God Speaks to Us, Too: Southern Baptist Women on Church, Home and Society.

Campbell-Reed, Eileen R.

God Speaks to Us, Too: Southern Baptist Women on Church, Home and Society. By Susan M. Shaw. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2008. 300pp.

Susan Shaw has put together a rich new primary source of material revealing the minds, words, and experiences of 159 women who grew up Southern Baptist during the twentieth century. Some are still affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Others like Shaw, associate professor and director of women's studies at Oregon State University, have distanced themselves from Baptist life, although emotional connections remain. The sometimes-personal, sometimes-collective memoir of Southern Baptist life includes forays into church suppers, Vacation Bible School, "sword drills," women's ordination, youth camping, college life, seminary studies, Baptist agencies, funerals, food, baptism, marriage, and race relations. Shaw delivers all this in lively insider language that captures the spirit of an age.

The main argument of the book is in the title, a point well-known to Baptist insiders: despite the number of public pronouncements by Southern Baptist leaders restricting female roles, Baptist women share in common, "an unwavering sense of their own ability to hear the voice of God and act on what they believe God calls them to do" (247). They know that God speaks to them, too. If this is news to readers outside Baptist life, they will find ample evidence to support the thesis.

Central to Shaw's research are personal and group interviews with "the Clique," eight Southern Baptist women, including the author's mother, who share decades of friendship and church membership in North Georgia. Another circle of women interviewed attended Southern Baptist Theological Seminary contemporaneously with Shaw. The remaining interviewees include married and single women, homemakers and working mothers, ministers, college and seminary professors, and missionaries and denominational employees, primarily from the Southeast, Texas, and California.

Shaw thematizes the women's stories by connecting them to aspects of Baptist life and identity. The first chapter begins where all mindful Baptists would: in the waters of baptism and salvation, followed in the second chapter by Baptist women's views and uses of the Bible. Although the third chapter is about hospitality, food, and friendship, Shaw makes no connection to Baptist practices of communion. The fourth chapter presents Baptist women's views on racism and whiteness, and the fifth chapter tells stories of ordained Baptist women. Chapters six and seven consider Baptist women's ideas about family and feminism. The final chapter restates the book's thesis: "soul competency has meant that [women] have the right to claim and enact their own agency and autonomy" (247).

Because the women's stories are so rooted in a particular time and social space, Shaw's presentation necessitates setting the historical context. She borrows insight and expertise from historians Leon McBeth, Bill Leonard, and Waiter Shurden, to narrate the larger Baptist story and especially changes since 1979 through a decidedly "moderate" lens. However, Shaw focuses on individual women's strategies of meaning-making. Historical events in the SBC remain in the background. Nevertheless, the book offers a memorable ride that is lively, provocative, colorful, and worth the trip. Its most enduring contribution will be Shaw's presentation of the first-person voices of Baptist women.--Reviewed by Eileen R. Campbell-Reed, associate director of the Learning Pastoral Imagination Project and research faculty, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota.