensible paradoxes revealing the fallacy of simple narratives. For example, 1930s Ireland was a country where women read articles in the Northern Star about ‘Catholic womanhood’, alongside coded advertisements for menstrual regulators and abortifacients. Thus, Delay concludes: ‘Irish women were charged with making themselves into discerning and moral consumers by the early twentieth century, but they had other choices as well’ (p. 145).

Overall, Delay's argument is one that is increasingly accepted in Irish social history: women played a significant role in ‘the trajectory of modern Irish history’, and this was not a simple story of oppression and loss of power, but also of agency and negotiation. Delay's book accentuates the diversity of experience and complexity of Catholic women's relationship with the Catholic church, highlighted in her conclusion that Catholic patriarchal literature ‘did not reflect reality as much as it attempted to construct an ideal, and lay women negotiated its tenets even as they helped to produce it’ (p. 240). Her approach has created a rich study with much for historians to reflect upon. It is, of course, difficult to track where the construction of an ideal begins and where it ends, how it is consumed and how it consumes, which lives it redefines and which it imprisons, but this book makes a valuable contribution to our quest to elucidate the process of the Catholicisation of Ireland.