Review

Priscilla Pope-Levison is already well known in the fields (inter alia) of mission and evangelism and American women's religious history. This, her most recent book, offers an account of a previously unstudied feature of the religious scene in the United States during the Progressive Era—a period, roughly 1890–1920, characterized by rapid intellectual, economic, and social changes, with their concomitant problems, matched by an enterprising ‘can-do’ mentality expressed in both secular and religious spheres.While engaged in research less than twenty years ago, Pope-Levison was surprised to find that the women evangelists of this period were virtually unknown. This led to her publication of Turn the Pulpit Loose: Two Centuries of American Women Evangelists (2004), in which she examined the life and work of eighteen women evangelists. In Building the Old Time Religion she turns to women who inhabited the culture of the Progressive Era, building and leading religious institutions where an earlier generation had operated on a more individualistic basis. Once again she has opened up a previously unstudied area, identifying and analysing a previously uncharacterized phenomenon.The book is structured around the stories of twenty-four women, eighteen of them examined in some detail. They belonged to, founded, and led a variety of churches and church-linked institutions, although the majority came from a Methodist background. The Progressive Era was characterized by ‘sweeping social change, bold legislation, and audacious innovation’ (19) and the work of the women featured in these pages was very much of its time: non-US readers in particular may need to adjust to the power of this optimistic belief that anything was possible. Such a context encourages the historian of women's religious leadership to move away from ‘women preachers’ to look for institution-builders and leaders. The period's theological context, which may be construed as part of the wider social phenomenon, also favoured innovative leadership. Among Protestant denominations, especially those with Methodist roots, the prevalent theologies of sanctification, whether instantaneous or gradual (as associated with the Wesleyan Holiness and Keswick movements respectively) could empower women by privileging experience over learning or status. Gender issues—the suppression of women's preaching in the 1880s in the various Methodist denominations, the establishment of many women-only institutions for moral and social reform, of which the Women's Christian Temperance Union is the best known—give further context to the apparently unique situations that Pope-Levison has identified, in which female leaders presided over institutions that were open equally to women and men.The heart of the book lies, however, in the stories which illustrate the chapter-length topics of evangelistic organizations, churches and denominations, training schools, and rescue homes and missions. They concern women such as Iva Durham Vennard, indomitable founder and principal of the Chicago Evangelistic Institute, Martha ‘Mother’ Lee, a founder of rescue missions who gave up pipe-smoking on receiving sanctification, or Maria Woodworth-Etter, famous for the ecstatic trances that punctuated her evangelistic preaching. Very few of them (perhaps only Aimee Semple McPherson) are known outside the specialized and still isolating field of ‘women's studies’. Pope-Levison identifies twelve ‘religious training schools’ (a typical Progressive Era category) founded by women: all published research into such schools at the time of writing was concerned exclusively with those ‘associated with a renowned male evangelist or minister’ (113). The stories, fast-moving and full of detail, call for slow and careful reading of their combination of specific narrative with more general context and analysis. Readers without detailed knowledge of the US political, social, and ecclesiological context will need to hold on tightly, but will be richly repaid through the sheer accessibility of the stories and, through them, the clearly presented context.This pioneering work opens up the possibility of further detailed investigations which might throw light on intriguing general questions. Just how did a conservative theological stance empower women to deal with scriptural restrictions on their leadership and preaching? Why did women's leadership of institutions not survive beyond the first generation? What networks of support and finance were women leaders able to access? Were any of the training schools founded by women, other than the Chicago Evangelistic Institute, which constitutes Pope-Levison's case study, able to resist post-1914 masculinization? And above all, what other examples exist, buried in unexamined archives, of women empowered by their faith to exercise institutional leadership, whether in this period and context or beyond?

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