A trusted historian and Baptist pastor's wife tells how the rise of a new and important leadership role for conservative Protestant women, the pastor's wife, intersects with the decline of women's independent leadership in the church.

Beth Allison Barr (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is James Vardaman Endowed Chair of History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she specializes in medieval history, women's history, and church history. She is the author of the USA Today bestseller The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. Her work has been featured by NPR and the New Yorker, and she has written for Christianity Today, the Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, Sojourners, and Baptist News Global. Barr lives in Texas with her husband, a Baptist pastor, and their two children.