Engendering Church: Women, Power, and the A.M.E. Church. By Jualynne E. Dodson. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002. Pp. vii + 147. $60.00 cloth; $23.95 paper.

For a long time, Jualynne Dodson has been a leading scholar of the history of A.M.E. churchwomen, with a 1984 Ph.D. dissertation from the University of California (Berkeley) and several significant articles to her credit. Thus, it is with real pleasure and anticipation that the reviewer finds this present volume coming to notice. Hers is the first book-length study of women's participation in the nineteenth-century A.M.E. Church.

Dodson is particularly interested in how women acquired power within the A.M.E. Church. The acquisition of power was not easy. For a long time after the founding of the denomination in 1816, males monopolized clergy positions. However, Dodson, in her introduction, informs her readers that the fight against male privilege cannot be her whole story. In their battles against racism and sexism, the ways that A.M.E. churchwomen collaborated with, as well as occasionally struggled against, A.M.E. churchmen are very important. In this respect A.M.E. women are similar to the Black Baptist women profiled by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Dodson sees three significant dimensions to women's acquisition of power within the denomination. First, women helped to spread African Methodism, bringing vast numbers of new members, both women and men, into the fold. One example she cites is midwife and real estate investor Biddy Mason, whose home served as the meeting place in 1872 for the first A.M.E. Church in Los Angeles. Second, she calls attention to the numerous organizations for women formed within the denomination, beginning with the Daughters of Conference, first mentioned in church records in 1828. The work of A.M.E. women soon extended to such other groups as Sunday schools, missionary societies, and boards of stewardesses. Third, she explores the "indispensable resources," both material and non-material, that women accumulated, including education, community leadership, and fund-raising prowess. The skill with which women employed these resources really made men within the denomination sit up and take notice.

These multi-dimensional powers accumulated by women were employed with most effect when used quietly and unobtrusively, if the object was to convince men within the denomination to change a decision they had reached. She points out that when A.M.E. women disagreed with the bishops' choice for the post of missionary to Haiti, the women simply withheld the funds they had raised until the bishops changed their mind, as they inevitably did. On the other hand, on such issues as the licensing of female preachers and women's ordination, A.M.E. preaching women often felt that they had no alternative but to raise the issue publicly at the Church's quadrennial General Conferences. That, of course, meant a head-to-head confrontation with A.M.E. men, and the result of such public confrontations in the nineteenth century, Dodson shows, was a series of stinging rebuffs for the women who had raised the issue.

The last two chapters explore the role of women's missionary societies within the A.M.E. Church. She explores the regionalism that underlay the formation of two missionary societies, the Women's Mite Missionary Society founded in 1874 (and dominated by women from the northeast) and the Women's Home and Foreign Missionary Society founded in 1896 by women from the South and Midwest who had not felt fully included in the early society. Sara Hatcher Duncan, who became president of the latter missionary society in 1900, is profiled in the last chapter. Despite a lack of cooperation by powerful male ministers in some areas, Hatcher was successful in organizing women and making herself heard. Dodson accurately portrays her as a "race woman" and a "pinnacle of women's power" (118) in the A.M.E. Church.

Dodson's portraits of some women will strike her readers as fragmentary. That is not Dodson's fault, but arises primarily from the fact that the sources themselves are fragmentary. There are many women who are named only once or a very few times in the extant records, and the thirst for more information on these intriguing women is not always easy to satisfy. Occasionally Dodson gives into the temptation to indulge in speculation. Thus, although Dodson has no records that place Doritha Hill at the founding conference of the A.M.E. Church in 1816, she assures us that "it would have been normal, acceptable, and feasible" (15) for Doritha to have accompanied her spouse. While the temptation to speculate is understandable, Dodson's narrative would have been more convincing, in my judgment, if she could have steeled herself and eliminated this kind of guesswork. Perhaps more research will provide more rounded portraits of these fascinating women, but the researcher will have to be determined and patient.

I wish Dodson had taken the story further chronologically. She refers several times to the election of Vashti McKenzie as the first female bishop of the A.M.E Church in 2000, but she does not look at any of the intervening events after 1906: the hard work and gradual growth of recognition for women ministers in the early part of the twentieth century, as shown by the ministry of Nora Fields Taylor among others; the ordination of Rebecca M. Glover in 1948, the first ordination of a woman in the A.M.E. Church not to be overturned; and the rapid growth in numbers of ordained women clergy in the last half century. Also overlooked is the healing of some of the regional tensions in the twentieth century as the two women's missionary societies reunited.

Then again, for the nineteenth century, Dodson only tells us part of the story of the struggle by A.M.E. women. She tends to favor the story of women who made a name for themselves in the church entirely on their own, mostly ignoring the stories of powerful women who were married to equally powerful men. For example, the success of the Women's Home and Foreign Missionary Society was due not only to the efforts of women such as Duncan, but also to women such as Martha Dewitt Turner and Laura Lemon Turner, the second and fourth wives, respectively, of the powerful Bishop Henry McNeal Turner. Nor do we find anything on the work of Fanny Jackson Coppin or Sarah Early, whose husbands, Levi Coppin and Jordan Early, were powers to be reckoned with in the A.M.E. Church. The struggle for women's equality within the church was advanced most effectively when the women who arose on the basis of their own charisma and those allied to powerful spouses joined forces in a concentrated phalanx. This dimension of the story deserves more attention.

Dodson has made effective use of official church records, especially minutes of the quadrennial General Conferences. However, there is much relevant material in the A.M.E. periodicals, especially the Christian Recorder and the A.M.E. Church Review, and it is unfortunate that she did not make more use of these. Her documentation is not always as full or as thorough as at least this reader would wish. Her bibliography does not include all of the relevant secondary works that have appeared in the past twenty years. Two significant works that are omitted are Judith Weisenfeld and Richard Newman, eds., This Far by Faith: Readings in African-American Women's Religious Biography (New York: Routledge, 1996); and Bettye Collier-Thomas, Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and their Sermons (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998). These last-mentioned works may be helpful for supplementation of Dodson's analysis of A.M.E women.

Still, these criticisms pale beside the pleasure of at last having this significant work by Jualynne Dodson in print. It helps to fill a gap in the literature concerning the A.M.E Church that existed for a long time. It will certainly be useful to scholars of African-American religion and of women in American religion.

Stephen W. Angell, Earlham School of Religion