Founded by Southern Baptists in 1888, the Woman's Missionary Union (WMU) opened the way for women's leadership in the funding, encouragement and training of home and foreign missionaries. The WMU linked women across the South through publications, conferences and institution-building on the local, state and regional level, cooperating at times with Northern religious and secular agencies. Following the history of the WMU through 1920, Holcomb argues that the organisation developed into a forum and agency for progressive reform and social gospel theology in the South, and did so to a surprising degree. In her detailed, nuanced, well-written and sympathetic account, Holcomb leaves no doubt that the social gospel was indeed present and vocal in the South, even within the most socially and theologically conservative denomination of the region, however much restrained by its own traditions. Under such tireless and talented advocates as Annie Armstrong, Fannie Heck and Lulie Wharton, the WMU ‘developed a distinctly feminine social ethic’ (p. 1) filled with paradoxes, not unlike the wider national Progressive movement itself. Its vision of social justice retained traditional gender roles but expanded the boundaries of ‘house’ and ‘home’ to open new opportunities for women to serve the Church, but never openly supported the women's rights movement; its genuine concern for African Americans retained a marked paternalism, never publicly criticised ‘separate but equal’, and it pursued temperance reform as a means of racial social control. The foreign mission questions posed by the Spanish-American War and the domestic and international problems of the First World War appear only indirectly, and suggest more avenues for fruitful research given how many social gospel clergy aligned their modern faith with the Wilsonian vision of democracy, righteousness and world peace. Nevertheless, Holcomb's important work on settlement houses and urban reform alone makes this book an eye-opening and welcome addition to the historiography of the social gospel and progressive reform.