The Preacher's Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities Paperback – September 15, 2020

I am a woman who has served in Christian Ministry for over 40 years. I found this book to be very helpful in understanding my own experience in ministry. It is very interesting, well written, organized, and readable. I consider it to be an important contribution to the documentation of the history of women in ministry in the United States of America, from the early 1900's to the present. I hope that it becomes a classic in "Women's Studies", and a classic for both men and women who are interested in removing barriers to women in ministry now and in the future. I highly recommend this book.

This book could be several books! It covers a lot of ground with a focus on celebrity or famous women in ministry. Her next book can be about how this trickles down into the smaller churches. I particularly liked the chapter on musicians as that's the area of church I have been involved in the most. Growing up in a mainline church, the choir director (often the pastor's wife) and most of the members were women. As an adult I spent more time in an evangelical church and also note the worship style has moved from choirs to worship bands/teams led by a worship pastor (man) and mostly men in the band, with women being singers and occasional keyboard player. The other insight the author didn't note (or I may have missed) is that most of the people who go to church are women, often with husbands who aren't interested in church going. Most of the church people seem ok with this and I suspect it will change once they are not or if there is a need to be filled that they can't find someone for. It does sadden me to know that there are pastor's wives who are pressured into filling a certain role or expectation they don't want and I think she could do a whole book on that. That is perhaps a conversation the husband and wife should have had prior to getting married or embarking on this career.

I would recommend this book to anyone surprised by the video of the pastor who said women can’t all be trophy wives - some are just participation trophies - but that all women need to make an effort. This book lays bare the cage that American evangelical Christianity built around women. And it didn’t just cover wives! All aspects of American womanhood; spouses, career women, artists - they’re all here.

I bought the book used from Kuhns Corner and it was in excellent condition!

I LOVE, LOVE Kate Bowler. Her podcast is fantastic and her other book Everything Happens is a MUST read. As someone that grew up in the South this book about Mega Churches and the women that have such within them was an easy read.

A tour de force. Kate Bowler is one of the great voices of our time.

This book breaks down so many of the expectations that the US church has put on women in the past century. It helped me personally examine those expectations in my own life and sort out what fits me and what doesn't outside of what a Christian woman "should" be.

In what existence would Joyce Meyer or Beth Moore ever be referred to as “a preacher’s wife?” The only way we even know their husband’s names is from them talking about them, and if they are even preachers we don’t hear about it. That is an outrageous characterization. This is not addressing inequality. It is CREATING it.

Kate Bowler has given us a comprehensive account of the struggles that Christian women who find themselves leading without authority have gone through over the past many decades.