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This chapter features the evangelistic organizations that arranged, financed, and implemented evangelistic meetings. Some remained small outfits, such as Maria Woodworth-Etter's or the Catholic Truth Guild, cofounded by Martha Moore Avery and David Goldstein. Others grew to great proportions, like the Billy Sunday evangelistic organization, ranked among an elite group of American corporations, thanks to the business acumen of Helen Sunday, or the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) Evangelistic Department, with its hundreds of women evangelists. Along with their decidedly evangelistic purpose, some organizations, like Florence Crawford's Apostolic Faith Mission, also served as a gathering point for converts who became the nucleus of new churches and denominations.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book focuses on the next generation of women evangelists who shifted their tack from itinerancy to institution building. Unlike the first generation of lone itinerant women evangelists who had once wandered the continent, this next generation of women became a phalanx of entrepreneurial institution builders. Each of their institutions exhibited a measure of permanency, complete with official incorporation, administrative structure, worker training, membership cultivation scheduled activities, fund-raising protocols, and an established location for meetings and services. The remainder of the chapter discusses three issues that help us understand these women and the beliefs that motivated them and propelled their detractors: conversion, sanctification, and gender.

This chapter investigates the new churches and denominations launched by women, from their initial formation to their development into enduring institutions with established headquarters, printing presses, and full-fledged sets of doctrines and disciplines. Women retained strict control over the institutions as well as their members, often dictating lives down to daily minutiae, like Alma White's insistence on a vegetarian diet and thirty minutes of daily exercise. While the women founders who launched these churches and denominations—such as Mary Lee Cagle, Florence Crawford, Mary Magdalena Lewis Tate, Maria Woodworth-Etter, and Alma White—are long deceased, much of their work remains vibrant into the twenty-first century, and second- and third-generation members continue to engage in evangelism across the globe.

This chapter focuses on the religious training schools founded by women such as Elizabeth Baker, Carrie Judd Montgomery, Mattie Perry, Iva Durham Vennard, Alma White, and Jennie Fowler Willing. These schools catered to men and women with little formal education who wanted to head into full-time Christian work in America and around the world. The curriculum balanced Bible study with practical work in settings where students experienced an internship of sorts in evangelism and religious outreach. One practical type of work site often used by religious training schools was the rescue homes and missions that opened in droves during the Progressive Era to provide those on the margins with food, clothing, and shelter along with a venue for the gospel message.

This concluding chapter teases out the legacy of women evangelists as the Progressive Era edged into the Roaring Twenties. It tells the story of Aimee Semple McPherson who stood on the giant shoulders of these pioneering women religious leaders and accomplished even more institution building. The women who preceded her had already plowed the hard ground of resistance and opposition to women evangelists. They had already pioneered transportation technology in evangelism, from gospel wagons to decorated autovans. They had already launched every institution in McPherson's repertoire—evangelistic organizations, churches, denominations, religious training schools, and rescue institutions. Women evangelists in the Progressive Era paved the way for McPherson to develop a most extensive, wide-ranging collection of institutions from the 1920s to the 1940s.