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All That Fits a Woman Training Southern Baptist Women for Charity and Mission, 1907-1926 by Laine Scales All That Fits a Woman: Training Southern Baptist Women for Charity and Mission, 1907-1926 is a detailed, well-researched and well-written account of the lives of women missionaries and others associated with the Women's Missionary Union Training School in Louisville, Kentucky. It includes case studies of individual women, and careful description and analysis of curriculum and architecture and material culture. The Woman's Missionary Union Training School provided enormous educational opportunities for Southern Baptist women, while ensuring that they would study and serve within limits defined for them by male seminary faculty and by women leaders of the WMU. This history offers a critical view from a feminist theoretical perspective, focusing on the subtle forms of teaching that have been used and are still used today to exclude Southern Baptist women from the preaching ministry and from leadership within the denomination. This timely work resonates with current issues as Southern Baptists continue to draw national attention for their stance on submission of women to male authority. All That Fits a Woman will prove a major resource for students of women's history and religious history, especially Protestantism. T. Laine Scales is assistant professor of social work at Baylor University. She has also worked with churches as a social worker in rural Kentucky, and is a graduate of The Carver School of Church Social Work at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. All that fits a woman: Training Southern Baptist women for charity and mission, 1907-1926. By T. Laine Scales. Macon, Georgia, Mercer University Press, 2000. 287 pages. $32.50 hardback. The history of women's roles within evangelical religious traditions has received scant attention when compared to that of women from more liberal denominations. Further, women's roles in the Southern United States have garnered less scholarly attention than those of women in the North and Midwest. Laine Scales rectifies both of these oversights with her fascinating book, All that fits a woman. She offers an insightful detailed look into the challenges Southern Baptist women experienced as they pursued their commitment to missionary activities and social work. This story attests to the veracity of the saying "what goes around comes around" in that, after reading about the trials and tribulations Southern Baptist women faced, the epilogue offers a bleak prognosis for these women who continue to seek full participation in their church's ministry today. It appears that the hard-fought efforts over the past century were, in the end, to return to a place, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, not all that far from where the journey began. And so it goes. This well-written treatise presents the ambiguity surrounding the place of women in Southern Baptist life that has persisted throughout the twentieth century to this day. Laine Scales astutely uses the history of the Women's Missionary Union Training School for Christian Workers as evidence of the uncertainty and confusion regarding Southern Baptist women's role in the church. The book focuses on the formative years of the Training School which was established in 1907. The story expounds an important piece of the history of social work education in a religious setting from a denominational perspective. As the text implies, the differences between secular and church social work, although subtle, are substantive. Scales describes how women's lives are integrally connected and subsequently directed by the larger social and denominational milieu of the Southern Baptist Convention. The story of the Training School is situated within a broader context so that the influential factors making its history both unique and informative are taken into account. These factors include the "myth of the Southern lady," the feminist movement during the turn-of-the-century, the nascent missionary activities of the Southern Baptist denomination, and the developing social work profession. The adept integration of this multitude of factors strengthens the text and makes it appropriate reading for scholars and students in several disciplines such as women studies, social work, history, higher education, home economics and religious studies. The history of Southern Baptist women's long struggle to organize reveals the resistance of many Southern Baptists to women who desired a more significant public role in church life. Paradoxically, the same religious ideology and missionary concern that motivated these women to quietly challenge their prescribed roles was used by their conservative brethren to thwart their attempts to organize. Through the work of the Training School, Laine Scales points out how the traditional place of Southern Baptist women was subtly challenged. The women who matriculated to the School negotiated their roles as women within the traditionally masculine domains of theological education and church-related work by expanding the domestic sphere (for which they were seen as primarily responsible) to include society and the world beyond their particular household. Thus, they redefined their roles as mothers and homemakers in such a way as to justify their presence in what most viewed a masculine pursuit. The integration of social work with theological education was instrumental to the redefinition of women's roles as a form of missionary activity Women, as a part of their studies at The Training School, adopted an approach to evangelism that provided social services to individuals. This approach was tolerated because it steered women away from preaching, an evangelizing activity reserved exclusively for men. Accordingly, the School's curriculum merged the two philosophies of the Settlement Movement and the Charity Organization Society to create a settlement house based on evangelism which was very different from more secular establishments. The epilogue offers the reader some insight into the compelling story that continues to unfold around the Training School, eventually renamed the Carver School of Church Social Work, until it was closed in 1996 following controversy between Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the leadership of the Carver School. So, the gist of the story presents an irony: it seems Southern Baptist women, despite many heroic and innovative exploits in establishing and running the Training School, "still find themselves severely limited by a denominational culture that does not recognize their ability for and calling to types of ministry that lie outside rigidly defined definitions of woman's place of service in the church." (p. 15) Laine Scales, who completed her graduate social work education from the Carver School and is currently a faculty member at Baylor University, is very familiar with the Southern Baptist tradition about which she writes. However, he perspective remains balanced and objective. There is much to learn in this history of women's struggle for recognition and inclusion in ministerial service by a denomination that continues to view their involvement in such activity as contraindicated. Laine Scales' well-documented work raises numerous implications for the salience of religion and gender in contemporary social work education and practice. Her book is highly recommended for its insightful historical analysis as well as its provocative and cogent presentation. James J. Ponzetti, Jr., Ph.D., C.F.L.E. Title of related interest
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Available April 2000 Retail $30.00, hardback Southern Studies 978-0-86554-668-4 MUP/H497 |
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