This book, the third to result from the work of the Dr Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies in London, makes a major contribution to both anti-slavery and women's studies by analysing the part that the traditions, practices, and beliefs of English Protestant dissent, and the American Puritan and evangelical traditions, played in women's anti-slavery activism. The discussion, well introduced by Elizabeth Clapp, focuses on three themes: first, the way in which dissenting life and values helped motivate women to become involved with the slavery issue; secondly, the specifically gendered manner in which women put their values into practice; and thirdly, the way in which different religious traditions either enabled women to become involved in such activism as anti-slavery activity, or hindered such involvement. The articles are wide ranging. Three analyse developments in Britain, all focusing on the impact of print and literary culture. Four study the North American scene. Whilst the influence of the one upon the other, sometimes with subtle changes in motivation, emerges from these studies, direct comparison is most to the fore in David Turley's excellent historiographical overview. By contrast, the differential theological ambits of rational and evangelical dissent are emphasized, although study of many local situations and biographies suggests that these phenomena may not have been quite as separate as is often suggested. In the case of Elizabeth Heyrick, Clare Midgley shows how the confessional grounding to her championing of ‘Immediatism’—the ideal of immediate abolition—is further complicated by a rational Presbyterian converting to the Society of Friends. In part the exercise is about the recovery of lost history, as is the case with Timothy Whelan's identification of the ungendered M. Gurney with Martha Gurney, which in its turn reflects upon the remarkably fertile community of faith and action to be found in the Maze Pond Baptist Church in Southwark, and the impact of the sugar boycott of 1791–3. Alison Twells's piece neatly follows on this as she discusses both the Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and the contribution of a fascinating circle of female literary Baptist women in Wiltshire. Carol Lasser traces changing emphases as the fruits of British women's labours are exported across the Atlantic and there, through different motivation occasioned by impact of the Second Great Awakening, given another emphasis. In the analysis of the work of female anti-slavery societies, mainly in New England, Julie Roy Jeffrey finds it less easy to distinguish Puritan and dissenting inheritances when, for example, in a number of states Congregationalism benefited from state support, which perhaps makes the association between female abolitionism and revival evangelicalism the more important. For female abolitionists orthopraxy was as important as orthodoxy, and, therefore, as Stacey Robertson shows, failure to identify slavery as a sin could cause secessions within a congregation with a consequent politicization of the abolitionist conscience, especially in the activities of the Liberty Party, which unlike other parties offered place for female involvement. A final chapter from the pen of Judie Newman puts the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe in its literary and historical context, demonstrating how Stowe marshalled the traditions of religious dissent to strengthen that transatlantic anti-slavery culture that has its origin in the work of women such as Martha Gurney and Elizabeth Heyrick.