Sharon M. Bowler (EdD, University of Toronto) is a Chaplain with the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches. Her research centers around the study of Section 2a Freedom of Conscience, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the Baptists who have contributed publicly in some way to its development and continuation. Sharon was a contributor to the first volume of the CBHS series, Baptists and Public Life.

The stories of the women have often stayed in the shadows of Canadian Baptist history. The writers of this book have sought out neglected primary source materials to reveal the lives and work of an array of Baptist women in Canada's history. Read here about the Acadian Mary Lore hungrily reading her French Bible and welcoming the message of Baptist missionaries in Lower Canada, Jane Gilmour leaving her home in Britain to minister with her husband in Montreal and the wilds of Upper Canada, a group of remarkable black Baptist women in southern Ontario in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Isabel Crawford from Niagara becoming an advocate for the Kiowa people of Oklahoma, Miriam Ross from Nova Scotia ministering in the Congo, Lois Tupper, pioneer female Baptist theological educator, and, more generally, the work of Baptist women in the Maritimes in the nineteenth century and western Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. Empowered by their Baptist faith, these Canadian women did remarkable things, and their stories deserve to be told and read.