page_title: Women in Christianity
section_title: Modern times
hierarchical_section_title: Women in Christianity / Women in church history / Modern times
caption_attribution_description: Anti-Death Penalty crusader Sister Helen Prejean
context_page_description: The roles of women in Christianity can vary considerably today as they have varied historically since the third century New Testament church. This is especially true in marriage and in formal ministry positions within certain Christian denominations, churches, and parachurch organizations.
  Many leadership roles in the organized church have been prohibited to women. In the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, only men may serve as priests or deacons; only males serve in senior leadership positions such as pope, patriarch, and bishop. Women may serve as abbesses. Most mainstream Protestant denominations are beginning to relax their longstanding constraints on ordaining women to be ministers, though some large groups, most notably the Southern Baptist Convention, are tightening their constraints in reaction. Most all Charismatic and Pentecostal churches were pioneers in this matter and have embraced the ordination of women since their founding.
  Christian traditions that officially recognize saints as persons of exceptional holiness of life do list women in that group.
context_section_description: Amidst the backdrop of Industrial Revolution and expanding European Empires during the 17th-19th centuries, Christian women played a role in developing and running of many the modern world's education and health care systems. However, women "still had to work under the nominal control of a man" for missionary work as late as the end of the 19th century. Outside of these positions, "women were denied other influential public roles in the churches".
  The roles that women began taking began expanding. Catholic religious orders like the Sisters of Mercy the Little Sisters of the Poor Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart were founded around the world and established extensive networks of hospitals and schools. The Anglican Florence Nightingale was influential in the development of modern nursing.
  While most Christian denominations did not allow women to preach during the nineteenth century, a few more evangelical Protestant denominations did permit women's preaching.  In early-nineteenth-century Britain, the Bible Christians and Primitive Methodists permitted female preaching, and had a significant number of female preachers, particularly among the rural and working-class populations. Some of them emigrated to British colonies, and preached to settlers in colonies including early Canada.  By the second half of the nineteenth century these denominations became more institutionalized, and thus less open to women's preaching, although a few women continued to preach in these denominations until the early twentieth century. Later in nineteenth-century Britain the Salvation Army was formed, and from the beginning it permitted women to preach on the same terms as men.  These "Hallelujah Lasses", many of whom were working class, were very popular, often drawing huge crowds in Britain as well as in North America.  Nonetheless, these denominations remained a minority, and in most Christian churches women remained barred from the ministry into the twentieth century.
  For much of the early twentieth century, Catholic women continued to join religious orders in large numbers, where their influence and control was particularly strong in the running of primary education for children, high schooling for girls, and in nursing, hospitals, orphanages and aged care facilities.  The Second Vatican Council of the 1960s liberalised the strictures of Catholic religious life, particularly for women in holy orders. However, in the latter half of the 20th century, vocations for women in the West entered a steep decline. In spite of that, the Catholic Church conducted a large number of beatifications and canonisations of Catholic women from all over the world: St. Josephine Bakhita was a Sudanese slave girl who became a Canossian nun; St. Katharine Drexel (1858-1955) worked for Native and African Americans; Polish mystic St. Maria Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938) wrote her influential spiritual diary; and German nun Edith Stein was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Three Catholic women were declared Doctors of the Church, indicating a re-appraisal of the role of women within the life of that Church: the 16th-century Spanish mystic, St. Teresa of Ávila; the 14th-century Italian mystic St. Catherine of Siena and the 19th-century French nun St. Thérèse de Lisieux (called Doctor Amoris or Doctor of Love).
  The 19th century saw women begin to push back on traditional female roles in the church. One was Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) who worked to "liberate women from their traditional shackles":
  "[O]ne of her first projects was a Woman’s Bible in which the passages used by men to keep women in subjection were highlighted and critiqued. Although some early campaigners for female emancipation belonged to the churches, and though some church-related movements helped nurture women’s entrance onto the public stage, the campaigners who embraced the feminist cause most wholeheartedly nearly always made a break from Church and Biblical Christianity.”
  While Catholicism and Orthodoxy adhered to traditional gender restrictions on ordination to the priesthood, Ord
caption: Anti-Death Penalty crusader Sister Helen Prejean in 2006.
exif: {}