No Man’s Land

2026 Wesleyan Theological Society’s Smith/Wynkoop Annual Book Award Winner


No Man’s Land, by Priscilla Pope-Levison, award-winning author and former president of the Historical Society of the United Methodist Church and the Wesleyan Theological Society, is a groundbreaking study of the international characteristics of a remarkable but largely forgotten women’s movement of Methodist deaconesses. Pope-Levison has carefully curated archival resources—vivid vignettes, striking photos, and intimate personal diaries—to offer us, not just a historical overview, but an encounter with the women who left their homes in Australia, Great Britain, Canada, continental Europe, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States, to don the black dresses, distinctive bonnets, and sturdy shoes of a burgeoning movement dedicated to serving those ground down by suffering, sickness, poverty, and addiction. This is not just any book. It is an experience that captures the lost lives of women who visited in tenements, waited on train platforms to welcome young boys and girls arriving alone, who nursed and preached and taught and fed. Deaconesses carved out a precarious existence in no man’s land—neither fully clergy nor fully laity—that nonetheless galvanized an international network of Methodist women.