The Woman I Am: Southern Baptist Women's Writings, 1906-2006.

Flowers, Elizabeth

The Woman I Am: Southern Baptist Women's Writings, 1906-2006. By Melody Maxwell. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014. 269 pp.

The inside cover of Melody Maxwell's recently published book champions the volume as a "tour de force." As I sat down to read it, I admittedly wondered as to such a grand claim. And yet, I immediately recognized Maxwell's impressive achievement. While most historians writing a monograph offer their readers a small peek in time, Maxwell has pulled the curtain on a rich history, at first glance, of Southern Baptist women that exceeds the 100 years claimed in her title.

Drawing mostly on the magazine publications of the Woman's Missionary Union (WMU), Maxwell deftly moves her readers through more than a century and a half of changing gender roles and practices as they were shaped, negotiated, and embodied by Southern Baptist women in ways that proved both limiting and liberative alike. She highlights prominent WMU leaders along with everyday participants, almost all of whom will be new to even the well-read Southern Baptist historian whose denominational surveys rarely feature women. Maxwell also considers denominational politics at large and how they affected the relationship between the WMU and the SBC.

At the same time, The Woman I Am stretches the traditional bounds of denominational history as Maxwell explores gender issues among Southern Baptist women within the context of the South and nation at large. Her central argument comes in the first chapter: "Analyzing historical WMU magazines reveals the fascinating ways that editors and writers reshaped the roles they advanced for Southern Baptist women, influenced by changes in contemporary Southern Baptist life and broader American culture" (2). However, Maxwell also shows that the WMU and the SBC were not only "influenced by" but also influenced, and sometimes resisted, their surrounding culture. Their relationship to wider societal and ecclesial trends, then, was often uneven, with the national leaders of the women's organization, at certain moments, parting ways with their male counterparts. It is an argument well-proven.

Briefly, in chapter two (1906-1918), Maxwell demonstrates how WMU writers, editors, and leaders participated in the popular women's missionary movement of the time, with their emphasis on "woman's work for women."

In chapter three (1919-1945) she indicates how the WMU then departed from other women's missions organizations and turned from the rhetoric of uplifting women and children abroad to supporting or uplifting the SBC at home.

In chapter four (1946-1967) Maxwell tells how the WMU happily followed the new domesticity of the period, arguing that women best cultivated Christian influence through their roles as wife and mother.

By the time period of chapter five (1968-1983), the WMU had shifted its rhetoric rather dramatically, echoing the popular pro-women sentiments of the day that encouraged women's expanding roles in society. Departing from most Southern Baptists, the WMU also pushed, and further than any of its more progressive male counterparts, for greater civil rights for African Americans.

Finally, in what I found to be one of the most original chapters, chapter six (1984-2006), Maxwell considers the WMU's conflict with conservative SBC leaders and how the WMU's magazines downplayed the conflict, somewhat ironically, by following conservative trends in the rising women's ministry to women's programs that focused more on prayer, spiritual growth, and Christian witness.

The Woman I Am is not a light read. Painstakingly researched, with archival evidence everywhere present, it is indeed this historian's dream. And yet Maxwell has an engaging and succinct writing style, wasting no words in this paradoxically brief and expansive history. It is a book that will appeal to professional scholars and laypersons alike. Most delightful, and indeed valuable, are the numerous photos of the magazine covers that capture the prevailing gender impulse or mood regarding women at any particular moment in time, enlivening Maxwell's narrative.

In a review that wants to celebrate the many virtues of the book at hand, my one critique then is intended more as minor query. Maxwell conceives her chapter introductions and conclusions as overviews and summaries, and while instructive, I cannot help but wonder if she sometimes misses an opportunity for more sustained analysis. At certain points I found myself having to read between the lines. This became most apparent when reaching the conclusion, chapter seven, which, since more of an overview, forced me to answer that perennial "so what" question regarding significance. Let me emphasize that I want to push Maxwell here to the foreground in the larger historiography of Southern Baptist and church history, namely because I fear a reader might overlook the actual magnitude, depth, and scope of her work with its multiple themes, complex ideas, and nuanced understandings.

As I closed the book, then, and pondered that "so what" question for myself, I wondered if Maxwell had not so much written a history of Southern Baptist and WMU women, as it might appear on the surface, as to help readers to reimagine Southern Baptist history and heritage, obliging us to see women as vital agents of influence and change as well as embodiments of the denominational politics of any one period. That indeed makes The Woman I Am, according to one definition of tour de force, a "groundbreaking feat" and a book I encourage all Baptist History and Heritage subscribers to "take and read" and circulate too.--Reviewed by Elizabeth Flowers, associate professor of religion, Texas Christian University, Ft. Worth, Texas