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Bill J. Leonard, Elizabeth H. Flowers. Into the Pulpit: Southern Baptist Women and Power since World War II., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1558–1559, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1558
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In this fine study, Elizabeth H. Flowers surveys the role of women, especially women in ministry, in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), America's largest Protestant denomination. While her focus is on Southern Baptists and related groups, Flowers believes that the SBC is itself a case study in denominational disconnection and other developments evident throughout American Protestantism. She traces the history of the SBC with particular attention to developments in the years following World War II. In the early postwar years the SBC was in some ways at the height of its numerical, financial, evangelistic, and cultural influence. The denominational system held together a wide variety of regional and theological subgroups. Liberals and conservatives in the SBC often chaffed under the institutional programs that moderated or sought to avoid ideologies at either end of the theological spectrum. Ultimately, a confrontation ensued between two segments of the denomination that finally resulted in the departure or disengagement of many “moderates” from participation in the SBC, and in the success of conservatives in controlling denominational agencies, boards, and administrative bureaucracy.
